(text by Ry Beville, photo care of the Brewers Association)

The World Beer Cup is the world’s largest and one of its most prestigious beer competitions. I’ve been a WBC judge since 2012 and was looking forward to this year’s competition in April when it was, as expected, cancelled due to the Coronavirus. What did that mean for the thousands of breweries around the world that had already shipped tens of thousands of beers to be judged in 111 categories? Well, a refund on competitions fees, for starters, but what about all that beer?

The logistic challenges (and economic folly) of shipping back all those bottles and cans made that option a non-starter. While I and a few other judges joked that it would be nice to ship it all to us and let us at least drink it and provide notes to producers, we knew that wasn’t going to happen either. Judges are scattered around the world, and the beer was all being cold stored in the U.S. prior to competition. Obviously, dumping it would just be a plain shame. The Brewers Association (BA), which runs the WBC came up with a simple and inspiring solution: make hand sanitizer for first responders.

As the BA reported on April 8th, the beer was delivered to Denver Distillery and Ballmer Peak Distillery in the Denver, Colorado area (the BA is based in Denver). These two businesses are converting the beer into sanitizer through their machinery. That also meant that BA staff had to empty those thousands of cans and bottles–the first batch was 1500 gallons. That first batch will produce an estimated 175 gallons of sanitizer after processing.

We’ve said before that beer created civilization. Now it’s doing its part to save it!