October 17 – Remember the pandemic shortages? In your household it may have been toilet paper, flour or chicken wings. For Maine’s roughly 150 craft breweries, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to frightening shortages of CO2, a gas essential to making beer.
The funny thing is that breweries also produce CO2 or carbon dioxide during the beer brewing process. Recently, a few breweries in Maine have turned to technology recently adapted to small craft breweries that allows them to recapture and reuse the CO2 they produce to make their beer. These closed systems can save breweries money, provide certainty in future CO2 shortages and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
They could be the future.
“As these systems become more customizable and affordable, they will truly become the new normal,” said Dave Love, sustainability manager for Maine Beer Company, in an email.
Maine Beer Company, based in Freeport, is one of at least three breweries in the state that have purchased the carbon recovery technology. The others are Lone Pine Brewing, which installed it within days of Maine Beer in 2022, and Sebago Brewing, which is just now getting comfortable with its new system at its Gorham brewery. Bissell Brothers, Baxter Brewing and others are exploring the technology — which until the past five years was too expensive and in some cases too bulky for small breweries to even consider.
“Being able to collect what we have has huge implications because we make it (during the fermentation process), waste it and also buy it,” Peter Dahlen, Sebago’s director of brewery operations, said of CO2 gas. “So when we heard there was technology tailor-made for our facility, it made perfect sense for us to connect the dots.
“If you can put the finances in place for it, it makes a lot of sense for any craft beer company,” Dahlen continued, as he and Sebago Brewing founder and owner Kai Adams excitedly led a tour of their new system.
They hope it will eventually allow them to capture 70-80% of the CO2 emitted as their beer ferments. For now, they’re still buying some CO2, but one day the gas they produce might — “baby steps,” Adams said — not only be used in the brewery, but could also provide power for the taps at their four brewpubs. also.
“Breweries are 100% convinced” of the benefits of carbon recovery, says Luke Truman, sustainability coordinator for the Craft Beverage Sector at the University of Southern Maine. “Any of them would love one of these systems.”
SUPPLY CHAIN CONTROL
At its base, beer is made from grain (often malted barley), hops, yeast and water. But CO2 is so crucial to its production that it is practically a different ingredient.
“In the brewing industry, you use CO2 for basically everything other than the actual brewing,” Truman said, ticking off fermentation, carbonization, packaging and transportation as processes that require the gas. The taps at breweries and brewpubs also need CO2 to function, as Great Lost Bear in Portland painfully experienced in 2022. On a Saturday afternoon that year, a national gas shortage left the pub unable to serve from any of its 60 taps. .
“I think a lot of people took CO2 for granted,” Allagash brewmaster Jason Perkins said of the pre-pandemic era. “It was always available and relatively cheap.”
Pandemic shortages have turned this easy attitude on its head. Breweries store the gas in liquid form in tanks. “We had our tank outside, and it was going further and further down, down, and there was no certainty that a truck would come” to deliver it, Adams recalled of the period of major shortages in 2022. “For us as a company, if that becomes zero, we will close down.”
Sebago and other Maine breweries responded with a series of measures: recapturing units in a very limited number of cases, but also replacing CO2 with nitrogen in the parts of the beer-making process where that is possible; carbonating the beer naturally as it ferments, a technique known as spinning; and finding efficiencies throughout the beer making process to minimize CO2 waste. Such techniques have enabled Baxter Brewing in Lewiston to reduce its carbon consumption by 33%, according to the company’s director of quality, Merritt Waldron, while Allagash has reduced its carbon emissions by 20% in the past two years, according to Perkins.
The immediate CO2 crisis appears to have subsided in this region. Sarah Bryan, executive director of the Maine Brewers’ Guild, said national problems persist, but she has not heard of any recent service disruptions in Maine. However, some local breweries reported recent “force majeure” notices from their suppliers, invoking the clause in their contracts to warn them that shortages could occur, and adding a penny per pound surcharge to the price of CO2.
In both cases, concerns about the supply of CO2 have become a reality in recent years.
“It goes from a fever deficit to ‘Oh, now it’s just a general concern,’” Dahlen said. “It’s just the new reality – yes, it could always be a problem tomorrow.”
