EPISODE S.3, E.7

[SAVE THE EARTH: IT’S THE ONLY PLANET WITH BEER]

[00:00:00] ZG: Welcome to The BrewDeck Podcast. We are here with Christian Ettinger from Hopworks and Portland, Oregon. How are you doing, Christian?
[00:00:07] CE: Great. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
[00:00:09] ZG: We are also here with John Egan. John, how are you doing?
[00:00:13] JE: I am doing great today, Zach. Thank you so much.
[00:00:17] ZG: How’s it there in sunny Southern California?
[00:00:20] JE: It’s a pretty nice day. It’s slightly hazy, about 63 degrees, a little breezy, I can’t complain. A little different from where you guys are at, I imagine. Is there still snow on the ground?
[00:00:34] CE: It was just snowing. I was up in the Vancouver plant. This is Christian. The snow was just whipping a minute ago, and now it’s cleared up a little bit. We are in the middle of a winter storm here in our area.
[00:00:47] ZG: Yeah, in early April. Christian, thanks for coming on. Do you want to give a little background about how you ended up in Hopworks? Your background in the brewing industry?
[00:00:54] CE: I’m 48 years old and had been poking it at life and beer since I was about 16, working at Lamb’s Thriftway loading the beer shelf when the best things you can get are Killian’s Irish Red, Henry’s Ale, and of course, Winter Fest was a highlight. Working from the grocery side up, I started homebrewing when I was 18. I was young for my grade, so I started home brewing the first summer back in college. When I was 19, I moved to Cologne, Germany as an exchange student through an exchange program. Morehouse College had a partnership.
I moved to Cologne for three months and traveled for a month. I was 19 and just unleashed in Europe. All I did was tour castles, the […], and dragged my friends to breweries. Most days after school or on the weekends, we’d bop down to Munich. We’d go over to Berlin. The first weekend out of the program, I went over to Prague, and I specifically remember, at 19, having a guy with a grocery cart outside the train car selling me an ice-cold half-liter of Pilsener […].
[00:02:00] ZG: That Pilsener […] was, let me guess, 35¢–50¢ probably?
[00:02:05] CE: Yeah, I think. With the exchange, I had no idea. He was drunk, and I was ecstatic, and away it went. At 19, I cut my teeth over there. I came back to the U.S. and worked with a business school, the University of Oregon, to design an internship program. I got five college credits at U of O for a brewery internship with Oregon Fields Brewery in my senior year. I knew early on this was what I wanted to do and worked towards doing something like Hopworks.
We have 14 years in the Hopworks, culminating all of that passion, travel, and ideas. I worked for others for 12 years, put my head down, and learned from the successes and policies of several different operators that taught me a lot. I tried to roll that up into my projects set for a little more success than the average […], and we are 14 years into Hopworks, the magnum opus. My wife and I are the only shareholders. We’re enjoying the ride trying to be a brewery that’s a force for good, a B Corp, and just sustainably rooted. That’s a little bit of the backstory.
I worked in Eugene as the head brewer for Eugene Savory and Beachport Brewery. I worked for Old World and Laurelwood. I was working at Laurelwood when I probably met you in Southern California at one of those San Diego CBCs. I just had an enjoyable time seeing a bunch of different perspectives, traveling a lot, and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
[00:03:37] ZG: That’s great. From your experience in Germany, did you fall in love with any particular styles or processes that you’ve tried to bring forward and bring into Hopsworks?
[00:03:47] CE: I think the exciting thing was that the Germans were high on quality but dull and late to the game on variety. Initially, the opposite was confirmed in the northwest. High in variety, and the quality was a little bit crude with the early McMenamins type of stuff, giving people an idea of what to get into. The original half in Red Hook with butterbeer and all that stuff.
Trying to smash these worlds together was a fun challenge. Of course, being from Cologne, I loved Kölsch beer. I was honestly enamored with the German brewing culture and how the town gravitated towards the pubs as the fundamental social center of the village. That was a big takeaway as much as quality.
I was like, holy cow, every one of these communities loves their local brewery. They support them, and they hate the brewery in the next village. It’s just this odd loyalty that you develop over time, the deep history, and I wanted to bring the quality and some of that community-mindedness back. Still, I also wanted to work on the variety and celebrate the ingredients and the cavalier attitude of the Pacific Northwest.
[00:05:10] ZG: Absolutely. Do you feel that interest in the community, wanting to be a part of it, and getting back to it drove you towards sustainability?
[00:05:19] CE: I think yeah. The Germans were efficient. Anytime the cost of materials and ingredients is high, you’re going to be efficient by default. You saw as the gas prices are hiking right now. When they hiked in ’08, everybody went back to sedans, wagons, SUVs got smaller, gas prices fell, SUVs are back on the road, and now they’re rising again.
In Germany, fuel, real estate, construction ingredients, everything’s been super expensive for a while, so they’ve been just efficient by necessity. I think that’s a big thing. My dad, both his parents, were from Germany. He got that real kind of detail-oriented outlook and that kind of discipline. I got that, and then I kind of got this hippie thing because I was born in San Francisco, and my parents kind of turned into hippies too.
I kind of come at it from, hey, I want to do this the right way just on a quality level and by design and engineering, but I also get a sense that it’s bigger than ourselves. There’s a community aspect that you need to celebrate, not only by being a good steward of the planet, but you need to get back.
[00:06:31] ZG: Absolutely. I don’t think I could have said it better. It really sounds like it’s a marriage of that kind of German sensibilities, but then also the West Coast. I have a similar story of being from California and caring about the environment from an early age and how that has presented itself into beer. You did mention that you’re a B Corp business as well. Do you have a little insight into what that means?
[00:06:54] CE: Yeah, the B Corp is our North Star. I think we’ve been B Corp now since 2015, and we’ve had three recertifications. They went from biannual recertification to a triannual, so every three years now. We just recertified. We had three scores to look at, if you will. We’ve tried on a bunch of different certifications over time, from 1% For the Planet. I’m big into Salmon-Safe, and that’s important as well. The B Corp was really the only thing that was totally comprehensive and really understood and enforced honest conversations about people, the planet, and profit.
