Fine Liquor—with a Sustainable Conscience

While there is a strong trend toward organic and sus­tain­ably pro­duced goods, in this case it wasn’t such a trend—or for that mat­ter mar­ket­ing or sales projections—that led the GreenBar Collective to decide they should go in a sus­tain­able direc­tion. It was actu­ally a mat­ter of conscience.

“It’s not like there was some sort of mar­ket study that told us to do this,” said GreenBar co-founder Litty Mathew. “We started out as a com­pany called Modern Spirits in the con­ven­tional space. We used fresh pro­duce in all our infused vod­kas, so we worked very closely with farm­ers at our local farm­ers’ mar­ket. Through inter­act­ing with them, we real­ized that some of them had an inter­est in becom­ing cer­ti­fied organic.”

From talk­ing to var­i­ous grow­ers, GreenBar came to under­stand just how much land it took to pro­duce their prod­ucts. For one bot­tle of the arti­san vodka that they were making—or for any bot­tle of grain vodka that any­one else makes—it requires 23 square feet of land.

“It’s a very agri­cul­tur­ally inten­sive prod­uct,” Mathew explained. “Many of our farm­ers had a wish to go organic because they wanted to pass their farms on to their kids in good con­di­tion, and we thought we’d like to do some­thing sim­i­lar. Since our prod­uct did uti­lize so many resources, we wanted to keep our land clean for this indulgence—for that’s what alco­hol is. If we could do our part to keep that land free of genet­i­cally mod­i­fied organ­isms, pes­ti­cides and syn­thetic fer­til­iz­ers, then that’s what we wanted to do.”

Hence, their TRU Vodka products—and their entire line—are now made solely from sus­tain­able ingre­di­ents. The wheat for the vodka is organ­i­cally grown in Idaho and Wyoming and sent through organic millers and dis­tillers as well. GreenBar’s Crusoe Rums are pro­duced from organic, fair trade sug­ar­cane, and their Fruitlab liqueurs are made from hand-selected organic whole ingredients.

“In order for us to be USDA cer­ti­fied it has to be organic at every step,” said Mathew.

But it didn’t stop there. A fine vodka bot­tle is tra­di­tion­ally man­u­fac­tured from very thick glass, much of the time weigh­ing half a pound just by itself. Knowing that their pack­ag­ing cre­ated quite an impact on the envi­ron­ment, GreenBar light­ened their TRU Vodka bot­tles by 25 per­cent. The labels are now made from corn fiber and printed with soy ink. The ship­ping boxes are formed from 35 per­cent recy­cled card­board (the most recy­cled mate­r­ial that can be used for card­board and have it still main­tain its strength).

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

Probably best of all, for each bot­tle of TRU Vodka sold, the com­pany plants a tree—and so far 70,000 trees have been planted. GreenBar has near-future plans to put the remain­der of their prod­uct line on the same one-tree-per-bottle program.

Having put in all this effort, GreenBar decided to request that a third-party expert eval­u­ate all the fac­tors and num­bers that went into their TRU Vodka pro­duc­tion, pack­ag­ing and ship­ping, and estab­lish exactly what their car­bon foot­print was per bot­tle. This fig­ure now appears on every bottle.

Such a move seems to be a brand-new prac­tice, espe­cially for a liquor man­u­fac­turer. “I believe we are one of few US prod­ucts with a car­bon foot­print right on the label,” Litty said. “We did a study, hav­ing some­one else look into our prac­tices and tell us what our car­bon foot­print was. Since we plant a tree for every bot­tle that we sell, we had another study done on the planted trees, based on fac­tors such as what kind of tree it was, when the tree made it to mat­u­ra­tion, what per­cent­age died off, and more. When all this infor­ma­tion came together, we dis­cov­ered that our prod­uct was rad­i­cally car­bon negative.”

This is almost an under­state­ment, for, based on all the data involved, each bot­tle of TRU Vodka is actu­ally 760 times car­bon neg­a­tive. (For a look at the com­plete study data, visit www.greenbar.biz/how-green-is-tru.html.)

Now green con­nois­seurs can uti­lize arti­san vodka and fine liqueurs to com­pli­ment their par­ties and din­ners. But, more impor­tantly, other man­u­fac­tur­ers can take the exam­ple set by GreenBar in ensur­ing their prod­ucts not only uti­lize sus­tain­ably grown ingre­di­ents but actu­ally give back to the envi­ron­ment as well.

To find out more about the GreenBar prod­uct line, visit www.greenbar.biz.