Many Boulder County craft-beer drinkers are familiar with the four main ingredients of their delicious drink of choice: Barley, water, hops and yeast.
But there are other, often invisible ingredients that go into every barrel.
Electricity, natural gas, wastewater, shrink wrap, grain bags and other materials aren’t as obvious, but are just as necessary for creating the diverse array of craft beer Boulder County consumers have come to love.
From sours to imperial stouts, the recipes and steps vary for each individual beer, but the overall process is much the same — and it’s very energy and resource intensive.
Though sustainability isn’t a new concept for Boulder County breweries or others around the country, the amount of energy and resources being used in craft beer production has come into sharper focus in recent years.
The Brewers Association, a Boulder-based organization representing more than 9,000 breweries, suppliers, retailers, wholesalers and individuals, recently launched a new initiative to help breweries track their energy use over time.
The initiative includes a benchmarking tool that is designed to allow breweries to track their own progress year-over-year, and to compare their operations to other similarly sized breweries.
Breweries who participate can log in to a personalized dashboard to view metrics for electricity, fuel, spent grain, water, wastewater, waste disposal and recycling.
Since 2012, the number of breweries springing up across the country has nearly doubled. While the boom may be slowing down slightly in 2017, that exponential growth means craft beer is using more water, more electricity and more materials than ever before.
With the number of U.S. breweries at an all-time high of 5,301, every environmentally friendly improvement adds up, says Chuck Skypeck, technical brewing projects manager for the Brewers Association.
“What we preach is, ‘Just get better,'” said Skypeck. “Everybody can make a difference.”
The association first established a sustainability subcommittee in 2013. Along with the sustainability benchmarking tool, which started as a pilot project with a handful of breweries in 2014 and launched fully in 2015, the Brewers Association has also produced five manuals that breweries can use to help inform their sustainability efforts.
“We were hearing from our members that this was a priority for them, for us to help them and provide them resources in this area,” Skypeck said.
Of course, not all breweries are the same size and not everyone is going to be able to make the same investments in sustainability — and that’s OK, he said.
“If you’re a small brewer, you can’t afford a solar array on top of your brewery — it’s just not practical,” Skypeck said. “But anybody’s efforts, whether it’s replacing a compressor with a new, more energy-efficient compressor or putting in LED lighting everywhere, that makes a difference. There’s lots of things you can do as a small brewer to make your operation more efficient.”
While research has found that consumers — particularly millennials — have made sustainability a priority when they shop, they’re not the main driver behind the renewed focus on sustainability among craft brewers.
Primarily, being sustainable also means being more efficient — which translates into saving money.
“That feel-good part of sustainability, about being a good community partner, that’s important,” Skypeck said. “But sustainability is also about operating your business effectively and the bottom line.”
Below is a sampling of what five Boulder County breweries are doing to make their beers — and their businesses — more sustainable.
1. Avery Brewing
When Avery Brewing constructed its new 67,000-square-foot facility in northeast Boulder, the company integrated sustainability measures into the building design. The brewery had outgrown its 25,000-square-foot facility in east Boulder, where it had been located for 22 years.
“The old facilities were commercial spaces that were never built with the brewing infrastructure in mind,” said Bernardo Alatorre, production manager for Avery Brewing. “Anything from drains to water supply to the placement of things for ventilation. It did take a toll. When the move happened, all of those things were taken into consideration to make them part of the design criteria. The new facility was born with sustainability in mind.”
Alatorre, who worked for MillerCoors for 15 years before coming to Avery, said that running a top-of-the-line brewery generally also means running a sustainable one.
“We recognize that basing our processes on environmentally friendly platforms does have clear and succinct economic benefits — not the other way around,” Alatorre said. “We’re not looking at the economic benefits first. That is one of the paradigms that we live by.
Avery, for example, began trying to concentrate as much of its production work as possible onto weekdays. This reduces the number of times energy-intensive machinery has to be powered up and powered down, which also saves Avery money.
“This is the first summer the company has ever had that. We didn’t have a single weekend day of work — and that saves a lot of energy,” he said. “You shut down your motors, lighting, ventilation, heating — all of that reduces the footprint.”
