Since day one, Fat Tire has blazed a trail on climate action.

When brewing the first batch, our founder rigged up a trash can and copper pipe to capture and reuse wasted heat to reduce energy. In the ‘90s, we pioneered wind power with our utility. In the 2000s, we installed onsite renewables, like solar and biogas capture. And that’s just the start.

Along the way, we’ve linked arms with others—funding climate-resilient barley research, sharing our climate playbook with the world free of charge, donating over $17 million to nonprofits working on the front lines of the climate movement and mobilizing a growing coalition of beer drinkers to get involved.

But there’s always more to do, and every day we look for new ways to chip our footprint closer to zero, while we continue to fight for necessary and sweeping systemic change.

As climate change disrupts the very ingredients our beer is made of—water and crops—we will continue working to protect the health of our planet and ensure that beer, not to mention staples like rice and coffee, remains affordable and plentiful for all.

America's First

Certified Carbon Neutral Beer

In 2020, Fat Tire became America’s first certified carbon neutral beer. Why? Climate change poses an urgent threat to our coworkers, our customers, and our communities – not to mention the beer we all love to drink - and we are using every tool at our disposal to protect the only planet with beer.

Certifying our beer as carbon neutral is one step of many that we take to reduce our impact, after setting science-based climate targets and investing in direct reductions in emissions from brewing and distributing Fat Tire. We utilize the leading international standard for carbon neutrality in our certification, ensuring we are accurately measuring our footprint and holding ourselves accountable to real, measurable emission reductions over time. Learn more here.

The Beer of the Climate-Ravaged Future

To show what the future of beer could look like if climate change continues unchecked, we brewed up Torched Earth Ale. This beer uses the kind of ingredients that would be available in a climate-ravaged future including: smoke-tainted water, drought-resistant grains, shelf-stable extracts and dandelion weeds. While it’s technically beer, it’s not great.

Although beer will be the least of our worries in a full-on climate crisis, we’re brewers at heart and just can’t imagine a world of “torched beer” like this. That’s why we need to act now.

Unpacking Torched Earth

Read the op-ed from our CEO Steve Fechheimer calling on businesses to step up on climate.

INTERVIEW WITH CODY + KELLY

Hear from Fat Tire brewer, Cody Reif, and illustrator, Kelly Malka about what it was like to bring the Torched Earth beer and label to life.