Crafting green beer is harder than you think

Posted: April 04, 2025

New Belgium Brewing believes that the beer industry is particularly at risk from the effects of climate change. Extreme weather events are impacting integral crops like hops, malt and barley. Crop fluctuations have knock-on effects, increasing prices, impacting the quality and availability of ingredients and affecting taste.^[1]

The company is one of the U.S.’s largest craft breweries. It’s currently working towards doubling its beer production capacity—and at the same, trying to make its entire business carbon neutral by 2030.^[2]

“The climate crisis is already harming our coworkers, our communities, and our customers here in Asheville and across the country – not to mention threatening the future of beer itself,” said Katie Wallace, Director of Environmental and Social Impact at New Belgium Brewing in a press release.

The brewery isn’t just sitting by and accepting this threat. It’s exploring every avenue to make its facilities more sustainable.

Leading the way with carbon-neutral beer

In 1998, New Belgium Brewing became the first wind-powered brewery. Almost 30 years later, it still led the way, creating America’s first certified carbon-neutral beer, Fat Tire, in 2020. Creating a carbon-neutral beer meant improving its supply chain and production processes, as well as investing in reducing emissions via clean energy.

The company has had an onsite wastewater treatment plant for over twenty years, where water is cleaned before being returned to the city treatment system. The plant captures the methane-rich byproduct to create biogas, producing 11% of the electricity needed by the Fort Collins, Colorado brewery.

It’s also investing heavily in solar. Three years ago, New Belgium’s Asheville site in North Carolina installed a large solar PV system, which, over the next 25 years, will produce enough renewable energy to offset roughly 11,100 tons of carbon dioxide. Solar panels at the Fort Collins site already make enough electricity to power its canning and bottling lines at peak times.

These canning and bottling lines also offered space for improvement. Data analysis showed that bottles were falling over on the production line, creating micro-stops. The company increased its production line efficiency by 30%, in part by addressing this problem. Further analysis indicated that the company could almost double the amount of beer produced on its bottling lines each week, without needing to expand the space, if it continues to optimize its production process.

Electrifying steam boilers: Decarbonizing the brewing process

A key and energy-intensive stage of the brewing process involves steam, which is traditionally generated with fossil-fuel-powered boilers. This year, New Belgium Brewing is partnering with AtmosZero to replace its existing combustion boiler with an electrified heat pump boiler that delivers low-cost, carbon-free steam. The AtmosZero heat pump uses fans to extract heat from the air, which warms liquid glycol, before passing through an evaporator. The closed-loop system uses a heat exchanger to cycle the heated glycol, which is compressed before being used to turn water into steam.

The new boilers can directly replace existing boilers and use half as much electricity as other electric boilers. New Belgium Brewing hopes that the trial will help fulfill 30 to 40% of its steam needs, and, if successful, will go on to replace all four of its boilers with AtmosZero versions to produce all the brewery’s required steam carbon-free.

The data analysis behind consistent flavor

Of course, creating greener beer doesn’t count for much if you can’t keep the flavor of your beer consistent. When New Belgium Brewing started out in the 1990s with one brewery, keeping its beer “flavor-matched” was relatively simple.

But with sites in three different states, it needed to ensure that every beer tasted the same, no matter where it was brewed: people expect “beer that is completely indistinguishable from beer made at all the other facilities,” explained one of its automation engineers, Frank LaBarbera.

New Belgium Brewing built its original Colorado plant from the ground up, with high levels of automation and data collection. However, gaining breweries through acquisitions meant it also inherited facilities with older, more siloed systems. Engineers at New Belgium introduced an automation process that pilots new strategies at its more advanced sites, before rapidly rolling them out to other sites. For instance, engineers realized that the amount of CO₂ and sulphuric acid in the air inside breweries had an effect on the taste of the final product. Within a week, they were visualizing air monitoring data across all sites.

Alongside the work it’s doing in its own sites, New Belgium Brewing has issued a carbon neutrality toolkit for craft breweries, helping smaller businesses start to implement similar changes. As climate change threatens the price and availability of ingredients, the company is doing what it can to protect the planet in the name of good beer.

^{[1] Decreases in global beer supply due to extreme drought and heat
[2] New Belgium Brewing's climate commitments}