Peeking under the bonnet to discover the sources of your carbon emissions is an inherently uncomfortable task for any business. And it can also yield surprises, as craft beer maker Capital Brewing discovered when it became the country’s first carbon neutral brewery certified under the Australian government’s Climate Active program.
Besides the usual suspects of transportation of brewing ingredients and finished product to retail outlets, and the aluminium used in their cans, the brewer discovered that the embodied carbon in the malt and hops it was using to make its beers together made up nearly 20 per cent of their emissions.
Carbon dioxide – which brewers use to sterilise their tanks and to carbonate beverages – was another large source.
“Our emissions report showed that the two big areas were in freight and aluminium cans. But the big thing we took out of it is that we can change the way we procure materials to significantly reduce emissions,” said managing director Laurence Kain.
The Climate Active certification required the company to engage consultants Pangolin Associates to do a complete lifecycle assessment of the business to understand its scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, which besides supply chain emissions and energy use also measures things like employees’ commute to work.
Australian malt is the most sustainably grown in the world
The team decided to attack the malt and hops supply chains and CO2 because they were “things we can control”, according to Kain. Through their research they discovered that Australian malt is the most sustainably grown in the world, so they switched away from their British supplier.
They are now also about to begin obtaining barley from a supplier with a bio-regenerative farming practice and have devised a way to recycle their CO2.
Through this process Pangolin created a template that Kain said other breweries can now use to calculate their own carbon emissions on their path to climate neutral certification.
Becoming a B-Corp
Capital’s founders Kain and Tom Hertel started out life working in bars and then opening Canberra’s first craft beer bar in 2011. They sold the bar in 2016 to found Capital Brewing after an educational trip to the US to study brewing techniques because “we got more into beer and less into running bars”, Kain said. It was there that the picked up their now head brewer Wade Hurley. Nearly nine years later, and the operation employs 75 people across the ACT and New South Wales.
Kain said he wished the team had been more focused on the carbon footprint of the supply chain in the early days before they entered into supply agreements. “We would have liked to put more effort into where we were sourcing brewing ingredients and putting all of our focus on making the best beer.”
The brewery is Australia’s third to achieve B-Corporation status, which Kain said was also an onerous process. “It doesn’t just look at environmental performance, looks at how you treat your staff, are you paying people at or above award wage, do people have contracts and job descriptions, do you have safety management plans. Looks at your supply chain and whether you have practices in place to favour local suppliers over international suppliers,” he said.
It was through this process that the team made strides in tackling their waste. They struck a partnership to dispose of their brewing waste by products, which are fed to cows.
The spent yeast and hops are taken to a nearby organic farm and composted. Their high nutrient and nitrogen content makes them ideal compost fodder, according to Kain. The brewery also runs on 100 per cent renewable electricity and invests in a biodiversity offset scheme at regenerative farm Orana Park in Victoria.
The company also runs Taproom, a food and beverage operation at its brewery in Fyshwick, a suburb of Canberra.
Taproom is 1000-person capacity and is very busy – on a busy day we will sell 1500 burgers.
All food waste from the restaurant is sent to Goterra, where it is fed to black soldier fly larvae who consume it. The flies are then sold to livestock producers as cattle feed. Kain said the team originally looked into buying an anaerobic digestor to process the waste but found it was cheaper to outsource management of the waste.
Rescued fruit beers
In the company’s latest sustainability foray, its brewing team has created four new beers out of rescued imperfect fruit that was headed for the dumpster.
The Salvaged Salvador is an apple and rhubarb pastry crumble sour, using apples from Southern Harvests Association that were too small to sell in supermarkets, and a surplus of rhubarb. Kain said they had to cook the rhubarb for several hours to extract the flavour from it.
The Leftover Lincoln is a “pavlova pastry sour” beer made from overripened fruit sourced from Ziggy’s Fresh Market in their local area, the Rescued Ruby was made from handpicked blackberries and plums and the Liberated Lucy, a cherry and cola seltzer using surplus cherries from Back Creek Orchards.
The beers will be exhibited at the GABS Craft Beer festival in Sydney on June 2 and 3.
The next step is to make rescued fruit beers a permanent fixture on the Taproom’s menu. Kain said the brewing team is looking at ways to sustainably scale this up to produce around 200 kegs a year.