Eco-Friendly Brewing with Amelia Loftus – BeerSmith Podcast #53

This week we discuss eco-friendly home brewing with Amelia Loftus. Amelia is an writer on ecologically friendly brewing and also a founding member of Seven Bridges Cooperative, a brewing supply shop that specializes in organic ingredients.

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Topics in This Week’s Episode (42:50)

Amelia Loftus is my guest this week. Amelia is an expert on ecologically friendly brewing and also a founding member of Seven Bridges Cooperative, a brewing supply shop that specializes in organic ingredients. She’s also working on a new book on eco-friendly brewing to published in the Spring of 2014. Amelia runs a website at AmeliaLoftus.com and also has started a new eco-friendly brewing discussion forum.
We start with a discussion of what eco-friendly brewing is, and why it is important.
I ask Amelia about her role as a founding member of Seven Bridges Cooperative, an organic brewing supply store. We also discuss some of the advantages of using organic ingredients in your beer brewing.
Amelia describes her experiments with growing her own hops and grains at home.
We discuss how to choose equipment for eco-friendly brewing and also what some advantages are of making good purchases up front.
Amelia offers some advice on choosing chemicals for cleaning in brewing that will not harm the environment
We discuss what to do with spent grains. Amelia has a recipe for spent grain energy bars.
We discuss some steps to use in the brewing process to be energy efficient
Amelia covers some ways to be efficient with fermentation and packaging
We discuss a bit about the upcoming book she is working on in eco-friendly brewing
Amelia provides a few closing thoughts
Here’s a link to her recipe: Barley’s Bark Brown Ale