Solar-powered brewery？ Cheers to sustainable beer!
Bright’s beautiful weather and mountainous terrain was the reason our founders made the tree-change to the High Country in the early 2000s. The rich natural environment that surrounds the Bright, the mountain-fed water of the Ovens River, the close proximity to the hop growing region of the Ovens Valley, and the awesome outdoor lifestyle that the region provides is why Bright Brewery exists today. “We put a brewery here in Bright because we love the rich natural environment that surrounds the town and the awesome outdoor lifestyle that it provides,” explains Bright Brewery founder and owner Scott Brandon.
”The environment is one of the biggest drivers of Bright’s economy, regularly drawing many visitors here across the seasons for the spectacular scenery and alpine adventures, so it is imperative for us to do our part in sustaining it.”Playing our part in helping to sustain the environment that surrounds us is at the heart of our operations and one of our core values. We seek to be genuinely environmentally conscious in our organisational culture and business approach.
Here are just some of the other sustainable measures you’ll find around Bright Brewery:
Solar brewing – We have 50kW of solar on the roof of our Great Alpine Road venue, which produces about a third of our daily energy usage. In its lifetime, our solar system has saved 3772 trees (as at April 2019).
Reduce, reuse recycle – around the brewery, you’ll find many repurposed items including old kegs as light shades, wash basins and seats, plastic kegs as bins, keg bladders as light shades, and pallets as tables and dividers.
We recognise that our two steam-driven breweries are highly energy and water intensive, so we attempt tomitigate this impact by brewing sustainably with back to back brews, which recycles both heat and water and significantly reduces energy consumption.
Our Green Transport Scheme encourages employees to walk, cycle, run, or even paraglide to work instead of driving. Employees are rewarded for every commute they make without a car.
Our beer is a genuine low food-mile product! The water comes from the snow-fed water of the Ovens River, which flows past our brewery; the hops are grown 10 minutes down the road at the Rostrevor Hop Gardens; 64% of the malt we use for brewing comes from Victoria; and, most of all, 80% of our beer is consumed within 50 paces of the brewhouse where it is brewed!
Green freight – when one of our customers in Bright places a small order for our beers, we load up a trolley and walk the beer to them!
Our brewery grain is transported directly from the brewery to a nearby farm where it’s fed to a small herd of cows owned by a collective of our Brewery staff.
We participate in an organics transfer box system with our local Bright Community Garden. We send over 150L of organic food waste every week, which equates to roughly 5 tonnes of food waste not going into landfill.
Shredded office paper is used for padding fragile packages that we ship from our brewery.
Our Food & Drink Menus are housed in reusable plastic sleeves instead of laminating. When the menus changes, the paper insert can simply be shredded or recycled.
We subscribe to The Last Straw initiative and have removed plastic straws from our venue. We offer paper straws upon request.
We run a used battery collection point at Bright Brewery and these batteries are recycled through an approved recycling centre regularly.
https://brightbrewery.com.au/sustainability/