Ally Perry fills kegs with beer last week at the Roadhouse Brewing Company plant on Gregory Lane. The brewery was recently recognized for efforts to combat climate change through sustainable and innovative practices.
Ally Perry fills kegs with beer last week at the Roadhouse Brewing Company plant on Gregory Lane. The brewery was recently recognized for efforts to combat climate change through sustainable and innovative practices.
What’s better than being a successful business? A successful business that’s also doing its best for the planet.
Roadhouse Brewing Co. has been named a “Best for the World 2022” Certified B Corporation for Performance and Excellence Beyond Profit — for the second year in a row.
The local brewery’s recognition stems from the company’s capacity to surmount the national CO2 shortage and nationwide freight challenges while combatting climate change through continuing sustainable and innovative practices.
Best for the World is a distinction granted by B Lab, a nonprofit striving to transform the global economy to benefit all people, communities and the planet. B Lab judges B Corporations (B Corps) whose verified B Impact scores in the five impact areas evaluated in the B Impact Assessment — community, customers, environment, governance and workers — rank in the top 5% of all B Corps in their corresponding size group. Based on the B Impact assessment, Roadhouse earned an overall score of 85.4. The median score for ordinary businesses that complete the assessment is 50.9.
Since its first batch of hops, Roadhouse Brewing Co. has built its operation with sustainability in mind, as stewards of the environment, and in particular the Tetons. At the helm of reinventing the wheel is Jon Courtois, an employee-owner, and the production manager and sustainability coordinator.
“Our goal in everything we do centers around being good for the environment and good for business,” Courtois said. “These categories have long been seen as mutually exclusive and at Roadhouse we aim to change that way of thinking.”
Two practical and mechanical means for carrying out that mission are the company’s CO2 recovery or recapture system and the retrofitted louver system, which is in addition to the solar panels, high-grade recycling practices and an employee-focused business model where after several years of employment, employees become eligible for employee-ownership.
Though the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest are not experiencing the same level of stress as the East Coast, there is a national CO2 shortage. But Roadhouse has engineered a process to remove CO2 as a continued input by having a recovery system in place. The system helps keep the brewery in stock by pulling CO2 from fermenting beer tanks and recapturing it to use in carbonating beers and purging cans. Roadhouse’s system was developed by Earthly Labs.
“Essentially, you hook up a sealed vessel to your fermenting tank and your by-product of fermentation, your alcohol and carbon dioxide, will travel up through the racking arm on your fermenter,” Courtois said. “Typically, if you were to go to any brewery, there is a 5-gallon blow-off bucket with water in it, and that CO2 is then transferred to what looks like a refrigerator.”
But at Roadhouse the brewery compresses, filters and then liquefies the CO2 to store it in a tank.
“And then, from there we use it. It goes from liquid back to gas and we can use it throughout the brewery. So we’re creating our own CO2 within our brewing process,” Courtois said as he detailed a brewing process that is striving to become a closed-loop system.
The louver system is another moment of ingenuity and one that uses Jackson Hole’s long supply of frigid winter air to stabilize ideal cooler temperatures 7-9 months out of the year.
“Everyone focuses on the third R [recycle], which is important and something we clearly embrace at Roadhouse, but it’s our ability to Reduce that’s our greatest strength, and in Reusing where possible we build sustainability across multiple industry touch points,” Courtois said. “We are constantly searching for ways to lighten our footprint, further our commitment and protect our business operations.”
Courtois said he gets weekly questions via emails and phone from breweries about the recapture system.
“Probably three or four times a week someone asks about our system, how it’s working, and how they can implement it at their brewery and I’m always willing to help.”
As its beer consciousness continues to deepen, so does Roadhouse’s network, including a recent all B Corp collaboration.
“We just did a project in a collaboration beer, called the global Kush — and it’s truly a sustainable beer. All of the companies involved were B Corps. It is just another way to emphasize what we’re trying to do and who we want to work with — and still make great beer,” Courtois said.
Contact Tibby Plasse via 732-7071 or jlove@jhnewsandguide.com.
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