BrewDog Achieves Carbon Negative Status, Invests $39 Million in Global Sustainability Efforts

Scotland-headquartered multinational craft beer maker BrewDog now removes twice as much carbon from the air as it emits, the company’s founders announced during their annual shareholders meeting for members of its Equity for Punks crowd investment platform.

“As we’ve dug deeper here to educate ourselves more and more, we were hit by the blindingly stark realization that we weren’t doing nearly, nearly enough. In fact, what we were doing was almost pitiful, and we were part of the problem,” BrewDog co-founder James Watts said. “The science is clear — we are sleepwalking off the edge of a cliff.

“We’ve got an imminent climate crisis, and huge change is needed; huge change is needed now, so we didn’t want to be part of the problem,” he continued.

BrewDog unveiled a $39 million sustainability plan announcing its purchase of 2,050 acres of grazing land in the Scottish Highlands that will become the “BrewDog Forest” in which the company will plant 1 million trees to offset carbon emissions.

“Trees are nature’s carbon killers,” BrewDog co-founder Martin Dickie said, adding that the BrewDog Forest will promote biodiversity and natural flood attenuation and eventually become a destination to drive economic development.

As the forest takes root, BrewDog has announced partnerships with conservation funds in the United Kingdom (The Woodland Trust, Ribble Rivers Trust), Australia (Carbon Neutral) and Canada (Nature Conservancy of Canada) to offset carbon emissions until the 1 million trees are planted.

At BrewDog’s Ellon, Scotland-based brewery, all electricity comes from wind turbines, and spent grain is converted into biomethane gas, which replaced fossil fuels used in the brewing process, according to the sustainability report. Part of the company’s “fast-track 24 month plan to reduce the carbon footprint of our operations, along with our journey to become zero-waste” includes capturing the CO2 created in fermentation to carbonate beers for packaging or kegging, and an anaerobic digester bio-plant that “turns our waste brewery water into pure H2O and biomethane.”

BrewDog isn’t alone in looking to capture the CO2 it creates in fermentation. In the U.S., the gas is in short supply, as its production has declined, because it is a byproduct of ethanol production, part of the manufacturing of gasoline. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Americans to stay home as much as possible, demand for gasoline plummeted, as did its production.

In the report, BrewDog detailed the 2019 carbon footprints of its five business units — breweries in the U.K. (49,908 tons of CO2 equivalent), U.S. (7,249 tons of CO2 equivalent), Germany (613 tons of CO2 equivalent), Australia (23 tons of CO2 equivalent), and the 102 bars it operates worldwide (10,165 tons of CO2 equivalent). To quantify these figures, BrewDog worked with lead scientific advisor Mike Berners-Lee to calculate the carbon emitted in parts of beer’s lifecycle:

  • Scope 1 — direct emissions from BrewDog’s facilities and vehicles;
  • Scope 2 — indirect emissions from purchased electricity, heat, steam and cooling;
  • Scope 3 — indirect emissions throughout BrewDog’s total supply chain and other business activities.

To bolster its sustainability efforts in the U.S., BrewDog plans to install solar panels to power its production brewery in Canal Winchester, Ohio, and invest in electric vehicles for its delivery fleet. The company also plans to install an anaerobic digester and a wastewater treatment plant in 2021. And, to mimic the work it’s doing with the BrewDog Forest, the company will plant a hop farm and an apple orchard on its Ohio campus.

BrewDog completed its U.S. brewery in 2017; the facility produced 43,559 barrels of beer in 2019, according to the Brewers Association.

Other environmental efforts detailed in the sustainability report, titled “Make Earth Great Again,” include:

  • Make Earth Great Again pilsner, brewed with surplus bread to combat food waste;
  • The Overworks Sour Beers series, which uses 100% surplus fruit that is “cosmetically defective or at the end of their shelf-life;”
  • Out-of-code or defective beer that’s distilled into vodka at the company’s distillery in Scotland;
  • Spent spelt used to bake dog biscuits;
  • Cans with old labels or design errors or production overruns relabeled, filled and sold on BrewDog’s e-commerce platform.

“For us it’s very important to be as transparent as possible here, with everything on the line for what we believe in,” Watts said. “We’re definitely going to make mistakes, but we’re going to share the good, we’re going to share the bad. We’re going to do all we can to raise the bar when it comes to sustainability.”