Building our second home in Mills River posed a new and exciting challenge for us – year -round rain! While drought conditions continue to become the new normal at our headquarters in Chico, California, Mills River receives 50 inches of rainfall each year. We installed 12 cisterns along the front of the brewery, each capable of holding 6,500 gallons of rainwater collected from the rooftop. We can collect an additional 450,000 gallons in an underground cistern behind the brewery which receives rainwater from the permeable parking lot and bioswales. When all the cisterns are at capacity, excess stormwater is diverted to an engineered streambed with multiple settling ponds to slow its release into the French Broad River.

Our energy efficiency and heat recovery programs were a key component of Mills River’s Platinum LEED certification. In fact, the Mills River brewery has a 50% energy cost savings when benchmarked against a standard brewery of the same size. Most of these savings came from innovative, closed loop, heat recovery systems. Mimicking our Chico, California brewery, we recover waste heat throughout the brewing process and use it to generate hot water and steam for the next batch of beer. Building a new brewery also gave us the opportunity to design a closed loop system we’d been dreaming about for years – recovering heat from our air compressors! This thermal energy is used to preheat incoming water to 120F, reducing energy consumption overall and creating a very efficient brewing process from start to finish.

Our Mills River brewery is nestled within 200 acres of lush, forested land in Western North Carolina. When we broke ground in 2012, we noticed the forest was quite unhealthy- hosting an overwhelming amount of invasive and non-native species. Among the first people to be hired at the new site were natural resource specialists tasked with rehabilitating the property, including about a mile of riverfront property along the French Broad River. It’s been a stunning transformation and we continue to see a return of native wildlife and plant species every year.

Lighting is one of the easiest ways to reduce energy consumption and the most cost effective lighting comes directly from the sun through skylights and windows! When designing our brewery, we maximized the use of natural light wherever possible. Natural lighting provides a healthier and more comfortable environment for employees and visitors and was a component in achieving LEED Platinum certification. A sophisticated lighting system uses ambient light sensors and automation to detect natural light before turning on any additional lights.

In 2016, our Mills River brewery became the first production brewery in the U.S. to achieve Platinum certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. While we had set out to build a facility that met LEED silver standards, we decided to go further as construction progressed. Most facilities only include a building’s design and construction when applying for certification, but we took it a step further and included brewing process equipment in our energy calculations, making the platinum achievement that much more impressive. LEED is a globally recognized rating system for the design and construction of environmentally responsible buildings and considers a large subset of construction factors including energy generation and efficiency, stormwater management, water efficiency, landscaping, indoor environmental quality, and construction materials and practices.

Closing the loop and bringing byproducts back into production is something Sierra Nevada thinks about all the time. Carbon dioxide from fermentation is a perfect example of this closed loop thinking. Instead of venting naturally produced CO₂ from fermentation, we recover it, clean it up and send it right back into the brewery to pressurize tanks and assist with packaging. Recovering our own CO₂ reduces operating expenses, as we rarely need to purchase CO₂, and eliminates hundreds of delivery trucks on the road.

Brewery wastewater contains a high percentage of organic material and can be expensive and difficult to treat in a traditional municipal wastewater treatment plant. Our onsite, pre-treatment facility removes 95% of organic solids from our brewing wastewater and spent yeast through anaerobic digestion before it continues to the municipal plant for further treatment. A methane-rich biogas is generated during the digestion process which is then used to produce electricity in our microturbines as well as our boilers to offset the use of natural gas.

We take waste reduction and diversion seriously at Sierra Nevada and have long been known for our leadership in zero waste. Our Mills River brewery was certified as a Platinum TRUE Zero Waste facility in 2016. In addition to focusing on upstream management, we source separate as many materials as possible to create clean streams of high value recyclables that also provide a source of revenue. We’re proud to maintain a 99.8% diversion rate from landfill through our comprehensive reduction, recycling, and composting efforts.

As a leader in zero waste, we understand that most smaller breweries don’t have the volume or resources to manage recycling the way we do. So, in 2021 we received a grant through the NC Department of Natural Resources and launched the Western North Carolina Brewery Recycling Cooperative at the American Recycling sorting facility (now Sonoco) in Candler, NC. Breweries and other craft companies from the surrounding four counties can drop off their recyclable materials like shrink wrap, PET strapping, and malt sacks directly to the cooperative. Without the drop-off facility, most of these materials would be landfilled due to the inefficiencies of providing bulk recycling programs to all of these businesses individually.