Alatorre said one of the initiatives the company is most proud of is its partnership with the city of Boulder to reduce nitrates in the city’s water supply. The brewery sends the city thousands of gallons of weak wort, a sugar-water byproduct created during the brewing process.
Because many of Avery’s beers have a high alcohol content, the brewery’s weak wort also contains high concentrations of sugar. Instead of dumping that byproduct down the drain, the brewery and the city have found a way to make it useful.
The sugar-water serves, in essence, as food for the bacteria that Boulder’s Wastewater Treatment Facility uses to break down nitrogen.
“We are very conscious about living, basically, the ethos of Boulder and we really wanted to be stewards of the environment and work with the city of Boulder in order to be a partner,” Alatorre said.
2. Left Hand Brewing
That ethos of sustainability extends into Longmont, too, where Left Hand Brewing was founded in 1993.
“For us, being conscious of our effect on the environment has always been common sense,” said Adam Lawrence, lead brewer for Left Hand Brewing. “We have a wonderful view of the mountains from our brewery and we are located right along the St. Vrain Creek. These are constant reminders of the environmental beauty that we strive to conserve.”
Lawrence has a degree in environment studies, so as lead brewer, he views every operational decision through that lens.
Left Hand’s sustainability committee — also known as the “green team” — was formed more than 10 years ago by Eric Wallace, Left Hand’s founder and CEO. The group, which is made up of employees from every department, meets to discuss new ideas, conduct feasibility studies and consider the return-on-investment for specific projects.
“The green team members’ roles are to look for inefficiencies within their department, be the ‘owners’ of their waste stream stations and to convey other employees’ concerns or ideas to the green team,” Lawrence said.
Left Hand focuses heavily on metrics, reviewing its usage rates for water, natural gas, electricity and wastewater every month. The team also studies the data of other similarly sized breweries using Brewers Association database, and sets realistic goals based on how much beer the brewery will be producing each month and ambient temperature, which can affect the brewery’s efficiency.
The brewery posts its resource usage rates every month for all employees to see. If the brewery misses any of its targets, it becomes a team challenge to figure out why.
“Most of this process is about communication, when our employees see that using too much water is a real issue that is being dealt with, it motivates a much more conscious effort to reduce usage,” Lawrence said.
Since Left Hand began recording data in 2012, the brewery has decreased its electricity usage per barrel of beer by 16.6 percent. It’s also reduced natural gas usage per barrel by 7 percent and water usage per barrel by 11.2 percent.
The brewery has also seen cost savings based on its resource usage goals. Beyond long-term savings, Left Hand tries to take advantage of rebates and tweaks that offer short-term savings too, such as LED light retrofitting and water recapture projects.
“I believe we should first have respect for our environment, and then look at how our business could benefit from investing in sustainable projects, and often there will be a benefit,” Lawrence said. “Our green team also closely analyzes the financial impact of possible projects and we are very aware of how being 10 percent more efficient will contribute to a significant decrease in operating expense.”
3. Upslope Brewing Company
Upslope Brewing Company began tracking resource metrics using the Brewers Association benchmarking tool last year and is adding flow meters to better track water usage at every point in the brewing process. Last year, the brewery also added a full-time sustainability position, a role that is now shared by two people, Lizzy Waters and Dillon Clayton.
As they ramp up data collection, Waters and Clayton said they also want to embed sustainability more deeply into the daily responsibilities and goals of all Upslope employees.
“In an ideal world, every person’s job would have an element of sustainability within it,” Waters said.
As it has grown in size, Upslope has increasingly focused on hard-to-recycle materials, or materials that cannot be included in a single-stream recycling system — things like shrink wrap, plastic bags, aluminum cans, scrap metal, grain bags.
Upslope is also encouraging its customers to return their plastic six-pack holders to the brewery, which will send them back to the manufacturing company for reuse.
“We’ve enabled ourselves to remove a huge amount of waste from the trash,” Clayton said.
