There are many ways to think about sustainability when it comes to breweries. The word can mean different things to different people and have different applications regarding a business ethos. For some perspective All About Beer editor and ProBrewer contributor John Holl spoke with Andy Hooper, previously Director of Operations at Anderson Valley Brewing Company in Booneville, California, brewmaster at Seismic Brewing Company in Santa Rosa, California and now in charge of business development for Barnum Mechanical.
John Holl: When it comes to the brewing industry, sustainability seems to be a word that gets thrown around a lot in a lot of different ways, putting your brewer hat back on when you hear that word, where does your mind go?
Andy Hooper: A lot of different ways. Honestly, sustainability can be distilled down to minimizing negative impacts and adding value. What that means is where you can take a process like brewing beer, which is potentially hard on the brewers, and it’s hard on resources, water, electricity, fuel. It can potentially be hard on the environment because of the carbon that’s generated by it, or because waste streams that are generated by it. Then finding a way logically to reduce that impact so that you’re still producing beer of excellent quality. You’re also positively impacting the environmental, social and financial aspects of brewing beer at the same time.
John Holl: So with that definition in mind is there a clear path, or is there things you would encourage other brewers to be thinking about if they want to start on that journey, if they want to start acting in that responsible way.
Andy Hooper: I think there the topical thing that people hear when they hear the word sustainability, it’s maybe more environmentalism and things like that. But in my mind, sustainability is actually in alignment with good business practices.
So if someone is a brewer or they own a brewery, sustainability is often directly in alignment with what you’re trying to achieve by improving your business anyway, you’re reducing costs, you’re increasing safety, all of those things are perfectly aligned with sustainability. They should never be in conflict.
Some people might even say, sustainability costs too much and certainly sure, there are some sustainability initiatives that may be capital intensive. Maybe you have to buy really expensive new equipment to see efficiencies, or you’re staring down the barrel of having to purchase a solar panel or something. So in that regard, yes sustainability could have a price tag associated with it.
But in other cases, sustainability is just about business planning and process engineering. So looking at places where you can reduce the usage of resources. Looking at your water consumption and identifying ways to reduce that, or looking at ways to reuse certain resources within the brewery, whether that’s CIP chemicals that can be reclaimed and reused again or CO2 to capture which may sound expensive, but given the price of CO2 at the moment, maybe it’s a smart business decision that secures your supply of a critical resource, lowers your cost over time, and saves money, in addition to being environmentally sustainable.
To me that’s a triple threat. You find those things that affect your triple bottom line – people, planet, prosperity – meaning that a sustainable, truly, fully sustainable initiative would address all three things so it would improve the lives of the consumer or your employees. It would be good for the environment, and it would also have a positive fiscal impact for your company.
John Holl: These can have a long-term impact, right?
Andy Hooper: There are some initiatives that may have a longer-term payback you may not see a direct result. In the current environment with beer, where things are volatile, and people are having to pivot a lot. It may be hard to think about a 20-year play, but certainly some of them are about longer term turnarounds.
John Holl: A lot of the time people were talking about sustainability almost solely in terms of the environment and the lessening impact of industry. And I like that that you’ve broadened it out a little bit more from that. Do you feel like sometimes people get hamstrung on just maybe the, buzzword definition?
Andy Hooper: There’s a there’s a community aspect to it as well. Especially given the big rise of craft beer through the big boom of 2014 at the peak of craft beer. It was all about distribution over long distances and trying to grow market share and everything. But if you bring the conversation back to the origins of craft beer, it’s more about community based.
Brewing local, serving a local community, and where possible, using localized ingredients, because you’re trying to focus those dollars back into your own community. In the past, my message to to our consumers at the places that I worked, such as Anderson Valley and Seismic, the message was you’re think globally and drink locally.
Because the beer that we’re producing is made from local ingredients, or we, as the stewards of the beer, we’re taking that extra effort to make sure that we have sourced quality ingredients, but we’ve done so locally. You know, we’re not bringing raw materials from all over the globe unnecessarily. And we’re also mindful of our waste streams.
There’s also programs where you can purchase your electricity in more conscious ways. So you can, potentially, as a brewer, purchase your electricity from suppliers that only generate that electricity in a renewable manner. And that becomes a central point of your marketing story for your beer, and hopefully that resonates with your consumers.
John Holl: That’s a good point. When you are operating in a respectful manner, or thinking about your larger impact, that should be breeding goodwill as well, right?
Andy Hooper: It definitely takes community effort to generate a pint of beer. If you think about what goes into generating the raw materials, the hops and the barley, and then malting that barley and everything else is quite a journey that it has to take. So one of the joys of making an environment environmentally sustainable beer is building those social relationships.
John Holl: What do you think is the biggest challenge with sustainability and brewing?
Andy Hooper: The challenge is not with the technology or with the operations. That’s all attainable. In my perspective, the biggest challenge in brewing and sustainability is convincing the consumer that it matters, because eventually what you need to do is get a beer into somebody’s hands who will understand and appreciate and be willing to make a beer selection based on that storytelling that you’re doing.
If ultimately we don’t do this storytelling to the consumer to convince them that sustainability initiatives are important to beer, it’s important to community, and it’s important to quality, then they won’t understand if there’s a price delta or they won’t understand the effort that the brewer has put forth to create that product.