Watch: Why draft beer in steel kegs is the ultimate sustainable beverage

The Steel Keg Association launched just prior to the Craft Brewers Conference at the end of April, bringing together six leaders from different sectors of the draft beer space: BLEFA GmbH, Hillebrand Gori, Micro Matic, MicroStar Logistics, Schaefer Container Systems and Thielmann. What was the impetus for getting this association together?

“To grow the volume of beer served from steel kegs,” says Dan Vorlage, executive director for the association in this chat from the Craft Brewers Conference. “It was really born out of Covid because sometimes you don’t really appreciate something until it’s gone, and the whole beer industry unfortunately had that experience with draft beer effectively going to zero at the beginning of the pandemic. It helped the industry appreciate it more and the benefits it delivers.”

And what are those benefits, exactly? Vorlage makes a compelling case for sustainability:

“ … People don’t see it this way because kegs have been around so long and they kind of work behind the scenes, but they’re the original reusable container, and reusability is kind of happened its moment.”

Pete: “This was sustainability before sustainability was a thing.”

“Yeah that’s exactly right … It all comes to this model of circularity, and the idea of a circular economy is that finite materials are put into packaging and then put back into the supply chain rather than sent to landfill.”

The Steel Keg Association hired Deloitte to conduct an ISO 14000 level life cycle analysis, and they quantify that in the U.S., steel kegs remove six billion single-use containers from waste streams each year. Yes, billion with a B

“What that means from a sustainability perspective: that removes 500,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases every single year because of keg’s reusability and their long lifespan,” Vorlage says. “It saves 400,000 metric tons of containers from going to landfills every single year.

“This is an incredible sustainability story that’s never been told and the mission for the Steel Keg Association is now to really tell that story so we can increase volume for the beer industry.”

What’s the association’s role from here? Education of decision makers at bars and restaurants. Because in addition to the sustainability storyline, as is often the case, there is an economic advantage to consider as well.

Watch the rest of the video for more. This one’ll start right where we left off: