(Belated) Earth Day and Beer: Bring On the Mini-Keg!

In Beer News by Karl

KARL: When it comes to “drinking green,” we’d like you to first put aside all thoughts of whatever terrible swill you may or may not have ingested around St. Patrick’s Day.  Sure, we maybe have missed Earth Day by a full weekend, but we figured it might be high time anyway to acknowledge and further request a couple of the things we’d like to see more of.

I drank this. No, I’m not proud of it.

Obviously, drinking beer straight off the keg is going to have the least environmental impact out of all the different ways to get your brew – no bottles, no cans and the delivery system is naturally recycled when it’s sent back to the brewery and filled up with more beer.  Since owning a full bar system or even a single-tap kegerator is out of the financial range of  most beer lovers, we thought we’d give an underutilized idea a little credit where it’s due.

When we heard about the mini-keg being given a shot by MillerCoors, of course our initial snarky response was something like “oh, good, so now we can get even more tasteless beer easier.”  But after that two seconds of knee-jerk beersnobbery, we started to think of it as a potentially revolutionary vehicle for beer delivery.

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Consider, would you, a box of Franzia.

No, seriously. Consider it.

Personally, I’ve got a big box of their “Crisp White” (whatever that is) in the fridge right now.  It’s not great, of course, but it’s a nice change of pace – and it is a significant improvement over standard wine bottles in terms of low-impact alcohol transport.  The plastic pouch and the cardboard box are way easier to recycle, it takes less energy to create, and it’s far easier to transport thanks to its easily-stackable shape, meaning less wasted cost in shipping.

The mini-keg has a lot of the same advantages – fully recyclable, potentially reusable and far easier to deal with than a pile of bottles or cans in the trash.  Plus, in terms of beer rotation (in a perfect world where you can get your favorite craft beer in a minikeg) it’s easier to mix it up than pulling a barrel out of your kegerator and attaching a new one.

mini-keg

We may not like what’s in it, but we applaud the idea.

We’re operating under the above assumption (and hope) that the minikeg, or the DraughtKeg as you may have seen advertised by Heineken before generally disappearing from view, will eventually become as standard as craft beer in tallboy cans.  Indeed, we’ve already got beers like Oberon and Hopslam into the one-serving minikeg.  Many German beers are available in the existing minikeg as well, but those pretty much have to be consumed relatively quickly after opening.  What if we just want a couple draft-style beers?  We can’t pop the ones we have now back in the fridge for a day or two without any quality loss.

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Since most craft beer fans have wrapped their head around the idea that we can get quality in a can, why not take the next step to believing that someday we can have a tiny barrel of Two Hearted in our fridge thanks to an idea put forward by MillerCoors?

Allow us to make this belated Earthy request:  More minikegs, please.  More DraughtKegs.  More reasons to buy craft beer and be a little cleaner about it.  We’re already pretty good about growlers, right brewers?  Minikegs will keep that beer better, longer, and let us enjoy it further without throwing a bunch of bottles, bombers, cans and other such vessels into the trash.

DraughtKegs. You know, these things?

In reality, we’re sure that it’s ridiculously cost-prohibitive.  Look how much work it takes just putting a canning line into an existing operation.  But – we can always hope, can’t we?

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About the Author

Karl

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Karl has written about food, travel and beer for Chicago Magazine, Thrillist, Time Out Chicago, AskMen and more. His book, Beer Lovers Chicago, is now available via Amazon and other booksellers. If you're buying, he's likely having a porter or a pale ale.

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