A big announcement providing more funding to help improve Iowa’s water quality out in the countryside. It’s partnership between the Iowa Agricultural Water Alliance and West Okoboji brewing, one of the most popular craft breweries in the state. Called the Blue Taps Equals Blue Water program, it will be coming to your favorite watering hole soon that has West O Brewing products on tap. Matt Matthiesen is the owner of West O Beer, and he says five dollars from every keg sold will go back out into the countryside to help fund water quality improvements as water is the key ingredient in brewing beer.
“If you’ve ever seen our tap handles, they’ve always been the vertical West O Beer aluminum kind of silver looking tap handles. We decided to tint all those blue and then start talking to our distributors and some matching partners about who else we could work with about spreading the blue taps across the state and give back to people outside of the Okoboji community.”
Matthiesen says it’s the result of six months plus of conversations with our friends at the Iowa Agricultural Water Alliance and really does help bridge that urban rural divide as the higher quality water coming from the rural areas will improve the product consumed by adult beverage consumers everywhere.
“That was one of the reasons why we chose to build the brewery where we did in the city of West Okoboji. All the communities around that area pull water from West Okoboji Lake. When we were looking at a place to build, we thought, hey, let’s look at this water, it happens to be naturally soft. The lake is spring fed, it doesn’t get a lot of runoff, actually very little runoff like most lakes do, from streams, from parking lots, that type of thing. Our water actually comes through in a form of a spring and so that soft water is perfect for brewing.”
Check out www.iaagwater.org for more information about how you can participate in the Blue Taps = Blue Water program.
