"Craft" beer is good at reusing old buildings, though it might depend on the size of the brewery.

Of course, it's also possible to completely outgrow these older buildings, at which point the traditional industrial park makes better sense because it's built for production of any and all items, and built next to automotive transport arteries.

At this point, our discussion can turn to a completely different model of sustainability, as I remind readers that older production breweries used to be places adjacent to railways, navigable rivers and canals.

But as brewpubs ... yes.

Definitely.

Reason No. 500 why craft beer is great: Reuse of old buildings, by Chris Crowell (Craft Brewing Business)

Sustainability is an integral narrative within the craft beer industry’s story, and many of these initiatives make for great headlines, but one of the most impactful sustainable attributes of the craft brewing industry, often overlooked, is the reuse of real estate and old buildings.

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"I won’t miss the systemic food waste in the restaurant industry."

This doesn't really apply to brewing -- or does it?

There are homebrewers who'd surely agree that the only way to do it right (and creatively) is at home.

There's possibly a topic about sustainability and beer to be found herein, one that might possibly be tied to the reasons for California's drought-induced water shortage (hint: think agriculture).

However, in the main, what's being addressed by the soon-to-be former reviewer is burn-out, and a desire to strip away the extravagance and get back down to the heart of the matter. This is something I can relate to, quite vividly.

Restaurant Industry's Dirty Secret: Why I'm Mostly Going to Stop Eating Out, by Ari LeVaux (AlterNet)

In a few weeks I will write my final restaurant review for Weekly Alibi in Albuquerque and head home to Montana. I’ll miss restaurant criticism, but I will also feel some relief to leave it behind ...

 ... Because the bottom line is, if you’re going to be a high-maintenance food snob on a mediocre income, cooking at home is the only sustainable option. You can pay more for pastured meat; local, organic vegetables; eggs from pastured chickens; pesticide-free produce; and seafood harvested by non-slaves, and still pay less than you would even at a cheap restaurant, while sending positive ripples down the food chain.

I will miss the ethnic restaurants, the fancy restaurants and my favorite guilty pleasure, the sushi restaurants. But I won’t miss the systemic food waste in the restaurant industry.

Sustainability: "It's about the soil."

Lately, and for obvious reasons, I've been fond of saying that the first ironclad rule of sustainability is survival. Without respiration, the remainder is rhetoric.

Then there's crop rotation.

What Farm-to-Table Got Wrong, by Dan Barber (New York Times)

... Today, almost 80 percent of Americans say sustainability is a priority when purchasing food. The promise of this kind of majority is that eating local can reshape landscapes and drive lasting change.

Except it hasn’t.

One section is of specific interest to beer fans.

... It’s one thing for chefs to advocate cooking with the whole farm; it’s another thing to make these uncelebrated crops staples in ordinary kitchens. Bridging that divide will require a new network of regional processors and distributors.

Take beer, for example. The explosion in local microbreweries has meant a demand for local barley malt. A new malting facility near Klaas’s farm recently opened in response. He now earns 30 percent more selling barley for malt than he did selling it for animal feed. For other farmers, it’s a convincing incentive to diversify their grain crops.

It isn't for nothing that we refer to food chains, and in the case of barley (and hops), local supplies count for little absent the means to malt and process them. While it's true that many readers already know this, remember that others don't. It can make for interesting barside conversation.

Let bourbon be bourbon. We'll just brew beer.

Here's the pitch:

Will a barrel shortage hurt small distilleries and breweries? For some, it already has, by Kevin Gibson (Insider Louisville)

As for the longer term consideration of white oak barrels used in distillation, the real question might be this: Production of bourbon is predicated on the single use of a new white oak barrel, after which the used oak barrel enters the secondary marketplace ... but is this cycle environmentally sustainable?

“It’s really tough to see an end in the short term. Everything seems to indicate that bourbon, Scotch and Irish whisky are very bullish. It’s a question of whether logging capacity and cooperage can catch up with demand from the other side.”

Assuming there is enough white oak to go around, and the value of bourbon production dictates supply of the necessary wood according to the purportedly "free" market, then brewers in need of used barrels to inflate the value of their specialty products, as determined by the geek-driven niche market on Rate Advocate, should be able to procure plenty of them. It's probably a non-issue.

Is the future of better beer as a whole dependent on a niche market like this? One certainly hopes not. Sam Cruz provides the correct answer when asked how a barrel shortage might affect Against the Grain.

Asked how (AtG's) brewery expansion would be affected if the barrel shortage worsens, he says, “If something does happen, we would adjust our production plans. We’d make more of something else and make it well.”

Precisely.

What brewers of beer beer must do is brew better beer, perhaps even the sort -- generally, those styles that are non-barrel aged -- capable of being consumed during a baseball game.