Oct. 17—Remember pandemic shortages? In your household, it may have been toilet paper, flour or chicken wings. For Maine’s about 150 craft breweries, the COVID-19 pandemic engendered scary shortages of CO2, a gas that is essential to make beer.
The funny thing is, breweries also produce CO2, or carbon dioxide, in the beer-making process. Recently, a few Maine breweries have turned to technology newly adapted to small craft breweries that allows them to recapture the CO2 they produce and reuse it to make their beer. These closed-loop systems can save the breweries money, offer security in the event of future CO2 shortages and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
They may well be the future.
“As these systems become more customizable and affordable, they really will be the new normal,” Dave Love, Maine Beer Company’s sustainability manager, said in an email.
Maine Beer Company, which is based in Freeport, is one of at least three breweries in the state that has purchased the carbon recapture technology. The others are Lone Pine Brewing, which installed it within days of Maine Beer in 2022, and Sebago Brewing, just now familiarizing itself with its new system at its brewery in Gorham. Bissell Brothers, Baxter Brewing and others are looking into the technology — which, until the last five years or so, was too expensive and, in some cases, too bulky for small breweries to even consider.
“Being able to collect what we have has tremendous implications because we are making it (in the fermenting process), wasting it and also buying it,” Peter Dahlen, Sebago’s director of brewery operations, said about CO2 gas. “So when we heard there was technology sized for our facility, that really made a lot of sense for us to connect those dots.
“If you can wrangle the finances for it, it makes a whole lot of sense to any craft beer producer,” Dahlen continued, as he and Sebago Brewing founder and owner Kai Adams excitedly led a tour of their new system.
It will, they hope, eventually allow them to capture 70-80% of the CO2 emitted while their beer ferments. For now, they are still buying some CO2, but one day, maybe — “baby steps,” Adams said — the gas they produce will not only be used at the brewery but can supply the power for the taps in their four brew pubs, as well.
“Breweries are 100% convinced” of the merits of carbon recapture, said Luke Truman, sustainability coordinator for the Craft Beverage Sector at the University of Southern Maine. “Every single one of them would love, love, love to have one of these systems.”
SUPPLY CHAIN CONTROL
At base, beer is made from grain (often malted barley), hops, yeast and water. But CO2 is so critical to its production, it’s practically another ingredient.
“In the brewing business, you use CO2 for basically everything beyond actually brewing,” Truman said, ticking off fermentation, carbonization, packaging and transportation as processes that need the gas. The taps at breweries and brew pubs also require CO2 to operate, as Great Lost Bear in Portland painfully experienced in 2022. On a Saturday afternoon that year, a national shortage in the gas meant the pub was 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 inexpensive.”
Pandemic shortages upended such easygoing attitudes. Breweries store the gas in liquid form in tanks. “We had our tank outside, and it was going down, down, down, and there was no certainty that there was a truck coming” to deliver it, Adams recalled of the period of dire shortages in 2022. “For us as a business, when that hits zero, we shut down.”
Sebago and other Maine breweries responded with a series of measures — recapture units in a very few instances, but also substituting nitrogen for CO2 in the parts of the beermaking process where that’s possible; naturally carbonating the beer while it ferments, a technique known as spunding; and finding efficiencies all along the beer-making process to minimize waste of CO2. Such techniques have allowed Baxter Brewing in Lewiston to reduce its CO2 usage by 33%, according to the company’s quality director, Merritt Waldron, while Allagash has curbed its CO2 by 20% in last two years, Perkins said.
The immediate CO2 crisis seems to have eased in this region. Sarah Bryan, executive director of the Maine Brewers’ Guild, said national problems remain, but she has not heard of recent Maine service disruptions. Some local breweries, though, reported recent “force majeure” notices from their suppliers, the clause in their contracts invoked to alert them that shortages may be coming, and adding a penny per pound surcharge to the price of CO2.
In either case, in the last few years, concerns about the supply of CO2 have become a fact of life.
