ISO: Backers with devastatingly good taste in beer & a profound sense of generosity. FT: A plethora of hella dank rewards.

Modern Times Beer is a soon-to-exist brewery in San Diego, California. For the past 14 months, I have been working like a crazed lemur to get the place up and running. 

In January 2012, I walked away from my job at Stone Brewing Co. and raised enough capital in 6 months to get the brewery off the ground. I found a killer location in Point Loma, just a ten minute bike ride from the beach. I bought a gleaming 30bbl brewery with all the fixin’s. And I somehow managed to hire some of the most inventive, experienced brewers a start-up brewery could hope to land.

But I don’t just want Modern Times to be functional. I want Modern Times to be a magical little kingdom filled with amazeballs.

as if that wasn’t the best sentence already..

UPDATE: New reward & charity stretch goal So here’s amazing news: if we become the most backed brewery project of all-time on Kickstarter, a group of our rad vendors & colleagues will DONATE $2,400 to incredibly awesome local advocacy group BikeSD. In order to unlock this mind-bogglingly cool donation, we need to break $52,375.

and then if they pass that goal..

Stretch Goal: $65,000

If we hit our stretch goal, I’ll buy a solar hot water heating system for the brewery. It’ll preheat all the water used in the brewing process, preventing the release of 27,540 lbs of CO2 each year while keeping our gas bills low. San Diego is super sunny, making this is an obvious step, but oddly, no breweries that I know of in the area are solar pre-heating their process water. I’d be stoked out of my gourd to be the first, hopefully starting a trend. We’ve got some killer stretch rewards to help reach this goal, so check ‘em out below.

Modern Times Beer: Building a Fermentorium.

6 (SIX!) DAYS to go!! back them! you know we need more great beer in SD!

UPDATE: we/they broke $52,375!!! 
Now let’s get that solar water heater!!

California’s signature environmental law needs to be reformed because NIMBYs are using it to block smart growth.

Parker Place provides a case study in how CEQA could be reformed.

Ali Kashani thought he had a sure thing. In 2008, the longtime Berkeley developer proposed to build one of the greenest housing projects in East Bay history. Kashani has long been an advocate for smart-growth development — dense housing and mixed-use projects built on major transit corridors in urban areas. And the architect that he commissioned for his smart-growth project in Berkeley designed it to meet LEED Platinum standards.

….In other words, the Parker Place project is a liberal environmentalist’s dream.

…But nothing’s ever a sure thing in Berkeley, a city that is home to some of the most vocal and stubborn anti-growth activists in the state. In November 2010, after the Berkeley City Council approved Parker Place, a small group of these activists sued to block the project, using the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to do it. And now, more than four years after Kashani unveiled his proposal, it’s still tied up in litigation. “They really don’t like infill projects,” Kashani said, referring to how anti-growth activists view urban development. “And they’re holding up good projects that could be on the market.”

“The law has become so dysfunctional,” said Jennifer Hernandez, an attorney for the Holland & Knight firm and a Berkeley resident who advocates for broad reforms of CEQA. “To call this environmental protection anymore … it’s really about quality-of-life” issues.

The California Legislature has approved minor reforms to CEQA during the past decade in an effort to spur smart growth. But CEQA still allows anti-growth activists to pervert environmental law. For example, the group that sued to block Parker Place contended that the city’s environmental study was “inadequate,” essentially because the project involves the cleaning up of polluted soil and groundwater.

Yes, you read that right. A project that would not only help fight climate change, but also would clean up contaminated soil and groundwater in downtown Berkeley has been blocked in court thanks to a law that’s supposed to protect the environment.

read more: eastbayexpress, 13.03.13.

…in a report released on Thursday, the nonprofit Urban Green Council makes the case that the country’s largest population centers needn’t rely on a federal breakthrough. Specifically, the 51-page report, titled “90 by 50,” finds that New York City could slash its emissions by a whopping 90 percent by 2050 without any radical new technologies, without cutting back on creature comforts, and maybe even without breaking its budget…

The report takes as its starting point this foundational statistic: 75 percent of the readily measured carbon emissions in New York City come from buildings. That makes it very different from the nation as a whole, where agriculture and transportation are among the biggest culprits. 

…But the Urban Green Council’s plans would carry these standards to unprecedented levels — not just double-glazed windows, but triple-glazed windows — and apply them to existing buildings as well whenever they’re updated. That’s an awful lot of work, but the potential payoff is bigger than you might expect. Think of how much a heater has to run just to keep a room at a constant 70 degrees on a 35-degree day — and then imagine instead that the room is so thoroughly sealed that it can stay near 70 for much of the day on its own.

grist, 16.02.13.

As he walked, Leopold explained the rules that CDOT set for the project. Materials had to be found within a 500-mile radius of Cermak, he said. All told, 23 percent of the materials used in the project were recycled, and more than 60 percent of the project’s construction waste was recycled in turn.

And recycling is just the start of it. Sidewalks and asphalt have been designed to reflect summer’s light and heat. Inside traffic lanes are coated with self-cleaning photocatalytic cement, absorbing nitrogen oxide from car traffic, thus cleaning the surrounding air. Overhead, new energy-efficient streetlights bow toward the street, drawing power from solar panels and cutting back on nighttime light pollution…

The addition of new sidewalks and parking spaces creates a place for cars to park at a curb, rather than where people want to walk. Installation of a “pedestrian refuge island” in the middle of Cermak Road puts an end to the hazardous standing amid east/west traffic, attempting to cross. Coming soon: long-awaited permeable-paved bike lanes that will finally tie Cermak to a web of routes leading into the city.

read more: grist.org, 08.10.12.

west cermak rd. g.maps.

awesome! I biked on Cermak from/to Pilsen and Chinatown when I was in Chicago during my spring break. It’s not a heavily traveled road, I would say, and it was cool to ride over the old train tracks (minus the bumps). (ok so I have a penchant for industrial areas)

a green roof in Arlington, VA. 2009.

Construction just commenced on a new 90,000-square-foot store in North Portland that will be home to not only the largest green roof in the green roof-happy city of Portland, but the largest green roof in the entire state of Oregon. When completed, the vegetated, carbon dioxide-absorbing roof atop the Hayden Meadows Walmart will measure 40,600 square feet.

mnn, 30.08.12.