Even drinking's going green

Even drinking can be considered a green activity now.

Many distilleries and breweries are launching spirits made from organic ingredients, as well as bottled and packaged with environmentally friendly materials. Los Angeles-based Modern Spirits claims to offer "the world's most carbon negative product" in its Tru Organic Spirits, gin and vodka in three flavors - straight, lemon and vanilla. The makers maintain that producing each bottle of Tru vodka absorbs 760 times more carbon than it emits. Modern Spirits plants a tree (which on average absorbs about 790 kilograms of carbon) for every bottle sold.

McCormick Distilling Co.'s 360 Vodka is produced at a state-of-the-art distillery, recently upgraded to reduce fossil-fuel energy usage by 21 percent. It also promises to offset its emissions through services such as Close the Loop, a postage-paid bottle-cap mail-in program developed to enable reuse. The bottles contain 85 percent recycled glass, compared with the 35 percent most distillers use, and the labeling and packaging are made from 100 percent recycled paper.

There are even organic mixers to combine with the vodka. Modmix offers five gourmet all-organic mixers, which include raw sugar and organic fruits and herbs. The newest, Wasabi Bloody Mary mix, is infused with ginger and tamarind.

Major beer companies have yet to go green, but microbreweries tend to produce beers with smaller carbon footprints. The employees of Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing dipped into their bonus funds to make the brewery the first U.S. company to source its energy from wind power.

Drinking never felt so virtuous.