Australia, Renewables, Solar

Thirst for renewables: Sustainability in Australia’s craft beer industry

The popularity of craft beer in Australia has exploded during the past 10 years, and some of the industry’s most environmentally conscious breweries are embracing clean energy and applying revolutionary ideas to reduce their carbon footprint, writes Gavin Dennett.

Helios Brewing Company | Brisbane, Queensland

From working with global climate campaigner Al Gore to three decades in the field of environmental consultancy and policy, Scott Shomer (pictured above) has an accomplished pedigree when it comes to helping save the planet. The founder of Helios Brewing Company in Brisbane is using his extensive experience as a hydrogeologist and environmental engineer to apply it to his love of beer, and he has created one of the worldwide brewing industry’s most sustainable enterprises.

Named after Helios, the Greek god of the sun, and operating under the moniker of “Beer brewed using the power of the Aussie sun”, Shomer’s brewery is laying down a blueprint for the beer industry to follow in terms of embracing renewable energy, reducing its carbon footprint and emissions, and leaning on science for new and improved ways to streamline operations with minimal waste.

Working for former US Vice-President Gore and being an expert in environmental sustainability certainly helped when Helios Brewing Company opened its doors in 2017.

“As a hydrogeologist, I spent my career cleaning up contaminated soil and groundwater from big industrial sites, military bases and refineries around the world,” says Shomer, who hails from the US. “I did that for almost 30 years while being involved homebrewing, which really went nuts in the 1990s in the US.

“I was one of the first 1000 people to be certified in the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) but continued working as an environmental consultant and going to graduate school studying engineering. Fast-forward a couple of decades and I moved to Australia, working in oil and gas as an environmental consultant, and writing environmental policy on things like fracking, which wasn’t easy as I desperately wanted to protect the environment. At least I was on the inside driving environmental policy as best I could.

“In 2007, Al Gore sent out an email looking for people in Australia who could communicate the science of climate change. I applied and ended up being trained by Mr Gore to become a climate change communicator. I gave lectures to businesses, universities and school groups about the importance of sustainability.

“Then in the early 2010s, I saw craft brewing take off in Australia from my desk in oil and gas, and I was thinking there might be an opportunity to open a brewery. I was 47 at the time and I promised my family I would celebrate my 50th birthday in my brewery. In December 2017, I did.”

When Shomer set about equipping his brewery in the Brisbane suburb of Yeerongpilly, he found sourcing green options was almost non-existent, apart from rooftop solar – he has 59 PV panels on his roof and a 15KW inverter – and his electric-powered delivery van.

“I wanted to use less water, less electricity, less gas and produce less waste, but there was nothing,” he tells EcoGeneration. “So I thought I would finally use my engineering for good and for a couple of years I basically turned everything on its head.

“I bought the building so at least if I put something too heavy on the roof or blew something up, it was mine (laughs). Everything in brewing either requires heating up or cooling down, and I had an epiphany one day after drawing a simple diagram showing things going from hot to cold, and cold to hot. Then it was as clear as day that all the efficiencies you can potentially save money on is in the transfer of heat.

Owning the site of Helios Brewing Company in Brisbane has given Scott Shomer the freedom to experiment with energy solutions. Photo: Joel Thomas.

“I was able to figure out a completely different set of procedures, processes and equipment, and the end result is we use about one-tenth of the power and gas, and one-third of the water, as a similar size brewery across town.”

Shomer also discovered that his sustainability solutions didn’t have to be expensive, including the brewery’s solar thermal water heating where cold water passes through 90 evacuated tube collectors on the roof and heated to 95 degrees Celsius.

“There are engineering solutions to be purchased, but they don’t have to be expensive,” he says. “I have a highly specialised solar hot water heater and am able to get our brewing water up to 95 degrees in under 10 minutes with no power and no gas.

“We also use our three-and-a-half tonne cold liquor tank in a manner nobody else has, with a computer chip at the bottom that helps take excess solar power and stores it in the form of heat and cold. The tank is like a battery, storing heat and cold energy.”

Not content with making Helios Brewing Company a blue-ribbon sustainable operation, Shomer is determined to share his ingenious ideas as a blueprint for other breweries to emulate.

“I have a consulting business called SolaBrew that I don’t make much money from because I bring people through and show them what I have done so they can go back and do it themselves,” he says.

