Story by Vivienne Pearson
‘Save the earth, don’t print this email if you don’t have to, this is the only planet with beer’.
It’s an original and fun take on the ‘please consider the environment before printing’ line that appears in lots of businesses email signatures. The business this is from is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a brewing company – Stone & Wood.
The award-winning local brewery doesn’t just pay email lip service to their environmental concern. Last Thursday saw a heap of the Stone & Wood team planting trees as part of the 18th Annual Rainforest Day. Working with Big Scrub Landcare, the effort contributed to rainforest regeneration. The term ‘Big Scrub’ is used to describe what was once the largest area of subtropical rainforest on Australia’s east coast.
‘We rocked up at the start of the day not really sure what to expect, but we were ready to get our hands dirty,’ says Jasmin Daly, creative and community manager for Stone & Wood. ‘It felt good by day’s end to look down the hill and see the 1,800 trees we’d planted.’
Being excellent business people as well as creators of great beer, Stone & Wood have, this week, re-released their Big Scrub Lager. This limited-release lager is dry hopped and left unfiltered to create a golden-coloured beer.
If you were lucky enough to be at the Scrubbers Ball on Saturday at Dorroughby Hall, you would have had a chance to find out for yourself whether the tasting notes (impeccable balance of floral aromatics and spicy herbal nuances, along with a hint of lemongrass) are spot on. Stone & Wood donated a ‘karma keg’ of Big Scrub to the event.
Stone & Wood ask people to pay what they’d like for the beer, (working off the karmic law of ‘what goes around, comes around’) as a fundraiser.
Jasmin Daley from Stone & Wood said the fundraiser was very successful. ‘Our two kegs, along with Kook wines sales, raised over $3500 for the Bob Brown Foundation and Big Scrub Landcare’, she said.
So if you’re in an environmental mood, grab a beer and plant a tree. If you’re reading this online, please restrain yourself from pressing print. Big Scrub Lager is available from lots of pubs and bottleshops locally – for a full list, see www.stoneandwood.com.au/bigscrub
