How far does your beer travel? In honor of Earth Day!

This topic has been banging around in my head for a while... Well, I should be honest, the idea was put there by one of my favorite professors. Since it's Earth Day, I thought it would be appropriate to put my spin on it and put it out here for all to see.

Your average six pack of beer weighs about 4.5 lbs in water alone, factor in the glass and you are up to around 8 lbs (BTW: perfect impromptu weights should you ever get the balls crazy idea to do aerobics). Bump it up to 24 bottles (an average weekend with friends), and the magic of math tells me we're at around 32 lbs. Depending on where your beer is "born", the environmental cost of shipping said package is enormous. And, the price of your beer's travel is often reflected in the price you pay to drink said beer.

Every time you purchase a beer, see how many "miles" you rack up according to your location and the location of the brewery. This is probably a best case scenario estimate, because its likely your beer came through a distributor, and got shipped all around whatever fine city you live in before it actually landed in your retail center. Here is a map showing the mileage and location of my favorite breweries:



Holy mackrel that's a lot of traveling for my beer to do... Especially when the majority of it is water! Those are just the beers I have consumed in the last month or so, and already I've racked up over 7000 miles. Unbelievable!

I'm not saying don't indulge in your favorite import, or enjoy a tasty IPA from the west coast. What I am saying is try those beers, and be inspired by them enough to try to replicate it in your kitchen where the water flows freely, and the grain requirements are literally a fraction of the shipping weight of your average case of beer. It's green, it's delicious, and it's a hobby you will undoubtedly get addicted to. Short of this, frequent your local breweries often! There are great people out there brewing great things... They're usually pretty cool cats, too.

Oh, and you get to free yourself from the race to the bottom in commercial brewing... It really is a win-win (win!) situation.

Best!

Liz B.

“She brews good ale, and thereof comes the proverb, Blessing of your heart, you brew good ale.”

Thank Bill Shakespeare for the title of this blog!

There are precious few female brewers in the world right now, and even fewer female home brewers. While finding exact metrics for women involved in the craft at home would be almost impossible, Brew Your Own's female readership in 2005 consisted of a mere 2% of their total subscribers. This might not seem strange to anyone used to the usual gamut of Bud Light commercials, featuring typical average looking guys A and B sharing what is questionably called "beer" with generic hot blonde C.

Side note! You have to hand it to AB and their Bud Light commercials. They have had some of the funniest campaigns in the world... Here's a good web only one that doesn't fit the formula above.

(Warning, the theme might not be safe for work... But a blog about alcohol probably isn't either!)


Anyway, where were we? Oh right: Every once in a while someone writes an article about how women are breaking through the glass ceiling in the brewing world. They often highlight the *first* brewster (female form of brewer) in a country, the first female in a particular sector, etc. I put first inside the funny asterisks there because the idea that you can be the first member of your demographic to breakthrough in a field that was literally invented by your demographic makes my head spin.

That's like congratulating Americans for manufacturing cars... Sure, there are times we have sucked at it, but welcoming all of us back to an industry that wouldn't exist without us goes a little too far!

The analogy might not be perfect, since presumably women left brewing as monasteries began to brew more and not because of shitty products let loose on consumers (I'm looking at you Pinto... and Taurus... and all late model Thunderbirds). I invite you to read this blog, which links to some detailed accounts of the history of beer. Notably, that historically women were the brewsters, distributors, and creative ambassadors of beer.

Today, most people look at monasteries as the historical home of beer. In fact, for women, the rise of monasteries (and the taverns that followed) marked the beginning of the end for women in beer. It is sad the rich history of artisanship heralded by women is often neglected, and sadder still that some point to the heritage usurped by male-only monasteries as justification for the current state of brewing.

To me, we are doing a disservice to the art of brewing by discounting its true history. We can't undo what happened and pay the alewives of lore their due (besides, would Budweiser be any better if it was marketed as the Queen of Beers?!), but with the resurgence of craft beer and the sheer number of people flocking to homebrewing, we have the opportunity to call women back into the art. After all, it wouldn't exist without our super ancient mothers and their super ancient brew kettles.

Grand Opening - The case for FreeZymurgy!

DISCLAIMER: All claims below of a historical order called "FreeZymurgy" existing before this exact moment are completely and utterly false (at least to the best of our limited knowledge). We are taking some liberty with facts to make our points. But not all of them! Beer, mead, and wine are pretty miraculous, after all.


Way, WAY back in 7000 BC (when you had to walk up hill both ways to get to to your sleeping hole) our ancestors left behind the first recorded evidence of mead making. Some assert the glorious concoction might have existed long before the first surviving piece of the archeological record, but to us this seems a mute point. Since the earliest evidence of mead predates the invention of writing by at least 3 millenia, it is clear our ancestors had their priorities straight. Mead pops up in Europe's archeological record in about 3000 BC, but by then both wine and beer had entered the historical record. The world was changing fast, and some scholars have attributed the development of civilization to the invention of beer!(Brief tangent: how does one get into actual beer scholarship?!)

Many of history's finest figures have waxed poetic about alcoholic beverages over the years, alluding to the incredibly diverse role of giggle juice throughout the ancient ages. We will devote some blogs (and maybe some of these new-fangled tweets) to these in the future. For now, we have some really interesting (and exclusive!) history regarding a newly discovered ancient order protecting the artisan-ship and integrity of the alcoholic crafts... (read: this is where we start making crap up)

... FreeZymurgy!

When we discovered the ancient avatar used to represent the FreeZymurgy order, it looked suspiciously like the emblem associated with the Freemasons. And, like the Freemasons, we found the original FreeZymurgists had a compelling origin story worthy of any comic book strip out there (if you have a bullshit meter, it should be going crazy right now...)

... It all started one glorious day in the spring of the same "long, long time ago" referenced often by pop culture, Ninkasi (the Sumerian goddess of beer and inspiration for the first written record of a beer recipe) had just thrown the last pound of grain into her kettle when she was approached by two odd looking characters. One smelled like a barnyard and had an extremely haggard look; almost like he had been cooped up for 40 days (and, consequently, 40 nights) on a boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean. He said his name was Noah, and that he had been given the gift of wine to ease his mind at the end of days spent laboring in the fields. The second was a tall, barbaric looking man carrying a giant spear and one hell of an ego. He seemed bi-polar, alternately scowling and appearing on the verge of tears. Ninkasi learned his name was Odin, and he had stolen "inspirational" mead from two jackals in his employ named Fjalar and Galar. Word has it they were slightly murderous dwarves, and tricky at that. As the paragons of alcoholic beverages, the three looked at the world and thought the state of humanity was (and I quote) "pretty shitty". So they vowed to make it their mission to propagate their craft and help humanity move into civilization by taking the edge off of life. As eons came and went, they passed their knowledge from generation to generation. Those who employed their craft were called "artisans" and produced some of the finest beverages the world had ever seen. Soon, beer had hops, meads had fruits and spices, and wine had... well, different grapes and more rules. Then one sad morning, humanity inevitably (and shamefully) applied the breakthroughs of the industrial revolution to brewing, and shifted beer out of the realm of households and neighborhoods and into gargantuan facilities turning out massive amounts of pale yellow, barely flavored, and all around inferior beverages. Mead was lost into the annals of history, and wine, well... still had more rules.

But all is not lost! The society of Zymurgists dedicated to the craft of great beverage making still exists, and it refuses to be a secret any longer. Take back your crafts, and come into the open arms of home brewing and home mead making (wine too, but promise to leave some of the rules out of the way of flavor).

Become a FreeZymurgist today!