“Everything I’ve done is purposely kept as open source. I haven’t patented or trademarked anything because I want as many people to take up what I have done as possible. I’m now getting contacted from all over Australia to advise.

“Some of the solutions are super easy, some are managerial, and some are simply changing around the order in which you do things. Once you think outside the box, you can come up with some pretty inventive solutions.”

The sustainability journey for Shomer is ongoing, as he continues to strive for cleaner and greener operations.

“We’re still trying to get our water use down,” he says. “But our wastage is minimal. We are an industrial facility and yet I only bring out one residential size wastebin each week. We just don’t want to generate waste.

“I did this for the engineering challenge, and it was important to me to be sustainable. But I also had to brew some awesome beer. People don’t come to the brewery because we are green. When COVID-19 hit, our wholesale and retail dropped, and our venue closed, and we wouldn’t have survived as a business had we not been green. Being sustainable is good for business.”

3 Ravens general manager Nathan Liascos is excited about the sustainability future of the brewery. Photo: Supplied.

3 Ravens Brewery | Melbourne, Victoria

As Melbourne’s oldest independent brewery, 3 Ravens is used to being a pioneer of Australia’s craft beer industry. Established in 2003 as a 300-litre nanobrewery in the inner-city suburb of Thornbury, the company has been leading the way for creative and innovative brewing that champions Australian ingredients for almost two decades.

“We are a brewery bar and co-working space, and sustainability has always been important to us,” says 3 Ravens general manager Nathan Liascos. “However, it wasn’t until we did a rebrand and strategy shift in 2018 that we put sustainability really high on our business agenda. We made it a core value to reduce our impact on the environment.

“We had an energy material solution assessment done in 2019, and that provided us with a suite of ideas to reduce our carbon emissions. Since then, we have installed 74KW of solar on our heat-reflective cool roof, and those two elements have reduced our CO2 emissions by 106 tonnes.

“We also do side-streaming by sending spent grain to stud farms; are looking to partner with organic compost farms to send by-products from brewing beer; we switched from bottles to cans to improve recyclability and logistics efficiencies; and source local ingredients to reduce food miles, among other initiatives.”

Through a recent crowdfunding campaign, 3 Ravens is about to embark on the next phase of its sustainability focused upgrade with a chiller heat pump and industry 4.0 automation.

“It was one of the recommendations in the energy material solution assessment,” says Liascos. “We have been fortunate to have it modelled through some grant funding through The Energy Alliance – it would have been too expensive otherwise. It is technology used throughout other industries, but is new to brewing.

“It is a CO2 chiller heat pump that combines all the heating and cooling requirements across the bar, brewery and coworking space, which works as a means of linking processes together throughout the business so any heating or cooling can utilise each other to minimise demand from the grid.

“Coupled with an industry 4.0 control system called Thermocraft, it will coordinate optimal heat exchange and maximise utilisation of solar energy generated. Essentially, the way I sum it up is our entire site will be powered by beer because we make beer to make power to make beer, etc. That’s exciting.

“There is a lot of chilling that happens in the brewing process, and it captures waste heat and stores it in a thermal battery, such as a tank full of water. The revolutionary side of it comes as we couple it with industry 4.0 automation technology that allows us to maximise our solar generation as it switches things on and off whenever we are generating power from solar, or when we are at off-peak times.

“It has been modelled to have a 70 per cent reduction of our energy consumption. We hope it inspires other people to look at their processes and environmental performance, and implement their own sustainable systems.”

Young Henrys co-founder Richard Adamson (left) with the Pingala Co-op team. Photo: Supplied.

Young Henrys | Sydney, NSW

The Young Henrys story is one of vision and success. Founded in 2012 in Newtown, in Sydney’s thriving Inner West, the company quickly found its feet during a time when craft beer in Australia was taking flight.

In the decade since its foundation, Young Henrys has become one of the nation’s biggest craft brewers, with its brand a household name and its beers available nationwide. Throughout the company’s journey of growth, sustainability has been a lynchpin of its operations.

“We want to have an impact on our carbon footprint,” says Young Henrys co-founder Richard Adamson. “When we started to broaden our footprint, we looked at putting in sustainable features so we went with a mash filter that uses a lot less water and gets more out of the grains to make us a high-efficiency brewery.

“Then we got approached by community solar group Pingala Co-op and they installed solar panels on our roof. We have a 10-year lease with them and the solar panels are owned by a community group which makes a return on their investment, and we get cheaper, greener power.”