Whereas let’s say 1% would have been an honest conversation about the planet. I really ignored the people thing by design because they didn’t want to take on too much. The profit side, the governance, and how do we have a third party? How are we partnering with the community? How are we looking at JEDI work—justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, all these things?
The B Corp thing is the only certification that covers it all. It’s super rigorous, but in its rigor, it really shines the light on your successes. We were really very successful in dealing with environmental issues, but it really highlighted our opportunities as well to work towards better workplace benefits and better partnerships with our community too. We’re good, but not great. The score just immediately highlighted what to do.
In addition to working on the benchmarking study with the Brewers Association on the utility side, this is like a comprehensive snapshot of every aspect of your business that you should be concerned with. Most companies end up just being in survival mode where they have too many stakeholders, and they’re trying to be profitable, and they’re putting that above all else only in that they need to, but potentially ignoring some very important environmental and social aspects. Those gardens need to be tended simultaneously with profitability.
[00:08:57] ZG: Was there another brewery that you used as a model when you were thinking about B Corp? How did you land on that? Is it like trial and error working with the other kind of sustainably focused initiatives?
[00:09:14] CE: For a long time, we did two collaborations with New Belgium Brewery, and what an awesome company. What Kim and the team have done over there is just remarkable to scale that, and to become more sustainable as you grow rather than less is really cool what they did. They were, of course, early heroes of ours.
I really kind of like what the Sierra Nevada did, but they were very reluctant to scream that from the rooftops. They just did it because they knew the right thing to do, and also, the energy market in California is very different from the energy market and a hydroelectric area like Oregon, where we got cheap power.
Sierra is really cool in that they really didn’t talk about it. They might do presentations on their fuel cells, their solar, their hot garden, or something like that, but I think they were just doing it because they knew they needed to do it. There are incentives in California to capture that too. I really like both of those approaches. Both those breweries have long been heroes for the same reasons—incredibly high-quality beer and also their attention to sustainability.
The B Corp thing with New Belgium was really important. Honestly, one of our employee’s brothers gave a flier to my head brewer. He put the flier on my desk, we talked about it with our sustainability manager at the time, and we were like, wow. It was really in its infancy; B Corp was at that point. We were, I think, the 11th brewery in the world to become B Corp certified and the first in the Pacific Northwest.
There really weren’t that many examples. You had to look outside our market and look at it with a fresh set of eyes and just go, well, this is going to be incredibly rigorous and complicated, but I have a sustainability manager that I can hand that to, and it took two months to put together. We have since moved on to another position. My wife, Brandy, has taken over all our sustainability and B Corp specifically. Man, that process is just awesome to go through.
If you’re okay getting your ass handed to you, go for it because it’ll tell you really quickly where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and it’ll give you some really quick projects to work on to be better.
[00:11:33] ZG: I think that’s great. I like the phrase you used of it providing a Northern Light because it’s not the easiest thing to get evaluated and have someone point out the areas that, as a business where you can work on. Also, being in Portland, it resonated. I can say that a lot of people I interact with and I have really positive associations with Hopworks because of that. Kudos to you.
I think it also speaks to why we wanted to work with you on the malt bag recycling program. Sorry to keep you just talking and talking, but do you want to give a little bit of perspective on that?
[00:12:13] CE: Yeah, the willingness when I approached you guys, I was on a road trip going down through the redwoods, and I got the call from Nathan, National Sustainability Manager, after I put a query out to see who was interested in pursuing some malt bag recycling because through COVID, all we had was packaged beer to sell. Restaurants were shut down, and there was no market for these grain bags. We’re just loading so many grain bags in the dumpster that there’s nowhere to go. It was the one thing that bothered me continually through COVID so much so that I was like, let’s do this, let’s find a way.
I know that once Great Western switched from paper to plastic bags, we used to take the paper bags, slip the bottom off, pull the poly liner out, and recycle it into outer paper liners. We’re kind of hippies early on and trying to show people how to do that, but then the plastic switches over. I was like, okay, I know that Great Western probably wants to do something with that, but it’s just a matter of connecting the dots, and we had already been doing great work with Vancouver Plastics, headlining a PakTech recycling program with them and actually, New Seasons and all these local markets were bringing us their packed […] and hop works, to then take to Vancouver Plastics. There’s clearly a need there.
Vancouver Plastics was a willing ally in that. I was putting calls out to them, and they were so busy recycling PakTech. It took a while to even get through to them. Once I did, I found out that the number five plastic in these bags is really high value. It’s far from garbage.
When she linked up a recycler with the ability and the recognition of the market value with the supplier who’s putting these in the market and also has the willingness, it’s just oftentimes just connecting the dots. That’s where I was kind of the thought broker to bring it all together. Then it’s really taken on a life of its own over the last, I guess, month.
[00:14:30] ZG: Absolutely. I think John, both of us have thrown hundreds and hundreds of bags, and it becomes apparent really quick when you’re stuffing them into each other how you’re missing that opportunity to recycle. A lot of the time, it’s because of the liner, like you said, and you do have to go through that extra effort. What kind of impact does this have the potential to have?
[00:14:51] CE: The one sheeter that put together, and I think you all really put the numbers to it. I knew just intuitively what we were providing, and if a bag represents 25 kilos and there’s roughly say 40 kilos in a barrel of beer, I think we were basically saying that the grain bag logs where we put one pallet worth of bags. I’ll just break it down to some base ten math. It’s 40 bags off the pallet, and the pallet is 2000–2200 pounds depending on whether it’s standard or metric weight.
Forty bags can get rolled up and stuffed in a log, and you see that mass of plastic, and you’re like, okay, this is understandable. We were assuming that the average brewery was going to produce about 25 of those logs a year because the average brewery in the US is about 700 barrels. That’s 75 pounds of barley per barrel and you just kind of do the math, and essentially, there’s a lot of waste even at the basic level.
As you move up the production ramp towards the bigger breweries, you just realize the problem gets infinitely worse as you move away from the small base of breweries. It’s so important in the life cycle analysis of everything where we got to give all these products a place to go.
First of all, we should reduce the amount of single-use things we consume, and then we should reuse what’s possible, then recycle on the tail end of it. This is recycling and avoiding the landfill. This is part of a zero-waste initiative, which brewers should start to put on a list somewhere as to how am I diverting as much material from landfills as possible?
