Can Beer Help With Climate Change?

The Alchemist's famous Heady
Topper IPA.  The brewery has 
found a way to capture its carbon
emissions and use it to produe
their microbrews.

 I have one thing in common with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh: I like beer. 

Beer is fizzy and bubbly because there's carbon dioxide in it. That's better than being in the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change. 

I'd like beer even more if breweries found ways to reduce their carbon footprint. 

Breweries, like almost all businesses, emit carbon dioxide in the course of operations.  So why not put their carbon emissions directly into the beer instead of the atmosphere?

Large breweries already do that, but the technology wasn't really there to allow microbreweries to sequester their carbon emissions into their beer. They had to buy canisters of carbon dioxide separately. Until now. 

As VTDigger reports, The Alchemist is the first Vermont brewery to be able to capture the gas and use it for carbonation.  

The Alchemist -famous for its award winning Heady Topper - had tried to find technology to capture carbon, but nothing really worked. According to VTDigger:

"Then, at the end of last year, they heard about Earthly Labs, a company based in Austin, Texas that makes a carbon capture system for breweries of their size. CEO Amy George is set to have about 50 operations around the country using the system by early next year, she said, and so far her product has been well received."

The Alchemist is running this carbon capture system at its Stowe brewery and plans to add it to their Waterbury operation.  The carbon capture system costs about $120,000, but breweries spend thousand of dollars buying canisters of carbon dioxide, which will no longer be necessary once these carbon capture gizmos are installed at microbreweries. 

Vermont has more than 50 microbreweries.