Geoff and Marcy Larson’s Alaska story begins similarly to those of so many others in this region: what was meant to be one season of big adventure has, all these decades later, stretched into the adventure of a lifetime. Having met one summer in Montana’s Glacier National Park, a season in Glacier Bay the next year was enough to convince the two that they’d found their home.
“We loved living here because where else can you catch a salmon, hike on a glacier, and walk through a rainforest in the same day?” said Marcy Larson. “We were here in this area because of Glacier Bay connections, and we looked around where we would put a brewery in Alaska, and Southeast made a lot of sense… There was a problem with no roads, but we were young. We figured that out.”
As it turns out, that whole “no roads” thing ended up being a major driving force behind many of the sustainable brewing operations they have in place today.
Geoff, a chemical engineer, and Marcy, an aspiring bush pilot at the time, began Alaskan Brewing Co. when there were less than 100 breweries in the country, not a single one of which was in Alaska. With 88 investors spread from Kotzebue to Ketchikan, it was clear from the get-go that this would be a community-driven operation and one that had a responsibility to the ecosystems that brought the Larsons to this neck of the woods to begin with.
First on the docket was minimizing the carbon output associated with manufacturing.
“Back in the 90s, we were buying CO2 from Seattle because you can’t get it here,” said Curtis Holmes, plant manager for Alaskan Brewing Co. To ship CO2 effectively, it needs to stay refrigerated to negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit – however, the tankers coming up from Seattle weren’t refrigerated at the time. “I remember one really hot summer we bought 30,000 pounds of CO2, but we got like 14,000 by the time it got here.”
Needing CO2 to counterpressure tanks and purge bottles and cans of oxygen but being unable to reconcile the environmental and financial cost of shipments, the company installed the first craft brewery CO2 reclamation system in 1998. CO2 is a natural byproduct of brewing. Instead of releasing into the atmosphere, however, they’re able to capture it, purify it, and reuse it in their operations. In doing so, they’re saving over a million pounds of carbon dioxide from entering Juneau airways each year.
“The really cool thing that people don’t know is that our CO2 is being made by grain and not by diesel, which is how CO2 down south is mostly made,” Larson said. “So we’re not using fossil fuels. (…) One of our marketing people early on said: ‘We brew the way we brew because of where we are,’ and it makes sense. We are in a unique situation here that has forced us to be innovative and to do things a little differently.”
The next roadblock came in the form of another massive byproduct inherent to the industry: spent grain, a combination of soaked malt and grains leftover from the beginning of the brew process.
Connected to the road system and nearby to the country’s cattle industry, it’s common practice for breweries down south to sell this byproduct to farms as feed. Cattle being few and far between up here, the team had to get more creative.
“Spent grain typically is given to farmers for either fertilizer or cattle food, but in Juneau we don’t have any of that so that was a little bit of a problem,” said Larson. “We didn’t want to put it in a landfill because that’d be a total waste when we were doing everything we could do to keep stuff out of the landfill (in the first place).”
“We had a dump truck back then and I think in a month we would fill it and take it to the community garden,” said Holmes. “But, when we put in the big brew house I think we were filling a dump truck per batch and we were doing four batches a day.” Quickly, the community garden was outgrown and they were forced to ship their grain to Seattle. Then a new problem emerged: the spent grain was so wet and hot that by the time it got down there it was completely fermented.
Truly, necessity is the mother of invention and this spent grain dilemma started Holmes on a 20-year journey that ended with Alaskan Brewing Company’s Beer Powered Beer system. In trying to figure out how to dry the spent grain for easier and less expensive shipping, they ended up creating a natural fuel source to power their manufacturing.
Utilizing a mash filter that is commonly used in Europe, Holmes was able to literally squeeze the water out of the spent grains which made for a byproduct less water saturated and easier to dry. This, paired with a different process for grinding the grain so that it was pulverized more uniformly, led to a stock that could then be dried and eventually burned as fuel in a steam boiler during the manufacturing process – displacing more harmful fuel sources like oil and gas.
“Brewing is very energy intensive. In any brew house you go to, (most of the) vessels either have steam, electric, or natural gas heat,” said Holmes. “So we have a fuel fire boiler, but this (spent grain) displaced about half the fuel. It’s like you start brewing and then it’s just self-generating.”
Utilizing a spent grain steam broiler that went in in 2011, now the brewery is able to take the nearly 60,000 pounds of spent grain they produce per week and dispose of it as a clean fuel source they use to continue forward with their operations. This process does away with shipping emissions associated with getting spent grain to the lower 48 and dependence on fossil fuels to power their boilers.
“We learned how to take a waste product that’s very difficult to burn and to figure out a way to dry it and use it as fuel. The more beer we make the more fuel we make to make more beer,” Larson said. “That’s what Alaska is about, and that’s what Juneau was especially about. One hundred years ago they invented lake tap electricity: You didn’t have to destroy salmon streams (to make electricity). All of this stuff – inventiveness is just kind of natural for this area.”
Victoria Petersen is an Anchorage-based freelance journalist covering food, culture and climate.