This is one key way because you’re already in the 90s in terms of your landfill diversion, just with your spent grain recycling system, giving it to farmers. Byway, you’re on the right side of history. It’s just mopping up that last 10% with all this kind of solid waste stuff in the green bags. Then you got mylar from hop bags, all the other things that are more long-term scientific objectives that the average grower is not capable of really doing anything other than maybe using it as a trash can liner before they throw it away.
The malt bag thing and me just kind of messing around with the bags going, okay, could they be their own bin? I know when I put the double side of the string away from me, slip the right loop, I can pull the bottom out. What does Vancouver Plastics care about in terms of contamination? The dose makes the poison in terms of any waste stream.
Turns out that the number four liners are a problem, but the strings aren’t because they’ll be vectored back into the virgin plastic system at a rate of 5%, 10%, or something like that. It’s really the strings that are insignificant. The liners have value in another number four-stream, and away you go. We’re going to make number five logs out of everything we can get our hands-on.
[00:18:00] ZG: You mentioned the logs, and I just want to give everyone a visual image of that. You pull up the bottom string, and as Christian said, 40 bags get rolled up and stuffed into one other bag for this recyclable number five plastic log. Like I said, anyone who’s thrown any number of bags immediately can recognize the amount of waste that is being generated and see that opportunity there.
[00:18:29] CE: You asked for the impact, and the number that I got back from you all is based on some assumptions because I don’t know exactly how much you guys ship in our local area. Vancouver Plastics really wants to accept more of a regional load than a national load. The number that came up was the first year, and we are anticipating diverting 200,000 bags from the landfill to the recycling system.
[00:18:52] JE: Nice.
[00:18:54] CE: That’s something I’ll put on my epitaph. I do like to be active and get out there, but I would be proud of that if I could only have done one thing in my life and catalyze something that had the potential over its life to keep millions of bags out of the landfill. Hey, I’m done. I can retire now.
[00:19:14] ZG: Totally agree. I just want to give the listeners some context too. Right now, we’re doing this out of our Vancouver, Washington warehouse, and it is a new process and program that we’re hoping to provide somewhat of a template too. If any of the listeners are in your local area and want to start looking into this recycling program, Christian, would you give any kind of advice on how to start going about that and some lessons you’ve learned?
[00:19:40] CE: Yeah, absolutely. I think that in a perfect world, every person and company is as green as they can be. The idea is to get all that willingness to the surface and get the right stakeholders together. I like starting with the supplier and testing the appetite there. It’s funny because the German exchange experience and the German influence and efficiency when you have a parent company who is international, the European market is required. They’re so densely populated they have to be efficient in everything.
What we found when we approached Great Western is that they had a global efficiency initiative that informed the local efficiency initiative, which this green bag recycling program helped them achieve more quickly.
Maltsters inherently are larger companies because of the consolidation. Get hold of your local maltster; the recycling information is clearly printed on the back. Find out on the waste side, the metro side of things, which the resources are for the recovery end of these high value recycled materials, take a case of beer on each one of them, have a conversation, try and overlap that conversation, and get everybody in the same room.
I think I had probably two or three calls independently with both Great Western and then Vancouver Plastics before I kind of understood the ecosystem and got everybody together. Then there were two of those meetings and then identified that the baler was the biggest hurdle on the Great Western side, and so they put a PO for that with a national company. Then Vancouver Plastics to find out what they needed to do differently to handle that load and what the one sheeter spec would look like in terms of what they were willing to accept without having to refuse it because we mismanaged what we were providing to them in the recycling stream.
I would just say the stakeholders are pretty simple. You’ve got the brewer sitting right in between the supplier and the recycler, and at the center of that table, I think the onus is on everybody equally, but somebody’s got to catalyze it. It’s probably the person who’s most frustrated with it, like the one putting the bags in the dumpster like you and me. When you do that every day you’re like, this has to change. The supplier sees them come out, get filled, and get shipped out clean on pallets. That doesn’t look like waste. That looks like a great product stream moving it out of the building, and it looks neat, tidy, and it’s well labeled.
The orders are coming in, and the cash is coming in, and then we’re the brewery trying to figure out how to efficiently use those things, so we got to handle it. The plastic guys are the recycler sitting in warehouses with mountains of discarded material, trying to figure out what to do with it. I think the brewers have an interesting perspective, and we all have the same duty to make sure this planet is managed properly for the next generation. It’s all part of it.
[00:23:06] ZG: Absolutely. We’re going to encourage listeners to reach out to your CMG rep and start having that conversation. I hope in a year’s time; we can look back and have these types of programs in each one of our facilities. I think that’d be a really important thing, and really glad that we’re able to work with you all at Hopworks and kind of provide this template.
Off the top of your head, we have a lot of breweries that are maybe just starting to approach sustainability and look at some of the things they can do. Do you have any tips, any kind of small strategies, or good ways to get started? I know you mentioned the grain recycling program with a local farmer. I know that’s something that we used to do. Any other tips like that? John, feel free to jump in too.
[00:23:47] JE: Yeah, totally.
[00:23:47] CE: I think the brewer is uniquely positioned, and they’re kind of up to their elbows and ingredients and packaging. Green teams, although they sound great, sound formal and corporate, but somebody in the company has to take charge of this. Maybe identify the person in your company who’s really passionate about that.
I kind of call it the sustainable sandwich. You got to have the boots on the ground that see where all the inefficiencies are, and the waste is, and then you got to have buy-in from the top and bring those things to the company. It can come from either way, but the more united a company is around these objectives, whether it’s just a small mom and pop shop with a couple of employees or a bigger company, you got to create some sort of either formal or informal sustainability manager or team.
It’s funny because recycling is something that’s curbside. It’s encouraged by the municipality, but I call it kind of the four nodes of sustainability. You’ve got your core and shell, your actual building; whether you’re occupying an existing building or building something, there are huge opportunities in terms of energy efficiency and sustainability when it comes to how you design the layout of a building.
