Successful, bigger craft brewers that started early in the craft-brew boom of the ’90s have the advantage of capital. The Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. has led the way in sustainability, with environmentally-friendly practices that are some of the best in its home state of California.
Sierra Nevada generates much of its own electricity. According to Cheri Chastain, the brewery’s sustainability coordinator, it has solar panels providing covered parking for customers and more solar on the way atop warehouses, totaling about a megawatt and a half of solar production. It’s not easy to accurately portray how much energy a megawatt is, but consider this:
Add the solar-generated energy to Sierra Nevada’s fuel cells that draw power from natural gas as well as methane produced in microbiotic water treatment plants, and Chastain says Sierra Nevada has enough electricity to power its whole operation. They might even be able to sell energy to the electric company.
But it’s not just sheer production of energy that makes that possible.
“We can produce all the green energy in the world, but if we don’t use it efficiently, the point has been defeated,” Chastain said.
The New Belgium Brewing Company Co. in Fort Collins, Colo., is the other tower of well-publicized sustainability in brewing. New Belgium’s media director, Bryan Simpson, said it shouldn’t be surprising that many breweries take similar first steps into sustainability, like reusing the spent grain.
“The beer industry is kind of cool that way,” Simpson said. “It’s a lot of progressives, and it’s an agricultural industry.” But New Belgium, like Sierra Nevada, goes much further. A lot of its sustainable practices are implemented outside of the brewing process.
Doors in the bottling facility are made of wood from trees felled by pine beetles during an epidemic in Colorado’s natural forests. Employees receive a bicycle on their one-year anniversary of work at the brewery and are encouraged to ride to work. Little artificial light is used in the brewhouses, thanks to clever architecture that takes advantage of Colorado’s sunshine. Then there’s xeriscaping – landscaping aimed at requiring little or no additional irrigation through using appropriate local plants and taking care to utilize and minimize water runoff.
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Vaccaro cuts costs by not paying his parents. It’s a different scale. Sierra Nevada produces over 600,000 barrels of beer annually. Vaccaro said he made 2,200 last year. What he can accomplish on sustainability is vastly different from what they can accomplish.
Suzanne Maloney, executive director of the Environmental Business Association of New York State, said that while it’s expensive to find a building and make it work in a sustainable way, there are grants and loans waiting for businesses willing to comply with New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s energy-smart benchmarks.
“If somebody came to downtown Albany and said, ‘I want to retrofit this building to NYSERDA standards,’ they would love, relish, welcome the opportunity,” she said. Failing that, she said, breweries could do well to take stock of what they’re already doing and maximize or market it.
For example, many breweries donate or sell discarded grain from the brewing process to farmers to use as feed for animals. Captain Lawrence does this, donating to a local farmer who picks up the otherwise wasted grain at no cost – and the farmer pays for the grain in beef, Vaccaro said. “We feed his cows and then they feed us. It’s the circle of life.”
The barter makes sense to him, makes sense to Maloney. “It’s considered good business practice, not environmental,” Maloney said.
Vaccaro said that he’d like for Captain Lawrence to move out of its rental space eventually and have the opportunity to adopt more sustainable practices. “It’s the smart thing to do,” he said. “In the long run, you’re saving a lot of money.”
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Chris O’Brien, author of Fermenting Revolution and self-proclaimed “beer activist,” said that sustainability isn’t prohibitively expensive.
“This is where most small brewers already have this coded into their genes,” he said. “They know just from practical experience. They already lean toward buying stuff that’s reused, limiting purchase of new equipment just because they’re looking to save money. But doing all of that has a positive environmental impact.”
He also said that other measures, like fixing leaks, keeping equipment properly maintained and even adding assets like steam-recapturing mechanisms that save water and energy might sting the pocketbook in the short term. “It does take a little bit of capital investment, but it pays off quickly,” he said. “If you want your company to be around in 100 years and still have customers, you should invest in sustainability today.”