Earlie this year, Young Henrys expanded its solar reach with additional panels from Solargrain on another building. The Newtown brewery is able to generate 40 to 50 per cent of its electricity requirements onsite, in addition to its 2019 power purchase agreement with ENGIE, which has partnered with the Australian Hotels Association.

Now the company is focusing on another initiative, The Algae Project, in conjunction with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Climate Change Cluster and Meat and Livestock Australia.

Research so far indicates that utilising algae could make a significant difference to climate change by consuming CO2 – a by-product of the brewing process – and releasing oxygen.

“If I thought I would be talking about algae when I started this brewery 10 years ago, I would have laughed at you,” says Adamson. “But The Algae Project came about through meeting with people from UTS and being fascinated by all the applications for algae.

“When they were describing how they tended to their algae bioreactors, it sounded like brewing, but in reverse. They talked about sparging and when algae grows the environment gets more alkaline as it produces oxygen, and you have to feed it CO2.

“As CO2 sinks, algae and yeast can have a symbiotic relationship and one can feed the other. The principle is that after growing the algae, it can be fed to cattle to reduce their methane emissions. We already have a supply chain going between breweries and farmers with our spent grain so if we can get this algae as a feed supplement into that system, we can further reduce our carbon footprint.

“There is still more research to do, but we are hoping we can spin this off as a separate company and see other breweries take it on once we have the science proven. We have a patent around the use of algae in this way, and matched funding from Meat and Livestock Australia has helped with the expensive research. They have a pretty ambitious target to be net-neutral by 2030 and are focused on commercial outcomes for this as well.”

Laurence Kain (left) and Dan Watters (right) as part of Capital Brewing Co’s Trees for Tomorrow initiative. Photo: Supplied.

Capital Brewing Co | Fyshwick, ACT

As Australia’s first brewery to achieve Climate Active carbon-neutral certification for its entire organisation, Canberra’s Capital Brewing Co is determined to set a standard for the rest of Australia’s craft brewing industry to follow.

Since launching in 2016, the brewery has staunchly adhered to its sustainability narrative, staying true to its ethos of “Good Natured Brews”. Now it has the certification to prove it.

“We take the approach that if we didn’t exist on the planet, what would the effects be,” says Dan Watters, partnerships, community engagement, sustainability and events at Capital Brewing Co. “This includes everything to do with the business from raw ingredients and packaging material, to freight and how our staff get to work – basically everything that happens as a result of us existing on the planet.

“The most genuine approach to being carbon neutral you can take is rather than just offsetting a small portion of your Scope 1 or Scope 2 emissions, look at your Scope 3 as well. About 10 per cent of our emissions are in Scope 1 and Scope 2, and 90 per cent are in Scope 3. Our top emissions are in aluminium for the cans, followed by freight, and both of these are Scope 3.

“We have learnt a few things in the process of conducting our lifecycle assessment and seeing where our emissions come from, and which ingredients have different emission factors. Australian grain is produced really sustainability compared to Europe and the US so a majority of our raw ingredients come from Australia. We are working with Voyager Craft Malt to see if we can emulate specialty malts from overseas to further reduce our emissions. It’s important for us to reduce our supply chain.”

Achieving Climate Active carbon-neutral certification has been a legitimate way for Capital Brewing Co prove its sustainability credentials to customers, which is also beneficial from a branding viewpoint.

“It has been a means for us to prove to our customers that it’s not greenwashing,” says Watters. “We stand behind it and do everything in our power to be as responsible as we can. We are also very close to B Corp certification, which covers more than environmental aspects, including social responsibility. It’s another way for us to prove we walk the walk.”

As part of the carbon-neutral certification, Capital Brewing Co worked with carbon accounting specialists Pangolin Associates to run the rule over the company and calculate its carbon footprint.

“We worked with Pangolin to determine what our greenhouse gas emissions were and how much carbon credits we needed to purchase,” says Watters. “In that process, we developed a template with Pangolin for other breweries to use to calculate their footprint.

“We can only have so much effect being just one carbon-neutral brewery, but the moment other breweries jump onboard, we can apply pressure to our supply chain and start demanding electric freight, for example. It’s hard to negotiate with current freight suppliers when we are the only one requesting it, but if more companies request it, they will have to start listening.

“We are certainly not guarding our IP [intellectual property] in terms of how we became carbon neutral. We are saying to everyone, we’re in a climate emergency, we need to act.”

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