Then you’ve got your operations inside the building, which can be a combination of your kitchen and your brewery and how you manage those things. That goes from sourcing what materials you’re bringing into the operational efficiencies. Then the tailpipe is what’s leaving. Maybe it’s more like three nodes. Maybe your core and shell, this kind of operations piece, and then what’s leaving the building. Every one of those has kind of maybe a top three.
I love org charts and just thought ladders and just seeing how you should prioritize these things. I like the facility, I like sourcing, I like efficiency, and then I like managing the waste. Those are kind of three or four camps, depending on how you want to look at it. There are so many on the building site right now.
There are so many incentives from your local energy provider to green up your electrical and natural gas usage when it comes to heating, cooling, lighting your facility, and insulating it. Then you move into efficiencies within the operation. On the sourcing side, incredible opportunities to look for the Salmon-Safe logo. I’m on the board of Salmon-Safe, so I’m a big advocate for managing our stormwater with good Salmon-Safe overlays over hot farms, vineyards, and hopefully some bigger malt farms coming forward. I need to talk with you guys about Klamath Falls and see if there are some opportunities with Salmon-Safe […] as well. You got sourcing, Salmon-Safe, and organic.
Then you’ve got operational efficiency. How are you managing in the brewhouse your use of water, your use of electricity in terms of kilowatts per barrel, your use of therms and natural gas per barrel, and your consumption of ingredients per barrel, whether it’s pounds of hops per malt? Those things are all incredible opportunities to manage that better.
Then on the tailpipe, what’s leaving your operation. Hopefully, your efficiency numbers. This is where there’s a great tool out there, and forgive me; you guys can jump in anytime if I’m talking too much. I’m on the Brewers Association Sustainability Committee on the national level, and we’ve got this thing called the benchmarking tool.
The benchmarking tool looks at your utility bills over your major ingredients and tells you where you’re best in class or where you’re worst in class, and it quickly shoots out opportunities. For us, we knew that CO2 was a huge opportunity for us on the go, and so I just put in a six-ton […] CO2 tank, and we’re putting in the new piping header because we realized we probably had some leaks we didn’t know about. That project was highlighted by a benchmarking tool so we could better utilize carbon dioxide in our plant.
Then on the tailpipe, of course, we were just talking about the green bag recycling program, making sure you hook it up with a great farmer in your local area to manage the highly nutritious brewery waste from the malt. You get yeast in the hop, switch to get land applied somewhere. That’s not really good feed necessarily, although the yeast can be good as it is metered improperly for the feed. The hops are really too bitter, and the cows don’t like it. Then this other stuff like packaging, material PakTechs, can bodies, bags, all that stuff. That’s a mouthful, but I break it up into those zones. Within each zone, there’s some really low-hanging fruit that […].
[00:28:40] JE: I really liked that approach, and I’m really glad you explained that. Going into the sustainability initiative in a brewery can be super overwhelming, but if you just put everything in a bucket like that where you’re building, operations, and then what’s going out the door, all that seems a lot more manageable. I’m glad you also mentioned the low lighting situation.
My experience in the past was when our local power company came out and replaced a bunch of high-pressure sodium lights in our brewery with fluorescence and LEDs, and it was free. They literally came in and spent thousands of dollars, and we saw the return pretty quickly. That’s something that if you’re out there, you’ve got a brewery working in, and you haven’t looked at those things, that’s definitely a good place to start.
[00:29:34] ZG: Yeah. Recognizing in yourself if you’re someone who cares about sustainability, and hopefully, there are a lot of people within the brewery that do, take it on yourself to look at one of those buckets. Plugin the benchmarking tool that Christian mentioned, and see if there’s any kind of low-hanging fruit that you can address and then move on to the next project. Slowly but surely, any improvement is, I think, a good step forward.
[00:30:02] CE: It used to be this kind of torturous path where you had to get a lighting proposal, present it, and then the Energy Trust would approve it. You had to get it approved before you bought anything. Otherwise, they wouldn’t fund it. Now it’s super easy. I just did a whole lighting upgrade in the brewery in our warehouse.
At the end of the day, they have a prescriptive fast track path. Each fixture cost me $50 each, and they got motion sensors built-in. It was so plug-and-play and easy. My electrician wired 14 fixtures in my warehouse in four hours. Half of it was paid for. That stuff is out there. I think everybody is willing.
I just started the Oregon Brewers Guild Sustainability Committee, and we’re putting these resources on the Oregon Brewers Guild webpage in one place on a sustainability dropdown, so that brewers in our area can find these things. The whole idea is that the grain bag thing is all this open-source system that everybody should start to model or role model some better systems out there to get all this information and links in one place so that people could roll in and go.
Double Mountain has got this great program where they use reusable ratchet straps instead of keg bands on their pallets. They can be used for years instead of just once, so when we put that whole committee together, all these great ideas start to bubble, and you end up with some great content.
[00:31:40] ZG: I like those reusable ratchet strap ideas. It makes so much sense. I never even thought about it. Well, cool. I think we’re just about to end here. Is there anything else at Hopworks or anything else in general that you’re working on that you want to give a shout out to?
[00:31:54] CE: Well, let’s see here. I’m trying to think. The resources we have on this planet, as highlighted by this climate change and everything, we got to work as a community really quickly to solve these problems. I think it’s bipartisan. I think it’s just like a human; if we’re on this planet and we’re extracting from this ecosystem, it’s up for us to mitigate that extraction and work swiftly towards some solutions.
Once we identify that there is an issue, then we can work together to solve the issue. I think that the sustainability narrative is now being talked about outside of Ukraine and stuff like this. There are news cycles, and sustainability seems to be up in the news cycle more often now than at any time in history with talk about climate change. We have an opportunity as a brewing industry to meet it head-on, have those honest discussions, and move quickly to solve problems.
I have nothing but faith in humanity and our industry, especially as a group of really great people from the supply side all the way through the recyclers. Informed and more aware than ever, this new generation, my kids are 13 and 16. I can’t believe the discussions they bring home and how much more aware they are than we were and how much more aware we are than our parents were. It’s moving in the right direction and awareness.
Also, I think that climate change is moving faster than that. I just try to light a little fire, excite the molecules, and just get everybody to move swiftly to green up their operations. We can make a really cool impact as an industry and become more sustainable over time relative to other industries. But it’s open-source, we just need to share that information, and everybody rallies.
