Cheers to Brewers for Clean Water

Senior Advisor & Managing Director, Center for Campaigns & Organizing

Today, NRDC announced a new partnership with craft brewers called “Brewers for Clean Water" to highlight the importance of clean water and the Clean Water Act.

We are working with 20 of our country's most innovative brewers, whose commitment to making great-tasting beer is matched only by their appreciation of the clean water that makes it possible.

Few industries depend on clean water as much as craft brewers. Whether a brewer draws its supply straight from a water body or from groundwater, or gets it from a public water system, the waterbodies protected by the Clean Water Act, including wetlands and headwater and non-perennial streams, help ensure more reliable, cleaner water supplies.

Small streams and wetlands improve both the quantity and quality of water available to brewers (and the rest of us). Small streams and wetlands can help filter out water pollution, thus reducing the clean-up burden on water providers. Cleaner source water requires less treatment. Less treatment means breweries may have to do less work – and spend less -- to prepare water for brewing.

But craft brewers are more than deeply connected to their water supplies because of their importance to the brewing process - they are deeply connected to their communities and understand the vital link between clean water and the health of their neighbors and the broader economy.

It's an exciting partnership, which begins with each brewer taking the "Clean Water Pledge:"

You can't make great beer without clean water. That's why our brewery is proud to join the Natural Resources Defense Council and its more than one million supporters to stand up for clean water and the Clean Water Act. Clean water is essential to more than great-tasting beer - it's critical for public health and the health of a wide range of industries. Responsible safeguards protect the water we use to brew from upstream pollution and help us protect our downstream neighbors. Please join us. Stand up for the Clean Water Act. Because we all need clean water.

But it's much more powerful to listen to the brewers' themselves talk about what clean water means to them, which you can do here.

Once a brewer joins the campaign and takes the "Clean Water Pledge," we will work with each brewer to identify outreach and policy opportunities to help them safeguard their most important ingredient and the communities they support.

NRDC and the brewers who have joined the "Brewers for Clean Water" campaign share a deep commitment to clean water and the importance of the Clean Water Act. It was a similar sense of shared purpose that ensured passage of the Clean Water Act more than 40 years ago. And like those bipartisan visionaries who worked on the Act's passage, we won't agree on everything, but we can come together to protect our rivers, streams and lakes - and the great-tasting beer our craft brewing partners produce.

NRDC is proud to work with the following partners (in alphabetical order):