4 Tips for Improving Sustainability at a Brewery

4 Tips for Improving Sustainability at a Brewery

As our world faces challenges thanks to climate change and environmental degradation, all businesses must consider the best way to improve practices. Breweries can use a lot of energy and resources that contribute to these issues, but you can implement new policies to reduce your impact. Using these tips for improving sustainability at a brewery, you can do your part to keep our planet safe while brewing.

Accurately Track Resource Usage

One issue that many businesses face is that they don’t realize how much they’re wasting. Keeping a close eye on how many resources you use can expose gaps in your system where you aren’t being sustainable.

Maybe your water usage is far beyond the industry norm, or you’re creating much more trash than you should be. Tracking resource usage and waste creation allows you to analyze what you should change and the best way to go about it.

Adopt Water-Saving Cleaning Practices

Beer is mostly water, so breweries tend to use a lot of it. However, most breweries also use a lot of water in their cleaning processes to keep things sanitary. A sanitary brewery is crucial, but there are cleaning strategies that can drastically reduce water consumption.

Just by adopting policies that prevent spillage, you can significantly reduce the amount of water you use to wash floors and equipment. Additionally, some breweries use purified municipal wastewater to cut down on overall water waste.

Another cleaning strategy is to use a Pump Cart to transfer water and cleaning solutions to other dirty equipment in the brew house. This helps reduce overall water consumption and drastically decreases the need for expensive cleaning solutions.

Use Sustainably Produced Ingredients

One simple tip for improving sustainability in breweries is to use ingredients from sustainable farms. Organic farms dedicated to sustainability will be the best places to go for ingredients such as barley and hops, which are both plants that require a lot of water to grow properly.

The cost for sustainably grown ingredients may be higher, but the quality is often much better. And you’re protecting our planet at the same time, something that is invaluable in the long run.

Start Circular Business Practices

Circular business practices are those that reuse resources as much as possible before they can’t be used anymore. A common example is to use leftover barley grains as animal feed for local farmers.

What would otherwise be a total waste can instead be donated to a local farmer to produce more resources in a sustainable way. Repitching yeast as much as possible by using yeast brink kegs also helps to reduce the demand for more yeast.

If you’re dedicated to making your brewery a force for good in the fight against environmental collapse, Craftmaster Stainless is right there with you. Our equipment can get you started on the best path forward.

Sarah Caples