[00:33:52] ZG: Absolutely. I really appreciate your optimism around it too. That’s not something you hear a lot about green efforts and sustainability. I think there are steps being made, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. We really appreciate you coming on and talking about it with us.
[00:34:08] CE: Yeah, I appreciate Great Western and Country Malt Brewery’s willingness and really eagerness to solve this quickly. From Country Malt Group, all the way through Vancouver Plastics, everybody has recognized that this was an incredible opportunity very quickly with the green bag recycling system. I think that we can really replicate this, get this word out once we iron out the kinks over these next couple of months to go national with this and make a big impact. I want to thank you guys for being receptive to another one of those crazy phone calls that I’m sure you get all the time.
[00:34:44] ZG: Well, thanks, Christian. We really appreciate you coming on.
[00:34:48] CE: Of course, yeah. Thanks for the time. I appreciate it. It’s been fun.
[00:34:52] HJ: We are now very excited to welcome Alexis Esseltine from Tin Whistle Brewing in Penticton, British Columbia. Welcome, Alexis.
[00:35:01] AE: Thanks for having me.
[00:35:02] HJ: So some of you may remember, we did have a Brew Year’s resolution from Alexis in our season 3 episode 1 episode that we did. If you haven’t listened to it, go back and take a listen. One of the things that Alexis says is that she has learned you can make great beer with less impact. We found that really, really interesting, so we really wanted to bring Alexis on today and talk about their carbon neutral initiative at Tin Whistle Brewing. Yeah, so Alexis, can you tell us a little bit about how you got to Tin Whistle Brewing?
[00:35:30] AE: Sure. It’s always a windy path in our lives, Heather. We all have windy paths. I started my career in the magazine publishing world, and I worked for Chatelaine, which is one of the women’s magazines here in Canada, a big women’s lifestyle magazine. I started to think a little bit about the impact that magazines were having on the natural world, just through paper, forestry, and all that stuff, and then decided to do a little bit more.
In order to do more in my career, I knew I needed a little bit more education. So I went back and did a master’s degree in a green business focus and have been working in sustainability. Everything from being an auditor overseas, flooring and leather manufacturing plants to Middle America. Manufacturers are looking at their environmental impact and trying to drive change there.
All the way through to more recently, I was the sustainability lead at the Vancouver Aquarium in Vancouver, leading all their green construction, green operation, green purchasing practices and making sure that they were putting their money where their mouth was in terms of practicing what they preach and doing all of that stuff. I came from there and lost my job in COVID because the tourism sector, of course, got annihilated in the middle of the pandemic.
I got laid off with 300 other folks at the same time, and my husband got laid off from his job at the same time too. We were sitting in Vancouver, one of the more expensive cities in the world, thinking about what’s next for our three little kids and us. This little brewery had been for sale in Penticton for a few years, and we’d never lived in the Okanagan or even worked in beer, for that matter. And off we came to bring our business experiences and our expertise to the table and see what we could do to turn this original craft brewery, the South Okanagan.
Tin Whistle has been around since 1995. It wasn’t necessarily thriving when we took over, but we wanted to come here and see what we could do to be stewards of this brand and take it to the next stage of its life. Being thoughtful in the production and bringing the values to the table in the beer space was really important to us. That’s what we’ve done from day one.
[00:37:26] HJ: That’s fantastic. That’s quite a journey from the aquarium to brewery ownership.
[00:37:32] AE: Totally.
[00:37:33] HJ: Just a little bit of a jump.
[00:37:35] AE: Just a little jump, you know.
[00:37:36] HJ: Can you tell us a little bit about what the Climate Smart initiative is?
[00:37:42] AE: Sure. First of all, Tin Whistle Brewing is BC’s first carbon-neutral brewery. We worked a little bit with an organization called Climate Smart, which works with businesses across Canada to measure their carbon footprints and to help them figure out the path to reduction. Then ultimately, carbon neutrality, if that’s the path that businesses choose to take. So we chose that path.
We’re lucky that my background is in sustainability, so I could do a lot of this stuff on my own. But when we took over the business, I did a full sustainability audit and looked at the full picture of our environmental footprint. That sounds pretty fancy, but it actually isn’t really that fancy. It’s a matter of dumping your garbage out and seeing what’s in your garbage.
It’s a matter of looking at your electricity bills and your natural gas bills because those have a carbon footprint to them. Looking at those things, seeing what you’re using and how you’re using it in your brewhouse, and then trying to figure out how you may reduce, eliminate, or move away from certain things in order to be better.
The Climate Smart part is the organization that we work with to measure our carbon footprint. They provide a calculator. We put all of our electricity data, waste data, and natural gas data, and all these pieces of data in and out spit a carbon footprint. From there, we can start to make some decisions as a business as to what’s important to address and where our biggest impacts are, and then ultimately, how we’re going to get to zero.
[00:39:03] HJ: Does this where the sustainability audit comes in? Is that basically going through the garbage and all that aspect?
[00:39:10] AE: Yeah, basically. Whenever I go into any new organization, and Tin Whistle is included in that, you’ve got to lay off the land, right? You’ve got to see where you’re at, and then you can figure out where you need to go. The sustainability audit is basically, like I said, me coming in, dumping garbage out, and looking at brewhouse operations and saying, okay, what were our waste because waste ends up in landfills and landfills produce methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
Waste is one part of our carbon footprint in the brewhouse. The other parts are often around energy because natural gas and electricity that we use here also have produced carbon dioxide in the production of them, which carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, again contributing to climate change.
You got to look at those key things. It’s usually waste, and it’s usually your energy. They’re your primary contributors to your carbon footprint if you’re just looking at your brewhouses, which is what we’re looking at. Those are usually your primary contributors. Then if you can start to dig in and get some numbers, that old business adage, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
We’re trying to measure to start with, so weighing wastes, looking at what’s going in the recycling bins, looking at what’s coming out of making beer, and looking at those bills like energy bills all have your consumption data on them and stuff and starting to dig in to really figure out where the impact is coming from. That’s the sustainability audit. It sounds fancy; it’s really not. It’s just getting the numbers.
[00:40:37] HJ: What are some of the changes that you have made at the brewery to get that carbon neutral?
