Sustainability

Water

The old joke—save water by drinking beer—sadly isn’t true. On average, we use 5.5 gallons of water to make one gallon of beer. We’re trying to reduce that figure to 4.5 gallons of water to make one gallon of beer in the future.

Our initiatives include reviewing our brewing processes to look for potential reductions in water usage, surveying our facilities for leaking water sources and repairing them, and closing open loops. We’re also investigating our cleaning practices and researching the most effective and efficient techniques to ensure a clean brewery with less water used.  

Currently: At our Southern Mills production facility, making 1 six pack of beer requires the same amount of water required to fill 4.87 six packs of water

Goal: Reducing water used in our production facility down to 4.5 units of water to 1 unit of beer.

Electricity

Using electricity contributes to global warming because many power plants emit greenhouse gases from combustion of fossil fuels. Over the past few years, we’ve put solar panels on the roofs of our facilities and purchased Green-e certified Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to ensure that 100% of our electricity sourced from the grid is renewable.

Installing solar panels and purchasing RECs are just part of the work we do. Creature Comforts believes strongly in the value of Demand Side Management – reducing the power we use to make beer in our facilities. We have reduced electricity demand in our facilities by using LED lighting, variable speed pumps and motors, and conducting audits to find and eliminate waste.

Natural Gas

We burn natural gas to create steam—this steam provides the necessary heat for our brewing process. Since natural gas is a fossil fuel, we try to limit our usage of this resource as much as possible—we burn 1.28 therms of natural gas to make 1 barrel of beer, which is among the most efficient for craft breweries in America.

To further improve efficiency, we check and repair our steam traps as well as check the combustion quality inside the boiler for optimal conditions. We’re conducting additional research to further optimize our brewing processes—if we can reduce temperatures or required time, we can save even more natural gas in the future.

Goal: repair and replace all damaged steam traps, and finish insulating steam pipes to eliminate wasted heat.

Carbon Dioxide

Breweries purchase carbon dioxide to use in manufacturing operations to carbonate beer and shield processes from oxygenation. It’s a critical gas that drives climate change, so using it wisely and eliminating waste is vital. We’ve reduced our CO2 usage by implementing systems for detecting and repairing leaks, modifying our tank cleaning principles to conserve CO2, implementing a nitrogen generator to replace some CO2 with N2, a gas that does not contribute to climate change.

There are big possibilities in the future to turn this greenhouse gas into a closed loop—implementing a system to capture the CO2 from fermentation of beer and re-using it in our facility is the ideal goal. 

Goal: Fully implement nitrogen into our kegging machines, which should lower our CO2 usage even further.

Waste

We want to make beer, not waste. Through processes, operations, and actions to reduce waste and resources throughout our system lifecycle, we’re working to eliminate any unnecessary waste from our beer production.

Actions we’re currently taking to achieve our waste reduction goals include:

• Sending spent grain to local farms to be used as food for livestock. While this is an industry-norm, we’re proud that our spent grain is staying local
• Purchasing balers for scrap aluminum and cardboard
• Participating in our county’s compost collection service to ensure organic waste materials like leftover food, napkins, and paper towels are composted instead of landfilled
• Sending hard-to-recycle items such as stretch film plastic, batteries, and used motor oil to our local CHaRM (Center for Hard to Recycle Materials) facility on a monthly basis

Because of these diversion practices, in 2021 we received TRUE (Total Resource Use and Efficiency) Silver Level Certification for our Southern Mill facility’s zero waste efforts. Administered by the Green Business Certification, TRUE helps facilities measure, improve, and recognize zero waste performance by encouraging the adoption of sustainable waste management and reduction practices, which contribute to positive environmental, health, and economic outcomes.

Our production facility achieved a 99.8% diversion rate, with less than 1% of waste material generated in our operations heading to a landfill.

We received TRUE Silver certification for Southern Mill in 2021 with a 99.8% diversion rate

We have made a lot of progress, but there is still more work to be done. In 2025 we are introducing a new metric – our Controllable Diversion Rate. Breweries tend to have very high diversion rates due to spent grain from the brewing process having secondary use as livestock feed.

We want to place an emphasis on all other waste streams, so we’re excluding spent grain from our diversion rate calculation in the future. This lets us focus on the diversion rate that we can control – and we want to boost that diversion rate from the current 76% to 90% in 2025.