As our favorite local watering holes begin to open up for more indoor and outdoor seating, we can imagine you’re just as excited about (safely drinking) beers with friends. While it was fun bringing the bar home to our houses during quarantine, there’s nothing like a cold pint of draft. Whether you’re enjoying to-go beer at home or hitting the bars for the first time in a long time (masked up, of course!), here are some ways to drink both sustainably and responsibly.
1. Bike or walk to your favorite breweries!
This one seems obvious, but the collective impact would absolutely make a difference if enough people decided to walk/bike to drink a beer. This option is not only a way to lessen your carbon footprint, but to lessen the risk of drinking too much before getting behind the wheel.
2. Opt for beer with locally sourced ingredients.
While this may already be the case for some, buying beer from not only your favorite local breweries, but ones that buy ingredients from local farms is a great way to keep your dollar within the local economy. For instance, we buy lots of grain from Skagit Valley Malting and hops from Yakima Chief Hops. Beer ingredients are heavy and transporting palettes of grain and hop pellets is heavy and high impact in regards to carbon emissions.
3. Check with your city about what kind of six-pack or four-pack holders are recyclable.
A lot of people assume six-pack holders are recyclable right along with the beer can itself. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for all rigid six-pack holders. We are working toward having a collection site of our own for our Pack-Tech six-pack holders since the manufacturers let us send them back to be recycled properly, but until then you can always take them to your local bottle shop where they’re used for mix-and-match six-packs.
Of course, we encourage you to continue saving the turtles by cutting the plastic rings from domestic six-packs. And to answer a FAQ, we don’t use the paper six-pack holders because most of them are made of poly-coated paper, which isn’t recyclable in Bellingham, and is high risk for microplastics when they’re just thrown away in the trash.
When making sustainability decisions, we always have to assume the worst. In this case, that’s the six-pack holder ending up in the ocean, where microplastics could be more detrimental to the environment than an improperly recycled plastic six-pack holder.
4. Pack it in, pack it out!
We absolutely LOVE to see Aslan beer being enjoyed in the great outdoors! Nothing brings our souls more happiness than a cold beer on a mountain top. But even more so, it’s important to pack it in and pack it out when drinking craft beer outside. Leaving no trace and every environment we get to enjoy undisturbed is so important to us at Aslan. And if you see someone else’s beer cans in the wilderness, pack them back with you! We have a collective responsibility as a species to keep our planet clean and litter-free.
5. Drink Organic Beer!
Good news, if you’re drinking Aslan beer, it’s already organic! By purchasing organic beer, you’re contributing to the demand for organic products and ingredients in our area. The more organic products are available, the more affordable they become, and soon more and more breweries and restaurants will be able to serve you organic food and beers, which are not only better for the environment, but consumers, farmers, and producers.
