Sustainability
Bright Spot
Bright Spot was designed to have a lower carbon footprint than our typical beer. Everything in the recipe is sourced from nearby hop and malt providers:
- Troubadour Malting (Ft Collins, Colorado)
- Root Shoot Malting (Loveland, Colorado)
- Billy Goat Hop Farm (Montrose, Colorado)
These local ingredients are 19 times closer than our average supplier, which means they carry significantly less carbon emissions from shipping. We were also able to brew with Kernza malt. Unlike traditional grains, it doesn’t need to be replanted every year, which reduces soil disturbance and increases carbon sequestration.
This beer was created as an Earth Day passion project, but as a brewery we focus on sustainability year-round. Our green team has been working hard on resource reduction efforts, particularly after achieving Colorado Green Business Network certification last year. Read more about our sustainability practices below!
Our mission is to make excellent beer and serve as a gathering place for our community.
Embedded in that pursuit is a non-negotiable commitment to social and environmental responsibility. We’re immensely proud of the accolades our beer has earned, but just as proud of the recognition we’ve received for how we operate behind the scenes.
For us, sustainability isn’t a single initiative or a finish line. It’s a practice of everyday incremental improvement. Each year, we build on the last: cutting down our footprint, fine-tuning our processes, and helping our team build better habits.
The result is a series of small, intentional changes that add up to something meaningful. Here’s a look at some of the impact we’ve made:
RECENT PROJECTS
- After carefully running trials and measuring results, we modified our brewhouse cleaning practices to reduce water and chemical usage per cycle by 36%. We clean our equipment after every brew, so these savings add up quickly! We estimate this will conserve 600 liters of cleaning chemicals and over 7,000 gallons of water per year.
- To make sure our beer doesn’t get oxidized, we purge all of our tanks with CO2 before we fill them with product. In 2024 we invested in a new piece of equipment that monitors temperature and oxygen levels in real time, which increased accuracy and prevented excessive flushing with CO2. Conservative projections indicate this will save more than 3,000 pounds of CO2 annually.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
- 96% of all of our to-go beer is packaged in aluminum cans. Aluminum is lighter than glass (therefore easier to ship) and infinitely recyclable - 73% of our average can contains already-recycled aluminum
- 70% of our yeast is propagated in-house, rather than purchasing a new pitch for each brew
- 100% of our spent grain is donated to a local cattle ranch
- We use a N2/CO2 gas blend for serving beer in the taproom in order to reduce our carbon footprint. This simply means with every beer poured, we use less CO2
WASTE REDUCTION
- We use reusable keg pallet straps and PalletWrapz for all of our in-house pallet transfers. We estimate this saves over 7,000 feet of plastic wrap annually
- We also moved away from non-recyclable HDPE plastic 4pk holders to cardboard ones - saving close to 13,000 lbs of plastic annually
- In 2025, we installed a grain silo at our Aurora Arts brewhouse - a move that allows us to source malt in bulk rather than in individual 55lb grain bags. By transitioning to silo storage, we’re reducing our plastic waste by an estimated 3,500 bags per year (or roughly 800lbs in solid waste), while also streamlining delivery logistics and lowering our overall packaging footprint. It’s a small shift with a big impact on sustainability.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
- Our brewhouse is designed to allow us to recapture the water flowing through our heat exchanger for use in the next brew via our hot liquor tank (HLT). Not only does this decrease our overall water usage, but it also decreases the energy required to heat the water in our HLT. Our new brewhouse at our Aurora Arts District location was designed to maximize energy recapture as well - including a steam condensate return system which loops pre-heated water back into our HLT.
- ⅓ of our delivery fleet is electric, thereby reducing our fossil fuel consumption