Most CO2 is a byproduct of the fossil fuel and ethanol industries; it is a finite resource, dependent on disruptions that seem far removed from the beer industry. All kinds of events, national and international, can influence the offer. Suppose, Truman suggested, that an area that normally supplies the gas is hit by a hurricane; given today’s wild, unpredictable weather patterns, the idea doesn’t seem far-fetched. And small craft breweries in Maine, at the end of a long supply chain, are particularly vulnerable to shortages, he said.
Unless a brewery can control its own CO2 supply, he says, “it’s a huge risk they’re taking every day.”
COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
However, breweries must weigh any risk regarding future CO2 supply against the cost of installing a capture system. Sebago Brewing paid about $150,000 for its new system, made by the Danish company Dalum, “a major capital expenditure,” Adams said. Maine Beer paid about the same, about $135,000 and another $5,000, to adapt the building to house the unit, Love said. “The unit was definitely an investment in infrastructure!” he emailed.
At Allagash, Maine’s largest brewery, costs would be higher, at least half a million dollars, Perkins estimates. The brewery has investigated whether a system can be purchased, but for the time being it is focusing on using less CO2 and – the major environmental boost – on purchasing more local grain. In 2016, Allagash used 60,000 pounds of local grains. Today it consumes £2 million a year.
“That, in terms of pounds, is the biggest contribution to making a pint of beer, and the biggest impact we can have on the local economy and reducing our (carbon) footprint,” he said.
Ultimately there are also savings. For example, Bissell Brothers says it spends about $30,000 a year on purchasing carbon. But even if the idea on the other side of CO2 recovery is for breweries to save money by eliminating or reducing their purchases of CO2, the initial capital costs of the systems remain high.
Sebago Brewing received a grant from the City of Gorham to help cover costs. At Maine Beer, Love said the “urgency” of the installation didn’t give the company time to apply for grants. On the plus side, “the unit will be recouped immediately if we encounter another supply problem,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Truman said he is in discussions with Efficiency Maine. He would like to see a day when Maine breweries can apply for rebates from the agency as a way to encourage technology adaptation. Its price has already dropped significantly. The original systems, Truman said, required a brewery to produce at least 500,000 barrels of beer per year to justify the costs. “Now they can work for a brewery that produces 10,000 barrels a year,” he said.
That has made a difference for Sebago Brewing, which produces 12,000 barrels annually. Although, as with most technology, Adams expects costs to continue to fall, for him the time was right. “CO2,” he said, “is a no-brainer.”
OTHER DIVIDENDS
CO2 is produced when beer is fermented. You can see the gas bubbles gurgling in a bucket connected by a hose to one of Sebago Brewing’s giant fermentation tanks. In the past, that gas would have simply dispersed through the plant’s HVAC system and eventually left the plant. However, with the new Dalum equipment, it is led via a hose from the fermentation tanks to a collection tank. From there it is sent to a unit that compresses and pressurizes the CO2 and sends it – now extremely cold and in liquid form – to a storage tank outside. When the brewery is ready to use the gas to make beer, the purified, high-pressure liquid CO2 flows back in through pipes, where it is vaporized back into a gas.
Sebago Brewing first reached that point in mid-October with its new system: “Looks good on the sustainability front,” an enthusiastic Adams emailed as they tested the process that morning.
The process has environmental benefits that can help reduce a brewery’s carbon footprint: the CO2 is reused. The emissions from the trucks that previously delivered CO2 every month disappear. The beer industry is reducing its dependence on the fossil fuel industry, which would otherwise be the source of the gas.
But as Sebago Brewing tests its new system and learns how to use it most effectively, Adams is looking forward to something completely different, something the casual beer drinker can relate to. After animatedly describing the great taste of spider-fermented beer, he added, “We’ve heard – we haven’t done a lot of evaluations yet because we’re so new, but this recaptured gas that’s introduced into the beer , makes the beer taste even better.”
“The idea is that it is produced from ingredients used to make beer, while other CO2 is not produced from the products used to make beer,” Dahlen explains.
“It’s not made by gas. It’s not made by fossil fuels,” Adams reiterated. “It was made by beer.”
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