[00:40:45] AE: We knew the numbers, so the first part was to reduce them. We changed equipment, we’ve got a new car presser in, we changed lighting, we changed processes to turn things off or to reduce the energy used in the brewing process. We turn the kettle on only for a certain number of hours before brew time to reduce the amount of natural gas being used. We really dug deep into processes on the equipment.
Luckily, there are a lot of incentives, in Canada anyway, for equipment changes if you’re moving to more efficient options. There’s lots of money at the table from the government, which helps to fund those changes. Those were the things that we started to dig in on. Then looking at the waste, looking whether there was a composting option, a recycling option, reuse, or eliminating waste streams so that we wouldn’t have waste going to landfills which contributes to climate change.
We really started to dig in on all of those things to reduce, and then whatever was left after that, we bought carbon offsets for. There are different carbon offset projects throughout the world. We chose the Great Bear Rainforest project on Vancouver Island, which is a forestry project. Trees naturally absorb carbon dioxide, which is a greenhouse gas.
Trees are what we call carbon sinks, so if we keep trees in place or we plant more trees, they’re absorbing carbon out of the atmosphere, which helps to offset the emissions that are out there. We bought the offsets to bring us to zero, but the goal is to continue to reduce our emissions. It’s hard to get to zero on your own without offsetting, but we’re sure to work hard to try to get there.
[00:42:24] GL: In terms of brewery practices that you do, you mentioned a bunch of them like measuring waste streams and things like that. Do you just have some tanks that you would hold like spin Easton, […], and things like that and measure those? Can you tell us a little bit about the setup or that process flow, if you don’t mind?
[00:42:45] AE: Yeah, for sure. If we’re looking at the waste from the brewing from the beer side, it starts even with grain bags. We buy grain from Canada Malting. We only buy from Canada Malting. You’re our people. So grain bags, for example, are one thing at the beginning before we even get to the beer part. Grain bags were just being thrown in the landfill. But in fact, the recycling depot up the street from us and the recycling depot across BC all take woven bags, and those are, in fact, woven bags that can be recycled.
We started collecting those and taking them to the recycling depot up the street. Then once grain goes into the beer-making process, then we’ve got the leftover spent grains. We’ve got some cool stuff with the spent grain. Obviously, many people who work with local farmers take away spent grains, the leftover grain, and they take it away for free. My whole thought about waste is that if something has value, it’s not really a waste anymore.
That grain still has value, right? It’s protein-rich. There’s not a lot of sugar left. It’s quite protein-rich; it’s still a great grain that we’ve only used once. I want to be able to put a value on it so that someone will buy it from me, so it becomes an input for another product, another process, another something, do we’ve started that. We had a couple of customers who started asking a lot about our spent grain. They’ve actually started a company that is going to launch pretty shortly. It’s called Spent Wisely.
They are taking our grain. They’re dehydrating it and grinding it up to make flour. You can’t use it the same like it’s not a one-for-one replacement with traditional flour because it’s a bit protein-rich and a bit of a different consistency. But you can replace it at 20 to 30% in your recipes. They’re going to start selling this at farmer’s markets, beer events, and through our taproom and more commercially shortly, which is great.
It’s a pretty small scale at this point, but this is a model that I want to really push where they’re buying the spent grain from us, so it’s really no longer waste, and there’s a value to that waste. I’m working on a bigger scale. You see companies like Take Two out of Oregon. If you’ve tried there, they have barley milk, which they’re making out of spent grain from the brewing process. They’re a bigger organization, and we have big volumes of the spent grain.
Volume is important for us, but there are companies that are doing this stuff. It’s working in volume, and getting a value for that product makes it no longer a waste. I’m really pushing on the spent grain piece to try to really make that something, so stay tuned; more to come on that from us but stay tuned. Spent grain, we’ve got an option, it’s not going to landfill at least it’s going somewhere, even though it doesn’t really have a value, it’s still a waste, but that’s fine.
The leftover yeast and stuff go in with the spent grain. We’re repitching, obviously, our yeast, so we’re reusing our yeast as many times as we can before it hits the end of life, and then it goes in with the spent grain and head out to the farmer who takes it, which is great. There’s a couple of wastes in there that we managed to find an option for.
On the latter end of the cycle, when we are packaging that product, we use PakTech, so those four plastic rings get snapped onto the cans. In that case, we actually take those back to the brewery, so it’s no longer a waste. We’re reusing those. We actually incentivize our customers to bring them back. We give 25 cents off everyone’s next four-pack for each one you bring back. Our record is 122 so far that someone’s brought back.
We’re trying to incentivize the right behavior because the reality is those PakTechs can be reused, I would say, probably 25 times, a total guess, but I’m sure there are hard, durable plastics that can be reused again and again. We’ve eliminated that waste stream.
The only thing that’s left for us from the waste side is the back of labels. When we buy labels, they come on either a plastic-coated paper backing or they come on very thin plastic. It’s PET plastic, specifically, that type of plastic. Either a thin plastic film or on paper coated in plastic, which neither has a recycling stream currently. So I’m working on finding a recycling solution or some way to reuse that material. I’m really pushing on that.
Then packing straps are another one, grain is wrapped. I think we have packing straps around the Canada Malting grain when it comes in. It doesn’t have a recycling stream. Though I’ve just found a recycler in Langley, BC, that will take it, so I’m working with them to try to get a more local program. Everything else, like the wrapping from the grain bags, and the clear plastic wrap that comes around those pallets, all goes to the recycling depot up the street.
The foil line bags from our hops, again, are also recyclable at the return depot up the street. We take them off the street. There are recycling options and waste options that exist, and you just have to be a bit persistent and find those ways that you can work to drive your waste to zero. We’re so close. I’m quite confident in 2022; we’ll get there to zero waste.
[00:47:40] GL: I’m impressed with how you tackle, how you come up with solutions. Some of these are pretty neat. You mentioned spent grain; down here in Texas, it just becomes cattle feed, of course.
[00:47:50] AE: […] for that as a waste. The thing is, you need to deal with it quickly because it starts to smell like a dirty dim sum. It smells horrible, so you need to get rid of it pretty quickly. But in Penticton, we have eight breweries and a town of 34,000 people, so we have a crazy volume of it in a very small area. If I can get someone to take the volume of it and have a little truck that’s running around every day picking up from everyone here, it would be incredible to see what we could do with it.
