Sustainable Brewing for the Craft Brewing Industry

Introduction

Sustainability sits at the intersection of environmentalism and efficiency. Many of the opportunities for sustainable practice in the brewery also produce economic value for the brewer. This ebook takes a look at opportunities within the craft brewing industry to make incremental changes that yield both environmental and economic benefits.

The discussion covers the process of getting started, with three main topic areas: Ingredients, Energy Use, and Reducing Waste. In each section we’ll outline specific actions and opportunities, and we highlight brewers who are taking these steps today.

Finally, we’ll wrap up with a summary of areas for attention and potential improvements.

Getting Started - Practical Steps

New Belgium Brewing writes extensively about sustainability and brewing. Their advice - emphasize “progress over perfection.” Any program will be more effective if it starts with an established baseline, then sets targets for improvement, and measures progress against goals. Here are a couple places to start:

1. Book an on-site efficiency audit with your local public utilities (your municipality or local brewers guild can provide specifics on how to do so).
2. Schedule visits/consultations with your major equipment providers (distributors or manufacturers) to review staff training, equipment configuration, and regular maintenance.
3. Review industry benchmarks (see Brewers Association, New Belgium Brewing, and other regional resources), then compare your own operations.

With these steps in place, you can build an effective program.

Where To Start

Maintain Your Sources of Energy

You don’t need a spreadsheet to tell you the quickest and cheapest solutions here are also the most simple: eliminate waste and turn down the power.

Regarding energy usage, waste management pretty much means preventative and restorative maintenance.

Brandon Watkins, Senior Manager for Utilities Design, Execution and Optimization for Molson Coors says leaks account for 5-10% of loss at a brewery and can rapidly escalate without regular inspection.

“At times we think leaks are marginal. In many breweries they’re pretty significant,” he says.

Maintenance crews should look out for dirt and breakage and be sure to clean, fix or replace anything that uses air or water, with special attention paid to broken belts, stuck dampers, dirty filters, dusty lighting fixtures, and all heating and cooling systems. If you have an economizer to capture exhaust heat, a technician should clean, calibrate and lubricate it annually.

The E Source utilities research and consulting firm writes in its brewery overview, “Economizers are prone to failure, and a broken economizer can increase heating and cooling costs by up to 50%.”

Turn Down the Power

Your dad was right about one thing: If a light, appliance or temperature-control unit doesn’t need to
be on, turn it off. This doesn’t just apply to bathrooms. Deschutes Brewing in Oregon saved $200 a month by waiting to turn on tasting room lights, fans and TVs until right before they opened the doors. If you’re hosting an event, power up projectors, microphones and generators just before go-time.

Throughout the building, whether it’s lighting, HVAC or something else, match output to demand through room-to-room or zone coverage. You don’t need to fully light, heat or cool your entire building when not all departments are in-office, and ancillary areas like the milling room may not need much temperature control at all.

Luckily, options to automate these tasks abound.

A simple timer can control, say, lights in the parking lot, and a pre-programmed dimmer can light the way for an overnight cleaning crew that doesn’t need sunshine-level-illumination to do its job. Daylight controls measure the amount of natural light coming in and regulate the amount of artificial light emitted, while occupancy sensors determine occupancy and adjust lighting accordingly.

E Source says occupancy sensors can conserve 30% to 75% of lighting energy and usually pay for themselves in one to three years.

Note: You may also want to consider “delamping,” which, just like it sounds, involves taking extra lights out of commission. The BA says you can reduce lighting electricity by more than 35% by replacing antiquated fluorescent fixtures with LEDs or T8 lamps and electronic ballasts. Though it’s tempting to wait until your bulbs blow out, Sierra Nevada Brewing sustainability director Mandi McKay says a business may realize enough savings to justify the effort and expense to do it beforehand, especially if it’s a large space like a warehouse or office complex.

Shift change: Time Operations to Maximize Energy Efficiency

The beauty of a brewery is that some operations can occur when most convenient or conservation-minded. Though it may not prove the most popular move, owners can drastically reduce charges and surcharges by scheduling energy-intensive processes like packaging outside of peak hours, and brewers can stack several batches back-to-back to cut down on the time and energy it takes to prepare boilers for use.

