After seeing the land around them burn with regularity, the team at Santa Rosa, California-based HenHouse Brewing decided to launch a collaborative fundraising beer with a clear call to action for drinkers to call their lawmakers and urge them to vote for the Green New Deal.
“One of the biggest traps in 2020 is to kind of fall into despair, and so this for us, is a way to, hopefully, not only not feel hopeless and helpless ourselves, but also empower other people to feel more like they have something they can do,” CEO Collin McDonnell told Brewbound
The beer’s name? Vote for the Green New Deal IPA.
“We didn’t want the message to get lost,” McDonnell said, adding that runner-up names included Do Something and Of the Utmost Importance.
Vote for the Green New Deal IPA’s ask is threefold: Drinkers are encouraged to call their congresspeople, and brewers are asked to donate proceeds from the beer’s sales to climate change-focused organizations and engage in sustainable business practices whenever possible.
The Green New Deal, also known as H.R. 109 and S.R. 59, was introduced in early 2019 by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D.-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.) in their respective houses of Congress. The twin bills’ goal is “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers,” through large-scale public works projects, similar to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that helped boost the country out of the Great Depression.
In HenHouse’s home of Sonoma County, deadly wildfires have ripped through the area each fall, devastating land and property. This year, the fires started earlier in the year than normal, forcing breweries still reeling from the loss of on-premise business due to the COVID-19 pandemic to close for outdoor service due to dangerous conditions and poor air quality.
“The fires are a giant goddamn bummer every year,” McDonnell said. “But this year, just with the pandemic and then fire season starting two months earlier than it has in the past three years, it was so crushing.”
Both Sierra Nevada and Russian River have spearheaded similar collaborative beers to raise money for fire relief, but HenHouse’s goes a step further with its call to action.
Labels for Vote for the Green New Deal IPA feature hops illustrated in a lush shade of green and include a call script and space for each participating brewery to include contact information for its district’s congressional representative and its state’s U.S. senators.
“I’m calling to insist that you take immediate and brave action to protect the climate by voting for the Green New Deal,” the label reads. “The scientific consensus is overwhelming and there are no other meaningful plans to address climate change, so please act now to support saving our planet.”
For HenHouse, those lawmakers include Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democrat who represents California’s second congressional district and has co-sponsored the Green New Deal in the House, and Sen. Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee and a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal in the Senate, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who has not co-sponsored the bill.
So far, more than 20 breweries have signed on to brew Vote for the Green New Deal IPA, the bulk of which are in the Bay Area.
“My goal is to get as many as many different breweries’ cans together as I can and take a mosaic of them to Dianne Feinstein’s office in San Francisco,” McDonnell said. “Our elected representatives are on board, so there’s definitely more need for this project elsewhere.”
Vote for the Green New Deal was the brainchild of HenHouse retail general manager Annalisa Girkout, who came up with the idea for the beer in mid-August when smoke from nearby fires choked the sky over Sonoma County.
In addition to calling for drinkers to demand action on climate change, participating breweries are asked to donate to a climate-centric non-profit organization and commit to sustainable business practices. HenHouse will donate proceeds from the beer to the Climate Emergency Fund. The company has optimized its energy usage following an audit last year.
“One of the reasons that a Green New Deal is important is that a lot of the really transformative technologies that breweries can use, like CO2 recapture and on-site water reclamation — those kinds of things — is that they’re just crazy expensive,” McDonnell said. “There needs to be public investment in scaling those things so that production goes up and cost comes down.”
Austin, Texas-based startup Earthly Labs has developed carbon capture technology for breweries producing between 8,000 and 20,000 barrels annually, but the system and its installation can cost up to $95,000.
Wildfires have made the need for climate change more pressing for Northern Californians and have elevated the topic above partisan bickering, he said.
“Locally, I think everybody thinks of this more pragmatically than politically,” McDonnell said.
Although breweries can sometimes face backlash from consumers when wading into discourse over current affairs, HenHouse has heard little. The stakes are too high to stay silent, McDonnell said.
“Pissing off some customers is not a thing I want to do,” he said. “As a business owner, I’m gonna take precautions to not do that, but I’m way more scared of having my employees evacuated again.”
The effects of climate change are felt nationwide in different ways, which McDonnell hopes will motivate brewers to participate, despite the potential for negative feedback. The streets near Jersey City, New Jersey-based Departed Soles Brewing, which will brew a batch of Vote for the Green New Deal IPA, suffered severe flood damage during Superstorm Sandy in 2012, three years before the brewery opened.
“You have your own personal flavor of climate disaster happening all around you,” McDonnell said. “I bet that’s more important to most business owners.”
Breweries across the country have supported two cause-driven collaborative beers in 2020 — All Together, an IPA driven by Brooklyn, New York-headquartered Other Half Brewing to raise funds for service industry staff forced out of work by the COVID-19 pandemic, and Black is Beautiful, an imperial stout driven by San Antonio, Texas-based Weathered Souls Brewing to raise funds and awareness for racial injustices caused by police brutality.