Steam Whistle Brewery Greening Initatives

Press Release from Steam Whistle Brewery

Hope this email finds you well Troy. For over seven years, Steam Whistle Brewing has been crafting beer. They have also been leaders in "greening" their brewery. Over the last few years, the brewery has undertaken several environment initiatives. I have included several of those initiatives below.

Steam Whistle's Current Day "Green" Building Features
Inspired to reduce our footprint on this earth, Steam Whistle Brewing continues the tradition of considering renewable resources in our building maintenance and beer production.

Deep Lake Water Cooling
Rather than using conventional air conditioners that rely on mechanical chillers using harmful CFC refrigerants and enormous amounts of energy, Steam Whistle Brewing has opted to use Enwave's Deep Lake Water Cooling, a smart energy that will lead Toronto towards a sustainable future. Through three intake pipes 83 meters below the surface of Lake Ontario, Enwave draws water from a permanent layer of icy cold (4 C) water. This naturally chilled water make's it way to the John Street Pumping Station where heat exchangers facilitate the energy transfer between the icy-cold lake water and the Enwave closed-loop chilled water supply. This cold energy cools our brewery (the first stop on the line) using only the coldness from the lake water, not the actual water.

This system uses 90% less energy than conventional air conditioners, eliminating 61 megawatts from Ontario's electricity grid – the equivalent of the energy needed to annually supply 6800 homes.
It also removes 79,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air, equivalent to taking over 15,800 cars off the road.
This system also reduces ozone-depleting refrigerants, noise, pollution and humidity generated by chiller, fans and cooling towers of conventional air conditioners.

Steam Heat
In our manufacturing and building climate control systems, Steam Whistle uses steam, the most ecologically efficient form of heat energy. Better yet, we get our steam from Enwave's Centralized Steam Plant eliminating the need for Steam Whistle to have its own boiler on site. We use steam heat to boil water in brewing, to wash our beer bottles, in heating our building, and of course to sound-off our functioning steam whistles!

100% Green Electricity
Steam Whistle is an early adopter of Bullfrog Power, the first 100% green, carbon-free electricity retailer in Ontario. Bullfrog sources power exclusively from wind and low-impact hydro generators who meet or exceed the federal government's Environmental ChoiceM Program EcoLogoM standard for renewable electricity. Wind power is among the cleanest sources of energy available, producing no emissions that contribute to air pollution or greenhouse gases. EcoLogo-certified low-impact water power must meet a range of environmental criteria including the protection of indigenous species and local habitat, and measures to minimize fish mortality and to preserve fish migration patterns.

Reduce – Reuse - Recycle
The Good Beer Folks continue to look for environmentally friendly products and programs to support Green Manufacturing.

We use only bio-diesel in our fleet of delivery vehicles.
The 'spent' grain from our brewing process is reused as farmer's feed.
Our green glass bottles have 30% more glass than industry brown bottles so are built to last for up to 35 uses, twice as long as the industry bottle.
Our painted label reduces to zero the amount of glue and paper that would enter our effluent if paper labels were washed off our bottles with each refilling.
All packaging materials (cardboard, shrink-wrap, broken glass) are collected for recycling from our operations.
We use Biodegradable cups to serve our draught beer at outdoor events.