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City Of Golden and Coors Renew Home Taps Agreement

We’re ecstatic that, late last night, spokeswoman April Foolsworthy confirmed that the City of Golden and Coors were able to reach an agreement to keep the Home Taps pipeline running. The Home Taps pipeline delivers beer directly into Golden homes from the brewery and runs alongside the city’s water pipes. The pipes have been in place since 1888 and have delivered fresh cold been with zero packaging and zero transportation emissions. As many of you know, in line with our environmental initiatives at Powder7, we strongly supported bringing both sides back to the table to reach an agreement. We felt that this was an important opportunity that was a win win for both the environment and our city’s oldest brewery.

The author, pours a Home Taps cold one

The old 20 year agreement between the city and brewery was set to expire at the end of the first quarter 2017, meaning that today, April 1st, the pipeline would stop pumping beer directly into Golden’s homes. The new 40 year agreement sets the new rate at $3.06/gallon, up from $2.12/gallon. The major change is that the new rate is tied to inflation, so will automatically increase annually. The major benefit of this is that it allowed for a much longer contract term. Another point of contention that was ironed out at the eleventh hour, is that the city will continue to handle the billing, simply keeping it as a line item in water bills as it has always done. Both sides have seen rising costs: on the production side for the brewery and the delivery/administrative side for thee city which owns the pipe and manages pipeline revenue. We’re happy that both sides could finally agree on a new rate. Even though it is higher, it still only comes out to about 40 cents a pint. That still beats happy hour!

At Powder7, we believe that the pipeline promises to be one of our city’s greatest gifts to the world. It’s an old yet ingenious system that minimizes the carbon footprint of beer. We take water in homes for granted so why not beer? For both, direct to home pipes reduce end user costs while also emitting zero emissions and waste. When the engineers from Halve Maan brewery in Bruges visited our city in 2011 to learn from our system, they were delighted and shocked at it’s remarkable efficiency. Their new two mile pipeline utilizes many of the features that they learned about when examining the 1895 blueprints of Golden’s system.

We hope that more cities and breweries adopt pipelines. It’s excellent news that our pipeline will keep running to serve as an inspiration for other communities who want to protect the world that we all live in. To both sides who reached the agreement late last night: CHEERS!

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