People are making alternative kinds of milk out of it. People are using it for flour and using it in dog biscuits or with dog food. There’s this huge potential, and it’s so nutritious, but it’s just thinking about things a little differently. That is sustainability. Really, in a nutshell, it is just thinking about things differently, not going with the status quo, and saying this is how we’ve always done it.
We’ve always dumped the chemicals in the back in the river, or we’ve always thrown this in the garbage. It’s just thinking about things differently because the reality is a lot of these things can be, what I say, an input for another system. They can be an input or raw material for another product, another system, another, whatever. It’s just figuring out how to connect those dots because they’re not always naturally there.
[00:49:01] GL: The spent grain milk that you brought up, that’s a brand new one for me. I’ve never heard of that before. I guess my first inclination would be like the starch converts to sugar and gets rid of […] in the wort […] for the milk. I didn’t think that it was doable.
[00:49:20] AE: Yeah. It’s Take Two. They ship samples out. When I was at the Vancouver Aquarium, I got samples shipped to me because I was interested in looking at it as an option for our food and beverage team. They’re incredible. They do a chef’s blend, they do a chocolate milk blend, and they do just vanilla. It was great. I’m not sure if the process side is on the other end, so it’d be great to dig in with them and figure out how they’re actually doing it, what they’re picking up, and all that stuff because the volume is the key.
I get a lot of calls from chicken farmers who say, oh, can I have a bucket of spent grain and logistically try to sort that out as a brewery? We’re not a huge brewery, but we’re a decent size. To try to logistically handle that is a nightmare. We work with a big cattle farmer, a pig farmer who takes the whole tote of it from each brew. Four times a week, he picks it up, so that works. But those little small-scale things are hard to manage if you’re a legitimate size. Scale is important in the spent grain world so stay tuned.
[00:50:20] GL: For sure. You also mentioned PakTech, and I see that a lot. Is anybody out there listening who doesn’t use PakTech, or if you do, like Alexa said, you could reuse them just about forever. One of the breweries here in town, they celebrate, they’re bringing back a PakTech, and that you can exchange them for T-shirts or other stuff. It’s a cool program.
[00:50:44] HJ: Any beer drinker probably has way too many of those sitting at their house. It’s really, really important to get to have those places to take those back to.
[00:50:54] AE: Totally. In the environmental world, we talk about the waste triangle. We learn the 3 R’s in school: reduce, reuse, recycle. Sometimes you hear other R’s. There’s refuse, repair, and all these other R’s. But if you just think about the 3 R’s, reduce, reuse, recycle, we should really be doing it in that order. That is the best order environmentally. We should prioritize, reduce, then reuse, then recycle last.
Those four-pack rings can be recycled, but it takes a lot of energy to recycle stuff and ship it up and ship it wherever it’s going to go. Reuse is even better. Breweries are great at disinfecting stuff. We disinfect stuff every day. We just throw them, disinfect them a little bit in the back, and pop them back on the canning line, and away we go.
It was funny. Our canner was here yesterday, though. We have a mobile canner we work with; he was here yesterday. He says, why don’t you just—like plastic bags—say to people, do you want PakTechs with that or not? Just like we do at the grocery store when we get plastic bags, right? Do you want a bag? It’s 5¢ for the bag. So we were, oh, well, we could even start to refuse that waste and not even have that as a waste stream if we just asked people if they either needed them in the first place.
There are so many opportunities just to rethink what we’re doing. Maybe we don’t even need PakTechs for people heading out the door. Maybe we just pop them off the PakTech, keep them here, and give them 25 cents off just for not using one or something. So many fun ways to rethink stuff. You just have to be open-minded.
[00:52:21] HJ: Yeah, if you’re already bringing in your canvas bag to take your beer home with you, which most people are, why not?
[00:52:27] AE: Yeah. So anyway, this is, in part, why I love environmental and sustainability stuff. It’s all about solutions. It’s all about trying to figure out how to make things better for the world, ultimately, and for our kids ultimately, dogs, or whoever is important to us. But it’s fun to rethink stuff with it.
[00:52:42] HJ: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really cool to have somebody with such a sustainability background coming into the beer industry and doing these deep dives into how you can actually make a difference. That’s fantastic.
[00:52:54] AE: And beer is pretty simple at the end of the day. I worked in some pretty complicated manufacturing processes. When we talk about furniture, for example, I’ve worked a lot in furniture, but you think about all the wood, the metal screws, the plastic, and the additives and those plastics. There are a ton of materials involved, so to change those processes is very complicated.
For beer, most beer is made with four or five primary ingredients. It’s not that complicated. It’s water, it’s hops, it’s yeast, it’s grain, and maybe you’re adding a spice here, the fruit there, or whatever. But it’s a pretty simple process, so you don’t have to dig into that many different materials or inputs in order to start to make a change.
[00:53:33] HJ: So is there anything else cool coming down the pipe that we should look for from Tin Whistle?
[00:53:38] AE: Yeah. I’m lucky to live in the Okanagan, and right down the street from me is Okanagan college, which houses the BC BTech program, which is a beverage technology center funded by the Canadian government to support the beverage sector here in the Okanagan, which we have a ton of wineries, a ton of breweries, a ton of cideries distilleries—we got it all.
I’m lucky to work with them, and we just got two projects approved. I can’t tell you what they are yet because we’re just waiting on the final pieces to come together. But look for a lot of stuff in the brewery world about one carbon capture. We use a lot of carbon dioxide in breweries. I pay a hell of a lot to bring carbon dioxide to carbonate my beer and to support the canning line and all of that.
Right now, we release carbon dioxide when we ferment beer. It comes as part of one of the byproducts of fermentation, carbon dioxide. But not a lot of people are capturing that carbon dioxide, reusing it in any way, or addressing it anyway. The reality is carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. There are seven greenhouse gasses, and carbon dioxide is one of them. Carbon dioxide is contributing to global warming and climate change. We all know what’s happening in the world.
