Take Your Love of Wine to a New Level at Recycled Cask Hotel

It’s like a oenophile’s wet dream: what could be better than capping off a day of drinking wine in Europe with sleeping in a recycled wine cask? The Hotel de Vrouwe van Stavoren in the Netherlands features four rooms made from gigantic 14,500 liter repurposed wine casks that are cute, quirky and surprisingly roomy.

From Green Upgrader:

The rooms offer two single beds as well as an attached sitting room and bathroom.  These rooms have been pretty popular with tourists in the sleepy village of Stavoren.  If you get tired of the in-room television and radio, you can rent a bicycle and travel along one of the many popular bike paths to see the old growth forests and beach.  There is even a famous statue of “Lady van Stavoren” to keep an eye on the harbour as well as an eccentric local story to go along with it.

How fun! While these rooms aren’t going to win any awards for luxuriousness any time soon, they’re a great example of how materials can be reused creatively. If you’re headed to the Netherlands sometime soon, you can snag one of these rooms for between $40 and $150 USD per night, depending on the season and how long you stay.

Link [Green Upgrader] + [Hotel de Vrouwe van Stavoren]

Get Your Green Drink On for St. Patty’s Day

Whether you’re heading to the nearest Irish pub or having a round of drinks at home tonight to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, make sure the beer is green. Not literally green, unless that’s your bag – but organic or made in an environmentally responsible facility. Green beer is more popular than ever, which means the selection gets better practically by the day.

Everyone from the smallest microbreweries to the biggies like Anheuser-Busch are getting in on the green drinkin’ action. Here’s a selection of green beers to look for while you’re out rabble-rousing.

Wolaver’s Certified Organic Pale Ale – Wolaver’s three year-round brews are perhaps the most ubiquitous of green beers, since they’re widely available and extremely popular. This classic pale ale is creamy and full-bodied with a rich, malty flavor and a distinctive, crisp hoppy finish.

New Belgium’s Fat Tire – While not organic, this popular amber ale is made by Colorado craft brewery New Belgium, which is known for its eco-friendly practices. New Belgium takes extra steps to reduce energy and water consumption as well as waste output, purchasing much of its electricity from wind farms and offsetting CO2. Fat Tire is described as a having biscuit-like malt flavors balanced with hops.

Peak Organic Espresso Amber Ale – This robust amber ale is brewed with locally roasted, fair trade dark Sumatran blend espresso for a toasty flavor that plays nicely off the sweet malty flavors found on the back palate. This is the first Fair Trade Certified beer brewed in the United States.

Eel River Organic Amber Ale – A medium-bodied beer with a hoppy bouquet, rich taste and caramel-like sweetness balanced with a liberal dose of organic Pacific Gems and Hallertau hops, imported from New Zealand. Eel River, based in Fortuna, California, was the first brewery with certified organic beer and has won gold and silver medals at many craft brewing competitions.

Butte Creek Organic Porter – This dark brown porter with a thin white head has notes of roasted, nutty cocoa and caramel with a hint of coffee. It’s quite a substantial beer, with a slightly smoky aroma that’s balanced nicely with hops. It’s bold, with lots of flavor, but not too heavy.

Deschutes Green Lakes Organic Ale – A classic amber ale with caramel and Munich malts for a rich color, and six different varieties of hops including Salmon-Safe certified Sterling hops. Copper-colored with a dry, hoppy finish. Larry Sidor, Deschutes brewmaster, spent four years looking for organic barley that meets Deschutes’ challenging criteria.

Stone Mill Organic Pale Ale – Even Anheuser-Busch, the largest brewer in the US, is making organic ales these days. Stone Mill Pale Ale is made with 100% organic barley malt for a classic taste with a nice balance of maltiness and hop bouquet. A-B has stepped up its commitment to recycling, use of renewable energy and responsible wastewater management. 8 A-B facilities have been certified by the Wildlife Habitat Council for managing company-owned lands for the benefit of wildlife.

Australia Gets Tanked with Tequila Biofuel

Creativity is blooming in the world of alternative energy, with people coming up with incredible ways to use what they’ve got handy. We’ve heard of New Zealand transforming pest plants into airplane fuel, Oslo buses running on the power of human waste and Scotland making fuel from whisky. Now, Australian farmers are realizing that agave, the plant used to make tequila, grows just as well in their country as it does in Mexico and has high concentrations of sugar that can be converted into ethanol.

From Treehugger:

Don Chambers, entrepreneur behind the South Australian based Ausagave company has been doing his homework on agave for the past four years. Whereas he reckons sugar cane averages a yield of 9,500L per hectare per annum, he is confident that agave’s yields are more like 10,000 to 16,000 litres of ethanol per hectare per annum.

And being a succulent, agave is tough enough to survive temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122°F), which given Australia’s rising thermometer will be a good thing indeed.

“It can grow basically in the desert,” he said. “We’ve been doing trials here in South Australia, and it doesn’t die without water, it can withstand extremes of temperature, it wouldn’t be as subject to storms like some of the crops like cane are. If you compare it with [sugar] cane and corn, it does have less operational costs and it can grow in very marginal land.”

Australia, which is suffering an intense drought, needs to focus on plants that thrive in hot, dry environments – so agave is perfect. It can be grown on bare mining lands, so it won’t take up valuable space needed for other crops. Ausagave reportedly has 10,000 plants ready for a trial.

And, who knows – maybe Australia can use this opportunity to start up their own tequila industry. Because the world can never have too much tequila.

Link [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Flickr user kretyen

Scotland Makes Fuel from Whisky

Leave it to Scotland to figure out a way to get renewable energy from the whiskymaking process. The land of whisky connoisseurs will soon have a plant run on energy created from byproducts of the distilling process. The company turning this grand idea into reality is ‘Combination of Rothes Distillers Limited (CoRD), joining up with Helius Energy to build a combined heat and power (CHP) plant along with a fertilizer factory.

From MatterNetwork:

Called GreenSwitch, the modular CHP unit will employ biomass made from biproducts of the distilling process and sustainably-harvested wood chips. Right next door, the GreenFields plant will turn a liquid biproduct [sic] called pot ale, into a concentrated organic fertilizer.

This £34 million project will take 18-24 months to ferment, at which point the GreenSwitch plant will produce 7.2 megawatts of electricty [sic], enough to power 9,000 homes. Although still in the planning stages, the venture already won the Best Environmental Initiative Award from the Scottish Green Energy Awards last December.

Scotland has dozens of whisky distillers, so if this idea caught on, it could be a great way to power not just the distilleries themselves but possibly even homes and businesses in the area.

Mmm, Glenlivet 18-year. I’d love it even more if the plant were run with green energy!

Link [MattersNetwork]
Photo credit: Flickr user tienvijftien