When you are told your overall co2 usage needs to be cut by more than half due to supply chain issues, you need to think fast. Fast thinking is what Dorchester Brewing has been doing for the past month or so and the Boston-area brewery shared with Brewer some quick steps they took in reducing reliance on co2 and converting production processes to nitrogen where they could.
Saying that they are not planning to be the next Guinness or a nitro-beer heavy brewery as the fix, Dorchester Director of Brewing Operations, James Haugh, explained that they knew that they needed at least an aggregate of how much co2 they use for their finished beers on a given week.
“Then we also ran some calculations to see how much co2 would keep our tap lines flowing without any disruption to service,” he said. “We’re obviously purging all of our bright tanks, carbonating our beers, and then providing co2 blankets for our canning lines and seaming machines. So we all kind of got together and figured out where we can supplement nitrogen into some of these processes.”
“If you don’t have co2, you’re not going anywhere fast, right?”
Every brewery, from startups to the biggest breweries, can be more mindful of how they’re using this finite resource, he added. So how do you pivot to keep the train on the tracks and moving forward? Here are places to look at first.
“I think everybody is going to come out better on the other side of this because they’re going to be more mindful,” Haugh said. “Nitrogen is 70% of the air we breathe. You might pay a little bit more per pound when you’re buying it, but you know that those resources aren’t going anywhere. So it’s almost worth a little bit more just to know that these processes that — I need co2 for, even if I have a smaller supply of it — I can concentrate that supply on the stuff that I can’t get away with changing the gas on.”
It was especially important to Dorchester to get things quickly done because Haugh says about 90% of the brewery’s production is for other breweries.
“When you get that type of scare, right off the get-go, you’re just thinking of your partner’s production continuing to flow and to get them their beer where they need it and when they need it,” Haugh said. “There was an extra level of putting our heads together to figure out how we can navigate and get over some of these hurdles.”
The brewery also has said they will offer up help to breweries in New England during their transition to nitrogen by using their dedicated QA/QC lab, team, and facilities to test DOs and can seams for free.
“We were thinking of ways of how we could help even though we are in the same trenches as a lot of other people, we do have some resources that could be made available,” Haugh said. “We’re just trying to do our part, it’s a big industry, but it’s also a fairly small industry.”
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