Motors and Systems

Don’t Keep the Motor Running

You’ve heard the term “motor mouth” to refer to someone who talks non-stop? Well, some motors just don’t need to keep running on and on like that. Variable speed drives (VSD) and variable frequency drives (VFD) convert a fixed-rate supply of incoming electricity into a variable output that amps up or slows down a motor, depending on current need (pun intended). Both types of drives bring blessed silence and significant savings to pumps, fans, compressors, HVAC systems and, most significantly, packaging-line conveyor belts that can benefit from speed control and soft starts/stops.

The BA writes, “Modern VSDs are affordable and reliable, have flexibility of control, and offer significant electrical energy savings (from 10 – 60%) through greatly reduced electric bills.”

When it comes time to repair or replace old motors consider two reasons to replace: One, your current motor may be heftier (read: more inefficient) than its workload warrants, and two, E Source says, “New, more efficient units can save significant amounts of energy and yield short, simple payback periods.”

Don’t Be a Blowhard

Compressed air systems may be a brewery’s most inefficient expense. Too frequently poorly designed and maintained, they commonly spring leaks that can expel 30-40% of air in the system and often comprise 10% of a brewery’s energy consumption – a problem that builds on itself by depressing the overall pressure in the system and requiring more compressors to compensate. Even the top models only function at 12-15% efficiency – releasing all that excess air into the environment.

Breweries should use as little compressed air as possible. Staff shouldn’t use it to cool off, dry off or clean up, and pressure should get set at the lowest possible PSI for the job.

Cooling and Heating

Stay Cool with Proper Refrigeration Practices

Cooling off with poorly functioning cold storage turns up the heat on electric bills, too, as refrigeration often comprises 35% of these for a brewery. To minimize costs, consider the following tips.

Doors: Keep the automatic door closer in good working order, the hinges lubricated and the seals tight. If the door fittings still gape, rehang them to restrict airflow.

Debris: Conversely, remove anything that restricts airflow inside the condenser and evaporator coils.

Insulation: Prevent air from escaping the system unnecessarily by insulating the lines between remote condensers and the walk-in, as well as all refrigerant suction lines.

Refrigerant: Raise the glycol temperature to raise pressure in those suction lines, which raises savings on compressor energy by 2-3% per degree Fahrenheit.

In addition, a glycol chiller whose head adjusts to ambient temperatures can consume a cool 20% less power.

(A note on glycol: though some large craft breweries are switching from glycol to ammonia for a more eco-friendly approach, Bell’s Beer environmental programs director Walker Modic says packaged chillers that take ammonia still really only accommodate breweries producing 100,000 bbls or more.)

Defrost: Set your auto defrost cycle to the minimum amount of time to keep frost from forming. E Source suggests seeing what happens if you set it to run four times a day for 15 minutes at a time.

Curtains: Trap cool air inside open-case fridges and display cases by covering them in night curtains when the business is closed.

Finally, don’t let unwanted heat sources burn up efficiency:

• Don’t use the built-in door heaters – designed to prevent frost build-up – if you don’t have to
• Install cool LEDs or compact fluorescent lights (CFL) in your refrigeration units to increase efficiency and decrease heat waste
• If possible, keep your heat-producing appliances like ovens and dishwashers away from your cooling appliances, which should be kept out of direct sunlight.

Wasting Heat Is Not Cool

If there’s one place the adage ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ does NOT apply, it’s your boiler. The Alliance for Sustainable Communities – Lehigh Valley (Pennsylvania) says replacing your existing boiler with one that’s high efficiency or Energy Star-rated may be the most valuable heating purchase you can make.

“The lower lifetime operating costs of condensing water heaters, tankless water heaters, and condensing tankless water heaters will well outweigh the slightly higher initial cost of such units,” reads the organization’s Green Communities materials.

Old or new, Green Communities advises hiring a professional to tune your boiler every year (or no less than once every three years). Inappropriately low pressure can cause “significant” heat loss, and high pressure can create steam leaks, which not only waste condensate but draw extra fuel and water to make up the difference.

“Fixing a steam leak is the best low cost item that you can perform to improve overall steam system energy efficiency,” it says.

As with your refrigeration system, you’ll want to Insulate your steam and condensate return lines and components.

It would be a pity to end waste in those ways without buffering against all the steam and heat that gets released into the environment by the
boiler’s very design. Exhaust flue gas from a traditional boiler can reach above 500 degrees and usually ends up in the air. So why not recover that heat for use elsewhere?

Plus, similar opportunities exist all over the brewhouse.

