As businesses recalibrate their environmental impact, breweries, of all places, seem to be struggling to outdo one another with efforts to turn amber ales green.

In Wisconsin, La Crosse City Brewery is recycling its waste to generate three million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year for a local hospital. Keystone Brewery won’t distribute farther than 35 miles from Wiltshire, England, where it only uses British hops. And Coors has been busy touting the 50th anniversary of the aluminum can, a more readily recyclable packaging material the company introduced in 1959.

One of the more aggressively green beer makers — at least by reputation — has been New Belgium Brewery, an independent craft brewer in Fort Collins, Colo., which teamed up with the Climate Conservancy last summer to publish a life-cycle assessment of one six-pack of its Fat Tire brand beer (PDF).

The company, in fact, has been chipping way at its carbon footprint since 1999, when it began taking advantage of wind power through the local utility — a move it underscored heavily in its promotional materials. But in so doing, the brewery became the object of a harsh truth-telling campaign and repeated complaints of greenwash — an unpleasant experience, no doubt, but one that the company has now embraced as it continues its sustainability efforts.

In 2005, an ex-employee and self-appointed gadfly began calling-out New Belgium for labeling its product “100 percent wind-powered.”

From The Denver Post:

This claim has apparently boosted sales among beer guzzlers who are deeply concerned about global warming. It’s also forced competitors to examine their own practices. But it isn’t entirely true. In addition to electricity, New Belgium burns natural gas — which is not produced in a wind turbine. The trucks that distribute its beer do not run on wind. The glass bottles — from an outside supplier — require more energy to make than the beer itself, much of it coming from fossil fuels. And most of these bottles likely end up in landfills anyway. Additionally, New Belgium doesn’t run a wind farm. It buys renewable-energy credits, paying a premium for the right to claim that the electrons it uses come from a wind turbine instead of a power plant, even if it is not technically so.

New Belgium initially dismissed the claims as those of a wild-eyed — and angry — ex-employee, obtaining restraining orders against the fellow and calling his complaints a matter of semantics, according to The Post.

In 2007, however, the company agreed to modify its claims of being “100 percent wind-powered” — and the experience might have proved reason enough for the brewery to circle its wagons.

Instead, New Belgium embraced the rebuke and used it as a catalyst for increased transparency in its first-ever sustainability report, which it published last month. (A PDF of the report is available here.)

Wrote the company’s sustainability director, Jenn Orgolini, in the publication’s preface:

Omission can be a reflex when your instinct is to protect the company you love from unwarranted harsh judgments. But, we learned to flex our openness and humility more readily in 2007 when an aggrieved ex-employee rightly accused us of incorrectly using the phrase “100% wind-powered” when natural gas provides over half the energy we need to make beer. We never meant to mislead. … Please tell us if you think we’ve left anything out of this report.

Looking forward from that incident, the company has laid out a number of sustainability ambitions.

Among other things, New Belgium noted that packaging and transporting of raw materials, including barley, which is imported from faraway Wisconsin, account for nearly half of its overall footprint.

As a result, Ms. Orgolini said the company was investing in research to harvest local barley, and that it was opening a new packaging facility designed to reduce carbon emissions. The company also reported that it had partnered with the city of Fort Collins, Colorado State University and “other energy-focused companies” in applying for a grant from the Department of Energy to fund a project aimed at reducing peak-load electricity demand.

Last Spring, the D.O.E. granted the city and its partners $6.3 million in funding toward that end, and New Belgium said it now plans to install $4 million in energy-saving technologies — “funded 50 percent in house, 25 percent by the D.O.E. and 25 percent by in-kind donations,” according to the sustainability report. Is is “our biggest single project,” Ms. Orgolini said.

Still, some environmentalists remain unconvinced. New Belgium now distributes its beer in 18 states — a point not lost on Will Walters of the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Sierra Club, who would prefer to see companies working more locally.

“I have seen Fat Tire in far flung places in other states where it shouldn’t be,” Mr. Walters said.

Said Ms. Orgolini: The brewery’s sustainability efforts are “a work in progress.”