Sustainable HomeBrewing

In this day and age its tough not to be conscientious of sustainable and eco friendly life choices. Its really not difficult to make minor modifications to the way you live you life. The human race is increasing in population and increasing in waste production every single day. I feel that as responsible humans we have a duty to make as little of an impact to the environment as possible.
I think its rather funny that as humans we have not learned from the most basic of life forms...
yeast. Yeast are simple one-celled organisms that have two purposes in their short life. Eat and Multiply. Thats it... nothing fancy at all. Yeast eat sugars and convert them to CO2 and Alcohol. To yeast, the alcohol and Co2 are waste products. To humans, the CO2 is gas and the alcohol is the end product we seek. The yeast will continue to ferment as long as there is an ample food supply and as long as the waste product is limited. Once the food supply is exhausted the yeast will die (go dormant). Once the alcohol percentage is too high, the yeast will die. Yeast will multiply so fast that usually one of the other will happen. Luckily for us, yeast don't spend too much time thinking about sustainability or conservation.

That's where my thoughts on sustainability come in. If we act like the yeast and consume and generate so much waste, we'll destroy our environment. We need to make as small of a footprint in our world as possible.

Ways to make your Homebrewing more sustainable:
1. Compost your grains, spent hops and yeast sludge if you aren't reusing it. I've got a great deal of great compost that i use for my hops plants that i grow in my backyard.
2. reuse your yeast. save some packaging. Share the yeast with other homebrewing friends.
3. Reuse (and recycle) bottles.
4. reclaim water used for chilling wort for watering plants.. or for the next brew.
5. Buy in Bulk. you'll save some money and use less packaging.
6. minimize water use in cleaning. this isn't easy... especially if you are kegging.
7. Buy locally...
8. Buy Used. Craigslist is great.
9. Make your own equipment. mash tuns, boil pots wort chillers can all be made yourself.