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Patrick Rowan, owner of Woodland Farms Brewery in Kittery, says the firmâs cost of carbon dioxide has quadrupled.
Higher carbon dioxide prices are forcing Maine breweries to get creative.
While not all Maine beer brewers are feeling the squeeze of the ongoing, nationwide carbon dioxide shortage, others have altered their production processes to more efficiently use the gas.
Carbon dioxide is often used throughout the beer-making process, whether to aid in carbonation, pressure-assisted tank decanting or clearing oxygen from tanks. Given that itâs one of the greenhouse gasses blamed for the climate crisis, it may seem counterintuitive that there isnât enough carbon dioxide floating around for breweries to use.
But while some companies are pulling the gas out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change â and some of that is used for beverage carbonation â atmospheric carbon removal isnât currently mainstream. Instead, Will Gentry, the president of gas supplier MaineOxy, says most of the carbon dioxide provided to breweries is a byproduct of three activities: petroleum refining and ammonia or ethanol production. And those activities slowed during the pandemic, meaning less available captured byproduct for the brewing industry, he explained.
âNow weâre telling our customers to have enough on hand for six to eight weeks, so if there is a shortage, you can actually get through it and youâll have enough product to get to move aheadâ with beer production, Gentry says.
Once supplies began tightening, companies like MaineOxy had to reduce their clientsâ allocations and charge more for what was delivered, too. Gentry declined to share how his companyâs year-over-year carbon dioxide charges changed, citing business competitiveness concerns.
However, the producer price index published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that carbon dioxide prices within the industrial gas manufacturing industry consistently rose throughout the pandemic, soaring in the summer of 2022.
Numerous Maine breweries told Mainebiz that their prices have shot up, with some feeling the pain more sharply than others. In an email, Patrick Rowan, owner of Woodland Farms Brewery in Kittery, suggested that the matter has reached levels of âprice gouging.â
âWeâve seen our CO2 prices quadruple in the last 24 months, and weâve been rationed twice to 50%â allocation from before the shortage, says Rowan, using the formulaic shorthand for carbon dioxide.
To navigate the challenge, has forced his team to get âseriously creativeâ and âgenerally watch every last drop we useâ to navigate the new terrain.
David Love, the sustainability manager of Maine Beer Co. in Freeport, says their carbon dioxide prices have been contractually locked in. But while they were âone of the luckier breweries, where we never ran out of CO2,â their allocation and the regularity of deliveries diminished.
Side By Each Brewing Co. in Auburn was paying roughly 46 cents per pound of carbon dioxide in the fall of 2019, âbefore COVID and all the madness started,â according to owner-brewer Ben Low.
A year later, the cost had risen to 53 cents per pound, including a force majeure charge. Now, theyâre paying 66 cents per pound â even with the force majeure charge dropped.
âThatâs almost a 50% increase, which is a lot, and the other charges associated have gone up as well,â Low says, detailing other charges on his carbon dioxide invoices he says have tripled, such as delivery. âItâs a pretty big price hit.â
The shortage has lasted so long that some brewers, like Fogtown Brewing Co. in Ellsworth, switched providers for more reliable deliveries. At first, the shortage didnât affect Fogtown strongly because the pandemic lock-down measures prevented it from opening their doors.
âIt didnât matter that we werenât making [beer], because we didnât have a market, but that continued even after reopeningâ says Fogtown owner Jon Stein, noting how bulk tanks wouldnât arrive for âweeks and weeks on end.â
Like many breweries that Mainebiz interviewed, Fogtown looked at alternative methods of production to reduce their demand for carbon dioxide, including natural fermentation, also known as spunding. That essentially means trapping the carbon dioxide created during the fermentation process, which absorbs into the substance becoming beer.
While that might seem a simple change, Stein says the âtiming is a bit trickyâ and that âitâs a hard process, because if you do it too early, then youâre starting to trap in essentially all these ⌠weird, volatile flavor compounds, and you usually want them to bubble off so that you donât taste them in the beer later.â
âBut if weâre doing it really well, we can save around 20% CO2 volume per batch,â he added. Another bonus â his team thinks thereâs an improved flavor and âmouthfeelâ with properly executed natural carbonation.
The achieved efficiency helps Stein feel confident about weathering the supply shortage. âIâm not scared anymore about providers running out of CO2, but it does still save a lot of money because CO2 is only getting more expensive,â says Stein.
At Nonesuch River Brewing in Scarborough, owner and brewery operations director Michael Schuler says his team also switched to natural fermentation, reducing exposure to the higher prices.
âWeâve used about 25% less CO2 this year, however our supplier has run into cost issues that theyâve passed on to the consumer, which is us,â Schuler explained. âFrom a dollar perspective, it doesnât seem like weâve saved any money, but weâve used less CO2.â
Nonesuch only partially carbonates their brews via natural fermentation because of the additional time a batch needs to spend in the fermenter to fully complete that process. That extra time takes away from the breweryâs ability to make more new batches.
Nonetheless, he says, âif we would have used the same amount that we used a couple of years ago, we would have seen at least a 25% rise in cost.â
Schuler says another way breweries are making the most of the carbon dioxide they can get their hands on is by switching to other inert gasses that are more available for packaging and purging tanks of oxygen before adding beer, since âoxygen is the killer of all beer.â
At Nonesuch, he says âwe started to use more nitrogen to push liquids around in the brewery instead of CO2, so that we could conserve as much of the CO2 as we could for the things that we really needed it for.â
Love says that Maine Beer Co. has also begun using nitrogen for the same types of processes, but added thereâs a sustainability incentive to make the switch, too, because nitrogen is âincredibly abundant and itâs also locally availableâ because of a refinery in Kittery.
âThe actual carbon footprint of that gas, which is already relatively low compared to CO2, is going to be even lower because itâs coming from somewhere so close.â
At Sacred Profane, a Biddeford brewery that opened its doors in September, brewery operations director Michael Fava and his team had the advantage of being able to design the brewery around âprocesses that are as efficient as possible, right from the jump.â
In addition to strategies more commonly employed by other breweries, Sacred Profane opts to serve beer right out of copper serving tanks, suspended from the ceiling over the bar in an âactually quite beautifulâ way, Fava says. That, he says, delivers âthe biggest savings.â
But the brewery also implements bag-in-tank technology, which Fava calls a newer type of set-up. Essentially, a big plastic liner is used to shield the beer from the tank, allowing a brewery to use compressed air instead of an inert gas to push the beer out of the system.
Fava says that even without the heightened costs and lessened availability, the bag-in-tank system would be beneficial to improve the overall drinking experience.
At a small number of breweries, innovative carbon recapture technology has been deployed to further reduce demand for new shipments. But many canât afford to install such systems, according to Rowan.
âIdeally weâd have a CO2 recapturing system in place, but they are prohibitively expensive for all but the largest of breweries,â he says.
Love says that Maine Brewing Co. commissioned and installed its system in November, although the idea had been kicking around in their heads for a while.
âWe had had multiple quotes, we had gone back-and-forth and says, âHey, is this the year where we finally do it?ââ says Love. âThen everything happened with the CO2 market, and suddenly we are in a good spot to really invest this time and money to make this happen.â
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