Who Cares

Yes we love the freedom of exploring AND we believe there’s a responsibility that goes along with it. That’s one of the reasons we decided to feature a business who cares about leading the environmental charge and inspires others to take action and protect the extraordinary natural resources that surround us and that so many of us enjoy. As we’ll be focusing our attention on those businesses that are making a direct impact along the A1A corridor, if you’re aware of an area business that’s making a positive difference, please let us know; we’d love to feature them on our site!

Saltwater Brewery is helping to usher in a sea-change with edible beer packaging and it may be the ultimate way to save animals and recycle brewers’ spent grain: using the husks and grist of brewers’ barley to make biodegradable and edible six-pack rings that hold cans of beer.

“An estimated one million sea birds and a hundred thousand marine mammals and sea turtles become entrapped in plastic or ingest it and die,” marine biologist Mark Tokulka said about the scourge of plastics in our seas. A report by the NCEAS Marine Debris Working Group at UCSB estimated the amount of plastic waste going into the ocean to be at eight million metric tons per year.

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Plastic packaging for beer however may become a thing of the past.

“It’s a big investment for a small brewery created by fishermen, surfers, and people that love the sea,” Peter Agardy said in a promotional video about the new rings. These types of environmental causes are not new to the brewery, either: they are constant champions of the Coastal Conservation Association of Florida, the Surfrider Foundation, and the Ocean Foundation’s SeaGrass Grow program.

Now, as their president Chris Gove says, they “hope to influence the big guys” in the beer industry to make a bit of a sea change. “For us at Saltwater Brewery, giving back to the ocean and protecting it is part of our brand mission and way of life. But if these edible can rings could be implemented on a larger scale, think of how game changing that would be and how many ocean lives it would save.”

Our heartfelt thanks and gratitude goes out to Saltwater Brewery for making a difference!

Logo and packaging images provided by Saltwater Brewery; content excerpt from article by Doug Fairall – a craft-beer blogger who focuses on Florida beers. He is a Certified Beer Server and has been a home-brewer since 2009. For beer things in your Twitter feed, follow him @DougFairall.

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