Anyway, carbon dioxide is a big part of brewhouses. We’re buying it, but we’re also releasing it in other processes. So stay tuned. Follow us on Instagram @theTinWhistle, or on Facebook, Tin Whistle Brewing Co. There’s some new stuff coming down the pipe from us. We’re trying to challenge the status quo, see what we can do with the whole idea just to be a model and to show people what’s possible.
We never want this environmental work just to sit with us. It’s just to show it can be done so that others will join us. The reality is that the world needs more of us fighting, pushing, and trying things to see what can be done because the world needs that from us, right? Climate change is real, and the implications of it.
We see every day here in the Okanagan, especially in the summertime, we’re on fire. We have wildfires through July and August. We had mudslides as a result of forest fires. We couldn’t get raw materials from the Lower Mainland. Heather, you know this all too well that we couldn’t get grain from the Vancouver depot. Canada Malting is shipping grain around to Alberta to come to get us from the other side.
We see climate change so intimately here, and if we’re not addressing it, it’s a real risk to our business. It’s the right thing to do. But it’s also the right thing to do from a business side because I couldn’t get sour cherries this year for my chocolate cherry porter because the sour cherry crop got annihilated, and the price of sour cherries was like through the roof.
The profile of grain is changing. I mean, Heather […] because of the impacts of climate change. If we are ignoring this stuff, it’s a real risk to our business because we’re seeing those implications every single day in our business. So we have a duty and a responsibility to try to do something to change the course that we’re on. This is not a complicated thing to do; it just requires us to think a little differently sometimes.
[00:56:28] HJ: What would you say would be some really good first steps for a brewery to get started into looking into this?
[00:56:34] AE: Totally. I always go back to you can’t manage what you don’t measure. So start to get some numbers. The reality is whether you live in Texas or you live in BC; you get a utility bill. The biggest impact my business has is primarily in the energy that we use, and it’s primarily from the natural gas that we use to heat things. You probably use electricity and electricity can come from different sources. Luckily, in BC, it comes from hydropower, so it’s more clean energy.
If you’re in the US or you’re in other places, it may come from coal, which is quite a dirty energy from a carbon perspective. Then your natural gas or whatever you use for heating is often quite dirty from a carbon footprint perspective and quite bad. Even if you just start to look at your energy use, and look at your bills, look at how you’re using month to month. If you have sub-meters on some of those things, you may have a separate meter on your kettle from your space heater, for example.
My utility has a different meter on each of those things, so I can see exactly how much natural gas my kettle is using. You can start to track and see maybe where you’re using the most and then start to dig in and see if your kettle is where you’re seeing so much natural gas use. It might be something worth looking at a little closer. The reality is everybody’s utility in the US and Canada. I worked in both of those places, all utilities, so your municipal utility, your provincial, or state utility, whatever it is, all have all need to reduce the usage.
More people are moving into cities, and more people are just being born. They have a crazy push on all of these energy systems. It’s very expensive to add new energy online. There are huge incentives from your cities, your provinces, or your states to start to reduce your energy use. So call your local province, your local city, your local government, whatever it is, and say, hey, can someone help me with this? I’m trying to reduce my use.
I’ve worked with so many cities and towns across this country on this very issue. They are very keen to get people to use less because, at the end of the day, they don’t have the money to invest in bringing more energy online because it’s very expensive. It’s not great from a public perception side. So start to look at your bills, especially around energy. You can look at them around waste, too, because waste is often another part of your bigger impact.
Get some numbers and start to understand it a little bit. See where you think your biggest impact is because it’s always worth jumping on your biggest impact. The reality is it’s probably where you’re spending a lot of money too. From a business side, it’s really worth it. The little things matter, like us taking PakTechs back and giving people 25¢ off instead of paying 25¢ for them.
Those things matter, too, and they start to signal to your customers and staff what’s important to you as a business, so those are important, and they get your employees engaged because they’re easy things to do. But if we want to make big environmental changes, we got to start looking at our big impacts. Usually, it’s wasted energy in brewhouses. Start to get some numbers, reach out to your local municipalities, your local city, or whatever it is that where you operate and see if there’s any money, see if there are rebates.
We had a free energy audit done last month. They’re often free energy audit programs in place where they’ll come in, look at your energy use, and provide suggestions on ways you can reduce usage. I’ve had free energy audits at the Vancouver Aquarium. I’ve had free energy audits here at the brewery. Because at the end of the day, I’m not an engineer. I want to do the right thing, but I don’t totally understand energy.
Energy audits, that’s what they do. They come in, and they give you a report, tell you how you can change, what rebate money exists from the city that you live in, and away you go. It’s a starting point. That was long-winded, Heather; it seems to be my theme. But anyway, there are resources. Never try to do this stuff alone is basically what I’m trying to say. Get some numbers, and then don’t try to do it alone. There’s your local municipality.
Also, colleges and universities are incredible. Most of them have a sustainability program or a sustainable technology program or something. Get those kids in to do a study for you. That’s what I’ve been doing. There are free studies. It gives them real on-the-ground training. It gets them into a brewery, which is pretty cool for them. It’s a great opportunity to get some people-focused and look at your impacts. Get a little bit more knowledge in there, too, because obviously, a lot of people don’t come from an environmental background. If you can get a student or a professor working on your stuff, incredible.
[01:00:52] HJ: Never apologize for being long-winded. That’s really, really great advice. I think you hit it there too. This could save you in the long run. This could really save your business some money. We’re in a really tough time right now. The cost of things, we’re seeing it across the globe. If you can find some areas where you can do good for the environment and make it a little bit easier on the bank account of the brewery, it’s a great thing to be able to do.
[01:01:23] AE: Totally. My husband is a capitalist. He’s an MBA, so […] I speak in that language, but every time you reduce energy, you reduce your cost. Energy prices are only going up, so it’s a total win for the business too.
[01:01:37] HJ: Awesome. Grant, do you have anything else to touch on?
[01:01:40] GL: No, I don’t. I think we’ve covered it really well. I think we came to the right place. Thanks, Alexis, for joining us and sharing your expertise. It’s really awesome to have someone who has just experienced brewing and other aspects of sustainability come and chat with us today.
[01:01:58] AE: Cool, thanks for having me.
[01:01:59] HJ: Thank you so much.