Sustainable Tips for Craft Breweries

When you think craft beer (besides thinking “OMG! SO GOOD!”), you may also be thinking “sustainability”. Sustainability is a theme often linked to craft breweries. Sourcing local ingredients and supplying local enthusiasts in and of themselves are sustainable actions. Here’s a few other ideas compiled from many brewers. Maybe some of these will improve YOUR sustainability:

Changing the way you deal with waste can lessen environmental impact and cut costs. Can you:

• Repurpose spent grains through local farms that use the grains as feed?
• Donates spent grains to a dog or cat food.biscuit bakeries that uses the grain in their treats?
• Usedspent grains in kitchens as ingredients in baked bread?
• Use spent grain to form eco-friendy can ring-holders?
• Compost spent grains to make a nutrient-rich fertilizer?
• Use a biomass steam boiler fueled by spent grain to significantly reducing fuel use and costs?

Now we’ll change our focus to sustainable water usage. Can you:

• Capture rain water?
• Capture and reuse process water? This water has been proven to help make parts needed for lithium batteries in cell phones.
• Anything else that can reduce the number of gallons of water used per gallon of brew?

Lastly, some brewers have even developed ways to capture the heat generated during the brewing process to generate hot water, and even power to off-set other energy use.

Thanks to craft brewers for being leaders in the field of sustainability. We can’t wait to see what else these innovative people come up with next! Tell us about what you’ve done to improve sustainability in your neck of the world.