Why I drink hard cider

This past fall I made about 40 gallons of hard cider (some of which is still fermenting an arms-reach from the keyboard here). I got most of the apples from Bybee-Howell park on Sauvie Island, and the rest from trees in the neighborhood. While taking bike trips during the summer, I would notice an apple tree in someone's yard and leave them a note which I kept in my bike saddlebags, asking if they wouldn't mind having me pick some apples in exchange for tossing all the windfallen fruit into their compost. So in harvesting the apples, it was all pretty locally-based. Pressing and fermenting was all done at home, and I bottled into reused champagne bottles collected on recycling days.



At the time, I was mostly just interested in free alcohol, and was excited about the DIY nature of the whole process. But tonight I read an email from Stephen Hayes, a craft cidermaker in England with whom we share a mailing list, ukcider@googlegroups. This is what he had to say:

There are strong environmental reasons why proper, locally produced, cider should be consumed in preference to beer. A very good reason I occasionally bang on about is the low energy costs of producing cider as opposed to beer. Beer is made from malted barley via a complicated process which consumes a lot of energy. When the malt itself is made into beer (and I home brew from basic ingredients so I know first hand) the malt is soaked in hot water at around 65C for 2 hours, then the liquid (called wort) is run off and boiled with hops for 90 minutes. Even with heat exchangers to reclaim some of the energy for the next brew, it is obvious that this process requires significant energy inputs and produces significant carbon dioxide from burning of gas, wood etc.

Grape wine has a similar carbon cost of production to cider, but is almost all imported to England from afar-therefore a carbon cost to move it from France, Australia etc to here.

Cider is of course produced from apples, which grow on trees, which are a carbon fixing permaculture crop as well as stabilising soil and being beautiful. Cider apples grow very well indeed in England, and parts of Wales and Scotland (no quarrels about this please!) and the fruit can be crushed, pressed and fermented with very little input of energy. I have not the time and energy to do a precise calculation (someone should though) but just looking at the processes involved, including transport, it is clear that locally produced cider has a much smaller carbon footprint that beer or imported wine. Spirits use even more carbon via distillation.

Couldn't have said it better myself.