Crannóg Ales Speaks Out

“I love your beer – why can’t I buy it at a liquor store? Why don’t you bottle?”

Over the last eleven years, we’ve answered these questions at least once a week. (The answers are below, in case anyone needs a refresher.) When we opened, everyone assumed that we would, sooner or later, start bottling. After all, everyone else does. But of course, we don’t follow the herd. We keep sheep because we like to shepherd the flock, not be part of it.

The response to our answers used to be mass confusion, and the strong sense that we were mad, idiots, or simply bad managers. After all, the environmental effects and effects on the quality of the beer cannot be all that significant, since everyone else is bottling. Why would anyone do it if the profit margin is as slim as we report?

Over the years, the attitude has changed. It’s easier for people who come to the brewery, who see the operation and understand how the farm and brewery fit together, and how serious we are about not allowing waste. But even for people who don’t come to the brewery, the idea is taking root.

In February, we did a presentation to a small group of (admittedly, pretty enlightened) people in Ottawa. When we explained why we don’t bottle, the response was totally different. People were astounded that bottles are not re-used, but recycled. They were shocked at the amount of waste that bottling involves and creates throughout the process from creation through consumption to recycling. Most of all, the environmental and quality rationale rang true to them. Instead of being incredulous that we don’t bottle, they wondered why anyone would!

It may have taken 11 years, but clearly attitudes are changing. Environmental awareness is spreading more widely, and basic ideas are becoming more accepted. The idea that re-use should come before recycling alone is a huge step, and it seems to be prevalent. After years of activism, we are seeing a widespread acceptance of sustainable ideas. This is reflected in the interest in organic food, organic beer (yay!) and food sovereignty.

What we all need to do now is to ensure that the depth of knowledge equals the breadth. By which I mean that we need to deepen people’s understanding of sustainability, their tolerance for reading labels, understanding the difference between unproven “natural” claims and certified organic, understanding that we can have both local and organic food as the best of all worlds. We need to help people think beyond greenwashing and easy solutions. We’ll start by continuing to explain why we don’t bottle.

Reasons We Don’t Bottle:

• We would have to either filter or pasteurize our beers, which would change them dramatically.  We could bottle-condition, but we don’t really want to and it doesn’t suit the styles of most of our beers.
• We don’t have room for a bottling line.
• Bottling uses additional water (lots) – we expend effort conserving water already, we don’t want to add more water use to stress our farm supply.
• Broken glass is inevitable, and would wind up in our compost or on our pastures – bad!
• The smaller the container, the more chemicals (for cleaning and sanitizing) are used and remain in the container. Larger containers use less by volume.
• The smaller the container, the higher the price. Why pay more for a container instead of for the beer?
• Bottles in Canada are recycled, not re-used. In other words, every bottle uses massive amounts of energy to return it to production, far more that would be used by washing and re-use. This is environmentally irresponsible.
• The nature of convenience (like single-serve bottles) is that it creates more cost to the producer and more waste, while raising prices for the consumer.
• The economics of bottling are crappy, especially when the treatment of bottles by the LDB is included in a real audit. We have no desire to submit our beer to bad conditions!
• Recycling downstreams responsibility: by throwing your “waste” in the blue bin, you’ve absolved yourself of responsibility, and you’ve still made “waste”, just in a different form. As soon as the bin goes out, you’ve offloaded your responsibility for creating waste onto someone downstream, the same way big companies don’t count their toxic waste as their responsibility or include dealing with it in their budgets and costs. We take responsibility for our crap: we re-use, we recreate, we reduce everything that goes out so that there isn’t waste at all.
• It would break our hearts to see one of our bottles making litter by the side of the road.