Sierra Nevada Brewing is Going Green: An Interview

I recently chatted with Cheri Chastain, sustainability coordinator at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., about its ongoing efforts to reach complete sustainability at the brewery, and to do its part to help our environment. Here is a transcript of our conversation:

Me: What do you do at Sierra Nevada?

Cheri: My current official title is Sustainability Coordinator; I coordinate our recycling program, I oversee our energy & water conservation programs, our storm drainage program, our green house gas emissions reports - really, anything related to the environment comes back to me. It keeps me pretty busy.

Me: How did you end up at Sierra Nevada?

CC: Actually, I was hired as the Recycling Assistant. I went from there to Coordinator, and really it just mushroomed from there. They figured that "Sustainability" captured all of what I was doing. At the time, I didn't have any brewing experience but I wrote my masters' thesis on sustainability and it was certainly something I was passionate about. So when it turned out that Sierra Nevada was hiring, I jumped at the chance; it's worked out really well.

Me: What is your favorite part about working at a brewery?

CC: Brewing produces such a wonderful product to begin with, and any opportunity I can have to make that product sustainable is awesome. I would want to work towards sustainability where ever I was but brewing, unlike other places I might have ended up, is not a dry industry, so to speak; it's a fun industry to be in.

Me: I've read everywhere recently that Sierra Nevada Brewing is in the process of "going green"; what exactly does that mean for you guys?

CC: Honestly, our owner Ken Grossman has run the brewery in a "green" fashion from the beginning. Sierra Nevada was founded using recycled dairy equipment for our brewing process; we've always been driven by using what's all ready readily available to us and we've maintained that to this day. A lot of what we do is simply just our culture and what we do here. We've been working on being good environmental stewards from the beginning; it's something we've done since the brewery was founded in 1979.