Carbon dioxide is easy to overlook at your brewery until the price changes, a delivery gets delayed or supply becomes difficult to secure. But two breweries on opposite ends of the same question are showing why CO₂ may deserve more attention as a business input.
Pure Project in San Diego brought its CO₂ recovery in-house, capturing the gas naturally produced during fermentation and returning it to the brewery’s production process. Meanwhile, California’s Almanac Beer Co. took a different approach, using direct-air-capture technology to produce CO₂ onsite.
The technologies aren’t interchangeable, and neither brewery’s experience should be treated as a universal model. What they do provide is a useful framework for others considering how much control they want over a production input that can affect cost, sustainability and supply security.