Sierra Nevada and other eco-aware breweries utilize vapor condensers on their kettles to recover heat and steam as well as multiple heat exchangers throughout the brewing process to preheat water for other processes.

“You take that steam or hot water on one side of the exchanger and run cold or ambient water on the other side and now you’re ready to go,” says McKay. It’s a closed loop philosophy everybody can think about even if you’re small,” she says.

A Word About REC’s

If all of this sounds like a hassle, it may appear cheaper or easier to purchase renewable energy credits (REC) like solar or wind power from
a local utility company. But truth be told, purchasing credits without first making your own brewery as efficient as possible wastes
innumerable opportunities to actually conserve dwindling resources.

The BA energy manual cautions, “Each brewer should exhaust all opportunities to increase energy efficiency and lower
operating costs before considering RECs.” No doubt it can seem daunting.

But as Skypeck says, it’s okay to take it one step at a time: “If a smaller brewer changes out fluorescent light bulbs for LEDs or replaces an old chiller with an Energy Star version, they all add up to make a difference.”

Reducing Brewery Waste

When Dave Thibodeau built the current headquarters for Durango, CO’s Ska Brewing in 2008, he turned former bowling alleys into tables, insulated his walls with recycled denim (“It’s better than fiberglass,” he says), and saved money on cement by pouring concrete fortified with a safe level of carcinogenic powder called fly ash that coal-fired power plants in nearby New Mexico emitted as a byproduct.

His materials reflect Ska’s continued commitment to the environment and still serve to showcase the ever-growing opportunities that exist to conserve our ever-dwindling natural resources.

“Our hope is to get to zero waste,” Thibodeau, Ska’s co-founder and president, says in 2023. Ambitious, yes. Impossible, no.

Whether it’s taking a bite out of the 38% of food that goes uneaten domestically or the 30% contribution that food-and-beverage businesses make to emissions-based climate change globally, small actions by craft breweries can add up to big changes in the amount of waste they generate.

But this isn’t the old ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra you may have learned in school or even the more modern expectation that you’ll recycle your cans and donate your spent grain to farmers. From reusing diatomaceous earth (DE) in masonry materials to feeding yeast to livestock to minimize methane production, we’re living in a new world of ways to stop overwhelming our planet. And with an increasing number of municipalities restricting what gets dumped down the drain or into landfills, many manufacturers are realizing going green is no longer a choice – it’s a requirement.

Don’t Take Out the Trash

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” isn’t outdated – just updated to include more options. The Brewers Association (BA) has identified four primary sources of waste at breweries – brewing, packaging, food service, and concerts and events – and two Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hierarchy charts, one for non-hazardous waste and another for food elimination, can help brewery owners prioritize the most ethical methods to divert and dispose of all that trash.

The EPA’s non-hazardous waste hierarchy directs producers to first reduce and reuse waste at its source. Remaining waste should be recycled or composted when possible then used for energy recovery. As a last resort, treated and thrown out.

According to the second chart, food handlers should, in the following order:

1. Reduce the volume of food generated
2. Feed people
3. Feed animals
4. Convert to it industrial uses
5. Compost
6. Landfill or incinerate

Specialty waste haulers abound to manage these channels – a solid first point of contact is your public works department or your garbage company, which may have branched into alternative disposal methods, particularly if your jurisdiction is one of the many that now limits what can go directly to the dump.

Step One: Reduce

Fossil Fuels

Wouldn’t it be cool to be the first brewer on your block to manage a fleet of vehicles powered by vegetable oil or corn?

Iowa’s transportation department has rolled out snow plows fueled by 100% biodiesel, made from soybeans or vegetable oil and able to reduce emissions by 50%. Such high concentrations of biofuel require minor diesel engine modifications but concentrations under 20% work without adjustments. The Iowa experiment proves that unlike in previous generations, advanced technologies and engine redesign are successfully allowing the fuel to stay in a liquid state in cold temperatures. You can contact the Alternative Fuel Foundation for references to suppliers, who may additionally buy your kitchen grease for conversion.

To keep things simpler, consider a battery electric vehicle (BEV) or a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). Manufacturers like Ford and Tesla have launched battery-operated and hybrid trucks, and Metalphoto of Cincinnati writes, “Given the major investments committed by leading manufacturers, we are likely to see a major increase in electric trucks on our roadways in the near future.”

