Ideal Bite

Just wanted to add to your list of organic beers.. There's a really tasty organic saison made by Brasserie DuPont in Belgium called Foret. It comes in a 750ml corked bottle and goes well with pretty much any food, or is great on its own!

A wonderful brewery is New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins, CO. A socially responsible, very "green" company with awesome brews. Distributes regionally in the midwest/southwest/west. Check out their original Fat Tire beer. Chips are OK, but with my beer I prefer popcorn with organic olive oil, Bragg's aminos (for the salt part) and nutritional flakes. May sound weird but it is scrumptious and actually almost healthy!

Great topic, y'all. Okay, it's time once again for my picky correction(s) of the month. On the daily tip, you say, "Organic farming reduces topsoil erosion - 1/3 of which has disappeared due to modern farming." First, there's a grammar problem; has 1/3 of the erosion disappeared? No, I assume you mean 1/3 of the topsoil has disappeared. But that's wrong too, technically speaking. This confusion about the "amount of erosion" is a major failing of a lot of conventional agriculture critics. Erosion calculations are not able to determine how much soil is "lost", at least in the way most non-farmers think about it, as topsoil that has gone from the land to the water. Erosion, as calculated by the NRCS through the USLE (can you tell I'm a gov't employee?), only indicates whether soil has *moved* from one place to another. So if topsoil from one place (like an ag field) has moved to another place (like a ditch), it is considered erosion, but it isn't necessarily "sedimentation", which is soil that has gone into a river or stream. And another thing: sadly, Ben Franklin didn't actually say that about beer, but about wine (although all the T-shirts and web sites would make you think otherwise). http://www.belleville.com/mld/belleville/living/14840864.htm Finally, the reason there isn't any nutrition information on beer is because "The Man" doesn't allow it. Beer is (apparently considered) only a substance to be gluttonously abused by frat boys and sorority girls, not a drink to be appreciated. Many of us know better, thank God (and God's servants, the monks).

PINKUS is a good organic import from Germany.

Hey Dave! Thanks for keeping us on our toes! May I politely suggest the book Biomimicry? Janine Benyus is an absolutely brilliant scientist who walks through the (loosely termed) "soil erosion" caused by monoculturing crops. In fact, I am going to copy some text here for everyone's benefit.. "Natural systems agriculture looks at a landscape and says "What grows here naturally?" In the midwest, it's the prairie. For 5000 years, the prairie has done a great job of holding the soil, resisting pests and weeds, and sponsoring its own fertility, all without our help. The secret of the prairie is that it is composed of perennial plants growing in polycultures (many species in the same field). Unfortunately, we can't eat a prairie. Over the last 100 years, we have plowed up the prairie and replaced it with our own agriculture, based on annual plants grown in monocultures (one species for miles). Unlike the prairie's perennial polycultures, these annual monocultures do need our help. Using annuals means we have to plow each year, which leads to soil erosion. To make up for poorer soil, we pour on tons of chemical fertilizers. To protect our all-you-can-eat monocultures from pests, we heap on oil-based pesticides. It works out to about 10 kilocalories of petroleum to produce one kilocalorie of food. The way to get off this "treadmill of vigilance", says Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, is to breed perennial crops that we can eat and grow them in a prairie-like polyculture. Jackson's edible prairie would not merely be new; it would be the polar opposite of what we have now. The plants would overwinter, so we wouldn't need to plow and plant every year, or worry about soil erosion. We wouldn't need to add synthetic fertilizers because nitrogen-fixing plants would be in the mix. We wouldn't need to spray biocides because the presence of lots of different plant species would slow down pest outbreaks.. What we would have, instead of an extractive agriculture that mimics industry, is a self-renewing agriculture that mimics nature. Though radical, this idea of breeding a prairie you can eat is quite realistic, when you consider that most of our crops were bred from perennial wild relatives. Over ten thousand years, we turned them into annuals and narrowed their genetic pools. So now we are looking to widen those genetic pools and breed perennial traits back into edible grains. Right now, natural systems agriculture is at the Kitty Hawk stage-the researchers have proven the agricultural equivalent of drag and lift. Working alone, they will need 25-50 years of wind tunnel tests before domestic prairies can be planted in the Breadbasket. If they get support, the shift could come a lot sooner. It depends on what kind of research we as a society choose to fund. As Chuck Hassebrook of the Rural Affairs Center points out, research is a form of social planning." - Janine Benyus And btw, god bless Ben Franklin... we dig wine too. - JenB

Guiness is GOOD for you?!?! I think not? Especially if you're vegan. To reduce the aciditiy and carbonation of this behemoth of a beer, it is rumored that they use fish guts. Now I checked up on it and did some research... they wont admit to "fish guts" per se, but they will admit to something "very similar" to settle the unruliness of the liquid combination. Sammy Smiths, Rogue, and Sierra Nevada are a few vegan beers I know of. Would you guys be interested in naming a few others?

Well, it isn't organic, but this microbrew in Fort Collins, Colorado was the first 100% wind-powered brewery. Plus, they use other sustainable practices as well. It's New Belgium, known around the country for Fat Tire, but the real treats are their seasonal beers. http://www.newbelgium.com/sustainability.php

Just wanted to add to your list of organic libations...Bison brewing from Berkley, CA makes a wide variety of beers that are impressive. I have enjoyed their Belgian, IPA, Chocolate Stout, Barley Wine and even A Honey and Basil beer. Another fantastic organic brewer is Pinkus brewery from Germany. The Pilsner is my all time favorite for the style.

For those Canuck Biters living in the Greater Toronto Area, the Mill St. Brewery makes a stellar organic ale. It is a local Toronto brewery, so the beer isn't that easy to find the further you get from Toronto. Oh, and they have a magnificent coffee porter on offer as well, which I understand will soon be offered as organic.

St. Peters organic ale is good!