Start-ups of craft brew boom lead the way
By Dave Burdick and Kenan Davis
Scott Vaccaro’s mom has spent some time inside an 800-gallon oak wine barrel. The barrel, some 15 feet tall, came from California’s Napa Valley, where it was used to age wine. Now it’s standing upright in the Pleasantville, N.Y., warehouse space rented by the Captain Lawrence Brewing Company Co. Vaccaro plans to fill it with beer, which he’ll age in the barrel so it takes on oaky flavors – and the flavors of the wine that was aged in the same barrel years ago.
It’s the scenic route to sustainability. Vaccaro and craft brewers like him tend to act in ways that are somewhat good for the environment, not necessarily because it’s earth-friendly, but because it’s wallet-friendly and taste-friendly. Reusing the cask is one thing. But it’d be another thing to follow in the footsteps of craft brew giants like Sierra Nevada and New Belgium, which have spent huge amounts of money on their own sustainability efforts.
Vaccaro, 29, started Captain Lawrence in 2006. His mom, like his dad, puts some pro bono labor into the brewery on the weekends, and one of her most recent tasks was to clean the inside of the wine cask. It’s a behemoth.
When he’s getting fancy, Vaccaro usually brews in normal wine casks, around 30 gallons each, producing small-batch brews he calls Smoke From the Oak. Among beer aficionados in New York City, they’re highly respected and sought-after. He has aged beers in bourbon casks and rum casks, and he has used discarded red wine barrels from a winery down the street from his rented brewery space. It’s a habit he picked up as a home brewer.
But this particular barrel is the one he has been chasing. “For years, I’ve been trying to get one of those things,” he said. Finally, he has the space. It wouldn’t work for home brewers, because few have high enough ceilings, and most probably don’t have doors wide enough even to drag the thing in on its side. Even with this barrel – whose interior could probably be rented out as a New York City studio apartment for close to a grand a month – and even with a warehouse big enough to hold it, Vaccaro isn’t totally satisfied with his brewery’s digs.
“I wish I did my floor drains differently,” he said. “I wish I had a building I could drive a truck into, and I wish I had a building with taller ceilings.”
To start a brewery, he needed space. To grow a brewery, he needs more space. It has to be a very specific space – a brewery requires tall ceilings for vats, fermenters and boilers. There must be good drainage in the floors to catch spills and runoff from the sometimes messy brewing process. Then, if there’s time and money, you can think about solar panels and engineering to reuse water and manage waste. Overall, though, infrastructure and a building are the things that often keep start-up brewmasters awake at night.
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Essentially, creativity takes start-up money. In the form of creative sustainable practices, creative brewing – like Smoke from the Oak – takes dollars. Sustainable in this case means reducing energy use, water use and pollution for the sake of the environment – though the environment is rarely the only benefactor. And those dollars for sustainability are available only after the basics are covered.
“The largest expense is the ingredients, raw materials,” Vaccaro said. “The price of our hops went up 400 percent, 500 percent. I mean, it went up from $3 a pound to $15 a pound. Malt prices went up 60 percent.” But the cost of raw materials isn’t a real problem for him—he’s just glad that the biggest cost isn’t rent anymore.
Captain Lawrence pays the bills now, he said, and pays its four full-time employees, but he’s not paying himself much. And he’s not able to pay much attention to things like cleverly-engineered sustainable techniques.
“For someone of our size that’s just trying to scrape by, sustainability is unfortunately the last thing on our mind,” Vaccaro said. “I mean, it would have been great to have solar panels for heating the hot water, it would have been great to use wastewater treatment to capture some of the methane gas to burn in the boiler, but it’s a lot tougher when you’re building out inside someone else’s building.”