“It goes from a fever shortage pitch to ‘Oh, now it’s just a general concern all the time,’ ” Dahlen said. “It’s just the new reality — yeah, it always could be a problem tomorrow.”
Most CO2 is a byproduct of the fossil fuel and ethanol industry; it’s a finite resource, dependent on disruptions that might seem remote from the beer industry. All sorts of events, national and international, can affect its supply. Suppose, Truman suggested, an area that normally supplies the gas is hit with a hurricane; given today’s ferocious, unpredictable weather patterns, the idea doesn’t seem far-fetched. And Maine small craft breweries, at the end of a long supply chain, are especially vulnerable to shortages, he said.
Unless a brewery can control its own CO2 supply, he said, “it’s a massive risk they are taking every day.”
COST/BENEFIT ANALYSIS
Breweries must evaluate any risk about the future supply of CO2, however, against the cost of installing a recapture system. Sebago Brewing paid about $150,000 for its new system, made by the Danish company Dalum, “a big capital expense,” Adams said. Maine Beer paid roughly the same, about $135,000 and another $5,000 to modify its building to accommodate the unit, Love said. “The unit was definitely an infrastructure investment!” he emailed.
At Allagash, Maine’s largest brewery, the costs would be higher, at least half a million dollars, Perkins estimated. The brewery has explored buying a system but, for now, is concentrating on using less CO2 and — its big environmental push — sourcing more local grain. In 2016, Allagash used 60,000 pounds of local grains. Today, it uses 2 million pounds a year.
“That’s the largest input, pound-wise, into making a pint of beer, and the biggest effect we can have on the local economy and reducing our (carbon) footprint,” he said.
There are eventual savings, too. Bissell Brothers, for instance, says it spends about $30,000 a year buying CO2. But even if the idea at the far end of carbon recapture is that breweries save money by ending or reducing their purchases of CO2, the upfront capital cost of the systems remains high.
Sebago Brewing got a grant from the town of Gorham to help defray the expense. At Maine Beer, Love said the “urgency” of the installation did not leave the company time to seek any grants. On the plus side, “the payback on the unit is immediate if we hit another supply snag,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, Truman said he is in talks with Efficiency Maine. He’d like to see a day when Maine breweries can apply for rebates from the agency as a way to encourage adaptation of the technology. Its price has already dropped significantly. The original systems, Truman said, required that a brewery produce at least 500,000 barrels of beer a year to justify the expense. “Now they can work for a brewery that produces 10,000 barrels a year,” he said.
That’s what has made the difference for Sebago Brewing, which produces 12,000 barrels annually. Though Adams expects, as with most technology, that the costs will continue to come down, for him the time was right. “CO2,” he said, “is a no-brainer.”
OTHER DIVIDENDS
CO2 is created as beer ferments. You can see the gas bubbles gurgling in a bucket hooked up with a hose to one of Sebago Brewing’s giant fermenting tanks. In the past, that gas would have simply been dispersed through the plant’s HVAC system and eventually have left the facility. With the new Dalum equipment, though, a hose will rout it from the fermentation tanks into a collection tank. From there, it will be sent into a unit that compresses and pressurizes the CO2 and sends it — now extremely cold and in liquid form — to a holding tank outside. When the brewery is ready to use the gas to make beer, the purified, highly pressured liquid CO2 flows through tubes back inside, where it is vaporized back into a gas.
Sebago Brewing reached that point for the first time with its new system in mid-October: “Looking good on sustainability,” an eager 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 each month disappear. The beer industry lessens its reliance 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 else entirely, something the ordinary beer drinker can relate to. After animatedly describing the awesome taste of spunding-fermented beer, he added, “We’ve heard — we haven’t done a bunch of evaluations because we’re so new, but this re-collected gas introduced in the beer makes the beer taste even better.”
“The idea being it’s produced from ingredients that you make beer with, where other CO2, it’s not produced from the products that make beer,” Dahlen explained.
“It’s not made by gas. It’s not made by fossil fuel,” Adams reiterated. “It’s made by beer.”
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