For a while now, we've seen many craft breweries shifting away from bottles and more towards aluminum cans. The debate has flowed back and forth for years: glass is traditional and inert but heavy and fragile, and lends itself to easy swap-out of labels between batches; cans block light, are inert from beer thanks to liner coatings, don't break, are safe to carry onto beaches and into stadiums, and are far lighter both empty and full. Both recycle fairly readily, but aluminum has of late come in as a "green" choice that's supposedly better for the environment.
But now the owner of one of the noted craft breweries, Lagunitas, has come out adamantly opposed to the use of aluminum cans. Possibly inspired in part by this article and others like it.
I think I'll take my own glass or cup to the City Paper Brew Fest tomorrow. That would certainly be "green," wouldn't it? Oh, wait, beer festivals don't let you do that, do they?
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To say that craft beer in cans is somehow to blame for strip mining for bauxite is crazy. Look how many people drink soft drinks in cans compared to craft beer drinkers. Furthermore, I bet craft beer drinkers have a much higher rate of recycling their cans than the average Joe who drinks 2-3 canned sodas a day. The fact that there are adverse affect from the mining process is a result of lenient/absent environmental laws in other countries. Not because of craft beer drinkers.
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