The Sustainability of Drinking
The first aspect of sustainable drinking, is drinking responsibly, taking that as a given; what is the environmental impact of the alcohol we drink?
For context, a bit of alcohol 101. At its core, alcohol is simple. Yeast + sugar + time = fermentation. Yeast is all around us, airborne in the natural environment, when yeast finds sugar in a liquid form fermentation begins to convert the sugar into alcohol. This is such a natural process that even honeydew dripping down beech trees ferments after rain – leaving wasps literally drunk in the forest.
So if the process is natural, the real sustainability question re industrial scale alcohol production is: how much resource goes into producing the sugar for fermentation?
Alcohol’s Sugary Inputs
There are many possible sources, in my seminar at the Go Green Expo I focused on four common ones for simplicity.
Each has a footprint. Grapes often need irrigation, barley and sugarcane are broadacre crops with fertiliser and chemical inputs, and monoculture farming has impacts on biodiversity. Honey, by contrast, requires no dedicated cropping land and no irrigation. Instead, bees forage from rain-fed flowers and support pollination while they work.
Put in perspective, producing 100 million standard drinks, which is less than NZ drinks in a year, requires the following (using international averages):
Grapes (for wine) requires 1,200 hectares and 7 billion litres of water
Barley (for beer) requires 400 hectares and over 2 billion litres of water
Sugarcane (many rums, gins and RTDs) requires 400 hectares and 9 billion litres of water
Honey (for mead) requires no dedicated land use and just 6 million litres of water, for cleaning the hives.
Put in perspective: producing 1 million standard drinks from grapes can require 12 hectares of land and 73 million litres of water. Honey? Zero hectares, and just 60,000 litres (mostly in hive cleaning).
Undisturbed’s mead maker Sam Callander talks alcohol production and sustainability at Go Green Expo 9 August 2025.
Why Honey Mead Stands Head and Shoulders above the rest
Of all the inputs, honey is the only one that actively contributes to ecosystems rather than depleting them. Beekeeping, when done well, supports pollinator health and biodiversity, instead of clearing land for crops.
Of course, mead isn’t perfect. Bee health is always under threat, fermentation and bottling still need energy like other beverage types, and it’s harder and more expensive to produce at scale. But as an input, honey starts from a very different place: one that already adds value to the environment.
