Tin Whistle Brewing's quest to become a carbon-neutral brewery

Founded in 1995, Tin Whistle Brewery is the original craft brewery of the South Okanagan and now they are one of the first carbon neutral certified breweries in BC. Tin Whistle worked with Climate Smart to measure and reduce their carbon footprint and ultimately achieved certification by reducing its electricity, natural gas, refrigeration and transportation use, installing a new compressor and lighting and purchasing carbon offset credits from the Great Bear Rainforest.

"You have to understand what your carbon footprint is and then go about getting that to zero," said Alexis Esseltine, owner of Tin Whistle Brewery. “We know beer, like all products, has an impact on the natural world, whether it’s through the grains grown and transported to our facilities or the energy, water and waste from production,” she said. “We knew we could make great beer, and we also knew we could lessen our impact.”

Four key areas were identified as impacts

Ingredients

Sourcing locally and thoughtfully makes a difference

Water & Energy

Big batch brewing can be wasteful

Packaging

How we package our products matters

Transportation

Shipping and delivery can quickly add up

By identifying these impacts, Tin Whistle Brewing has created action plans for each of the four areas.

In addition to Tin Whistle’s commitment to being carbon neutral, they promote investing in their local community by donating 5 cents from every can to a local charitable partner and sourcing ingredients as locally as possible. The next milestone that Tin Whistle is pursuing is making a selection of their beer certified organic.

They also plan to work towards a near-zero waste production process. Right now, the spent grains leftover after the brewing process are given away to a farmer who feeds it to his pigs and cows. Tin Whistle is looking at monetizing the spent grain by selling it to a company that will dehydrate it and mill it into flour.

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