Beer gets sold as simple. Brewing isn’t. Behind every taproom is a mechanical room full of boilers, exhaust, and energy loss that nobody puts on the label. As fuel costs rise and utilities get more involved, breweries are being pushed to confront heat and carbon not as ideals, but as operating constraints. This piece (the link above) looks at why brewing is becoming less about aspiration and more about design, economics, and the uncomfortable parts of sustainability that actually matter.

Climate conversations often drift upward into policy, ambition, and targets. Reality lives lower down, in physics, infrastructure, and money. Examples of constraints that don’t care about intent: - Energy density and thermodynamics - Existing infrastructure lifetimes and sunk costs - Human behavior and operational inertia - Capital intensity vs. payback timelines - Reliability requirements that don’t flex for ideals Most plans fail not because they’re wrong, but because they assume one of these constraints will quietly move out of the way. Which one do you see misunderstood most often, and where does it actually bite? This isn’t about being anti-anything. It’s about respecting the boundaries the system operates within. Explain the constraint. Explain the consequence.