You may be able to receive a $7,500 tax credit on your personal income taxes when you buy a new, qualified plug-in electric vehicle or fuel cell electric vehicle for yourself or your business. Further, some analysts say it’s even easier to take advantage of a business tax credit of up to $40,000 to purchase an EV specifically for your brewery because unlike the consumer credit, the commercial credit doesn’t come with income restrictions.

Be sure to install an EV charging station in your parking lot, along with car- and bike-share docks and bike racks to encourage non gas-guzzling forms of transportation.

Bags and Bottles

Make your regulars feel special with a specially designed non-disposable bag they can use to take home bought beer or merch. Cut down further on plastic by giving all shoppers a differently branded reusable bag and reward them with discounts or exclusive shopping hours for
reusing it.

A water bottle carrying your logo – sold in your shop and at events – can serve a similar function as a branded bag. Discourage disposables by offering an incentive to customers who bring yours to your brewery.

Drinking and Dining Utensils

Minimize plastic water bottles at events by presenting a prize to those who bring a reusable drinking vessel, branded or not, then be sure to have plenty of water stations or even a water truck on hand for refills. For sales of water, secure a supplier who stocks reusable cups and/or compostable bottles. Bonus points for loading your events with biodegradable plates and cutlery, and don’t forget to set up an info table to educate attendees on your efforts.

You don’t have to wait for an event to display your biodegradables. Replace them for paper plates, plastic utensils and styrofoam containers in your pickup food orders, and use minimal single-use items like individual creamers, condiments and straws both to-go and dining in.

Step Two: Reuse

Feed Humans

Donating excess food to organizations that feed the hungry became easier with the federal Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act of 1996, which protects businesses and their officers from liability for donating food that meets some basic criteria. The Food Donation Connection matches donated restaurant food with groups accepting donations.

This solution couldn’t come soon enough. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, food waste is the main contributor to solid waste landfills, and when food decomposes it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which is often released directly into the atmosphere. Project Drawdown, known as a leader in climate solutions, reports that preventing food waste is the single most effective solution to prevent global warming of more than 2 degrees celsius.

Not only is food donation so much easier since the food act, the Upcycled Food Association has certified six dozen companies that upcycle food for new purposes, including ReGrained, which exclusively “rescues” spent beer grains. According to Merriam Webster, to upcycle means, “To recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item,” and when it comes to breweries, that can mean more than turning spent grains into pizza dough.

At Great Lakes Brewing in Cleveland, short pours gain new life as mustard, barbeque sauce or ice cream made by collaborative food producers.

“We’ve partnered with Mitchell’s Ice Cream to make ice creams out of our Porter and our Christmas Ale, called Edmund Fitzgerald Porter Chocolate Chunk, and Christmas Ale Gingersnap,” sustainability manager Saul Kliorys told CraftBeer.com. “They’re really good.”

Feed Animals

You might not know that with permission, table scraps can get tossed in with the spent grain you supply a farmer to feed livestock in what’s considered a win-win way for brewers to get rid of their nutrient-rich used barley.

As long as your farmer and jurisdiction say ok, you can also mix your used yeast into that grain as
a feed additive. Not only does brewers yeast contain 40% protein, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service led a study that found post-fermentation saccharomyces cerevisiae reduces the amount of methane cows belch into the atmosphere. The researchers discovered the greater the concentration of hops the yeast absorbed during fermentation the more methane it curbed – around 25%, on average.

This symbiotic grain-feed solution can work superbly, especially if, like Broad Street Brewing outside Philadelphia, your brewery sits on a “micro cattle ranch” that houses the Jericho Mountain Beef Company. Or if, like Alpha Michigan Brewing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, you produce so little leftover grain that a resident of your tiny town – reported population 145 – bakes it into dog treats for fun and the kids from the Youth Livestock Market Association pick it up and feed it to their pigs.

Downstream cooperation with the agriculture sector does have its challenges - for brewers and farmers. Thibodeau thought it would be cool to put Ska’s used grain silo in the beer garden so patrons could watch the brewery’s farming partner collect it.

Unfortunately, he discovered, “It’s really not that safe and it’s kind of a mess sometimes and there’s always a possibility he could show up at the least opportune time.”

And it can cost a farmer countless hours and energy each day to pick up hundreds of pounds of soggy grain at an agreed-upon time, calculate the appropriate amount to feed each animal, then wash out the barrels by hand.

“It’s turned out to be a blessing and a curse,” Montana farmer John Stahl told AGDAILY.