The brewery has also been emphasizing sustainability at its largest annual events by partnering with groups such as Eco-Cycle and Leave No Trace. All vendors at Upslope’s largest events are required to use compostable dinnerware and utensils, and staff members or volunteers stand near the trash, recycling and compost stations to help event-goers sort their waste.
In May, Upslope hosted its annual “Get Down” music festival and was able to divert 98 percent of all waste from the landfill thanks to these efforts, Clayton said. The brewery next hopes to focus on waste diversion in its taproom and among the food trucks who regularly serve food to Upslope customers.
“The community is very willing to step up and do zero-waste if given the chance,” Clayton said. “What we have to work toward is making it easy on them.”
4. Asher Brewing
Though other breweries haven’t specifically used sustainability in their marketing efforts, one Boulder County brewery is making a name for itself with its organic ales: Asher Brewing.
The small brewery launched in 2009. A year later, Asher received organic certification from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making it the first all-organic brewery in the state.
While other breweries may use organic ingredients from time to time, Asher’s beers are all organic, all the time.They also strive to include local ingredients whenever possible.
“All of the malt that we bring in, all of our grains, our hopes, our yeast, as well as anything additional we put in the beer, we use only certified organic ingredients,” said Kate Dortenzo, taproom manager for Asher. “We have to provide the state with documentation for all of those things, proving that they’re organic. It’s a lot of work for us and definitely more expensive for us as a business, but we think it’s worth it.”
In addition, the brewery and taproom are wind-powered and lit by energy-efficient lighting. The brewery frequently hosts meetings and provides beer for farmer’s groups, and staffers use environmentally friendly cleaning products, Dortenzo added. Asher also encourages food vendors to use compostable utensils at the brewery.
Though the use of all organic materials limits the number of beers Asher has on tap, the brewery prides itself on quality over quantity.
“Most people will come in just noticing that we are a small craft brewery and then once they learn we’re organic, they’re really excited because it definitely is different,” Dortenzo said. “We like to pride ourselves on both—we are organic but we’re a craft establishment. If we hear either of those two reasons when someone comes in, we’re excited.”
5. Oskar Blues Brewery
Like many Boulder County breweries, sustainability was baked into Oskar Blues Brewery when it was founded in 1997. The company prides itself on being one of the first breweries to put craft beer into cans, which are easy to recycle, stack and fairly light, which means the company uses less fuel to transport its beer.
Oskar Blues has also opened breweries around the country to minimize its shipping footprint, according to Brian Shaeffer, brewery manager for the Longmont location.
“A reason why (sustainability) is important to us has a lot to do with our outdoor culture and living in Colorado — just trying to protect the environment we like to play in,” he said.
Brewing is a particularly water-intensive process, and since water is a valuable resource anyway, that’s one area Oskar Blues has honed in on. Water usage is also a highly visible reminder to staff that they have a role in making Oskar Blues more sustainable, too.
“You can watch it go down the drain,” Shaeffer said. “It’s hard to watch electricity flow through the building and see how you use that, but it’s pretty simple to see water. We’ve made some process changes and really tried to engage our staff and figure out ways for them to reduce water in their day-to-day jobs”
The brewery has tweaked its cleaning processes to conserve water, tuned its boiler to use less natural gas and began brewing in more concentrated 24-hour periods to reduce energy usage.
Last year, Oskar Blues switched from water to pressurized air to pre-rinse its cans.
“We run our canning line 20 hours a day, five days a week,” Shaeffer said. “Even what would seem like a small amount of pre-rinse water adds up over time.”
Oskar Blues also recently upgraded to LED lighting for the brewery
and reduced its natural gas usage per barrel of beer by 20 percent since 2011. It has reduced water usage by 29 percent over the same period, according to Shaeffer. Though electricity usage numbers have remained relatively constant over the years, the brewery has invested roughly $250,000 in energy-efficient equipment and lighting already this year.
Oskar Blues also uses the Brewers Association benchmarking tool, which Shaeffer says has been invaluable. Though each brewery is making unique decisions related to sustainability and efficiency, the entire industry seems to be moving forward together.
“The cool aspect of the craft brewing industry is that there’s a lot of people have my job in other breweries and everybody in the community likes to talk about it,” Shaeffer said.
