Wolf Street: Breweries Expanding Outisde of Drought Ravaged CA

One of my favorite bloggers has an article posted about the beer brewery situation in CA.  Two  craft breweries are expanding outside the state.

“We are at the maximum growth threshold here in California because of water,” Leon Sharyon, CFO of Lagunitas Brewing Co, told the LA Times. Lagunitas, which makes one of my many favorite IPAs at its Petaluma brewery, less than an hour north of San Francisco, uses about 2 million gallons of water a year from the Russian River that has been reduced to a trickle.

Solution for Lagunitas? Heresy! It expanded to … Chicago! Next to Lake Michigan, so that brewery won’t run out of water for a while. Sierra Nevada opened a brewery in Asheville, North Carolina, with plenty of water from the Smokey Mountains. Others are following the same strategy.

Well, at least they are just expanding into other states. Not moving out whole hog.  Others are hanging tough and implementing tight water conservation methods.

If any have onsite power generation, they might want to consider extracting the water out of the exhaust.