Luckily, companies like Against the Grain in Boston have emerged to run collection routes between donor breweries and recipient farms to relieve farmers of the responsibility and ensure quick, clean, quiet – and on-time – pickups at the breweries.

“Our company’s secret sauce is managing those issues by ensuring that spent grains are regularly and reliably picked up and delivered to farmers on their schedule and in precisely the quantity they need,” founder Holden Cookson said in a statement.

Instead of giving your grain to farms, you can connect with soil and water districts, environmental conservation departments, farm bureaus, or universities that might seek out spent grain for scientific studies.

Step Three: Recycle

Turn Waste Into Energy

If you have packaged organic material you can’t use because it expired, for example, a company like Boston-based Vanguard Renewables collects, depackages and processes it into biogas in anaerobic digesters that only the most flush craft breweries can afford on their own.

Servicing a client roster that includes Tree House and Sloop, Vanguard makes and sells gas out of solids: unwanted beer, food, kitchen oil and grease, process waste, and wash water from breweries and cideries in New York and New England.

As it works to bring an anticipated 150 digesters online nationwide by 2026, Vanguard currently offers multi-faceted organic recycling options to breweries around the country by connecting them with the highest-value recycling services. Other similar services may be available - check local options and proceed as feasible.

Compost Organics

Thibodeau is applying a similar collaborative approach to diverting food waste by partnering with some friends to recently open what he calls a “table to farm” composting facility in Durango where he anticipates taking 2 million pounds of spent grains, yeast and trub annually once the program matures.

Under the existing arrangement, Thibodeau drives the waste, which he’s nicknamed “SKA-mpost,” to the site himself and leaves it for free, while the facility profits by selling the compost in bulk to landscapers and nurseries.

“We don’t currently make any money off of that; we’re just happy to let those dollars recirculate locally, and the safety and convenience is worth it to us,” he says.

Ska did win a $200,000 state grant to cover °C of the cost to buy a closed 4,000 gallon truck to drive the SKA-mpost and a new spent grain silo to store it in.

He recommends that smaller breweries that don’t have access to collaborative or municipal curbside composting should apply for readily available $5,000 and below grants to help offset the cost of their own composting programs.

The best method for DIY composting varies by brewery (warning, options include worms and manual labor) but the Brewers Association recommends an enclosed composter that costs between several hundred and several thousand dollars.

The finished compost material can either be used to augment soil on the brewery’s property or shared with a gardening co-op. Great Lakes helped build an urban farm using soil fertilized with spent grain compost and went so far as to experiment with a commercial mushroom breeder to assess the viability of using it to grow mushrooms.

Recycle Inorganics

Eco-aware breweries can bring back “clean-stream” recycling by placing color-coded and descriptive sorting bins in a warehouse, the kitchen, and all dining areas, including public ones. Bring in a rep from the recycling company to train workers on the importance of cleaning before tossing and why, yes, they do need to separate all seven different types of plastic. You may unearth cost savings or higher returns from doing this.

Implement a voluntary bottle-return policy – with incentives, of course – and post signs around public drinking and dining areas to explain your return and recycle systems.

“The benefits of doing things for the earth – sometimes business owners will look past that but it’s marketable,” says Thibodeau, whose recycling company showed him how to set up single stream collections for plastic, paper, cardboard, glass, and steel/aluminum. “If your customer knows you’re doing your part, that’s your bottom line.”

Some recyclers offer rebates, pay more for or only accept baled or huge quantities of cardboard, shrink wrap and polypropylene grain bags. However, a baler can be an out-of-reach expense for a small brewery that may not even generate enough for their local company to accept.

Enter the co-op recycling model, one pioneered by Great Divide Brewing in Denver and copied by Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo. Since 2018, both breweries have used sizable public grants to purchase balers and invited neighboring breweries to drop off their qualifying bags and boxes.

In 2018, the program helped Great Divide reach a 99% diversion rate and receive numerous awards. “We estimate that we use 2,000 lbs of polypropylene grain bags a month, and all of this was going to the dump,” says former sustainability coordinator Erin Cox. “We realized if we were struggling with recycling these items, then surely our neighboring breweries were also having the same issue.”

“Every generation seems to understand how hastily we’re running out of time for the environment and how important it is to be a steward,” says Thibodeau. “We’re not too far away from the day from the day it’s nothing less than expected.”