Consumers are more focused than ever on sustainability credentials for the products they buy and companies they align with. 48% of U.S. alcohol drinkers claimed that their purchase decisions were positively influenced by a company’s sustainability or environmental initiatives, according to IWSR.
But sustainability is more than just a tactic to draw in new consumers, it’s a viable long-term strategy that can make your business’ supply chain more efficient or open up access to new resources.
Below are three suppliers who share their experiences on how to build a sustainable business.
Michael Langan, Head of Distillery at Yellow Rose Distilling, shares his playbook for applying sustainable solutions at the production level. While some distilleries advocate for implementing sustainable practices at the time of launch, Langan explains why it’s still a worthwhile investment to implement new sustainable practices over time for thos already in business.
In fact, implementing alternative technologies at his distillery paved the way for solving some of the biggest challenges facing Yellow Rose Distilling.
Incorporating sustainable solutions doesn’t have to come with a hefty price tag. In this video, Elana Effrat, Director of Marketing at One Eight Distilling, lays out the small steps brands can take to build out a sustainable footprint. She highlights several small environmentally friendly examples including, repurposing barrels, utilizing regional services, taking advantage of subsidized energy programs.
In this video, Amanda Victoria, CEO and Co-Founder of Siponey shares her experience incorporating a sustainable model in the brand building process.
She explains how making mindful decisions around partnerships is a particularly crucial step in building a sustainable brand. Victoria gets into how to evaluate prospective partnerships to teach brands about responsible sourcing through the supply chain and vendors.
How Yellow Rose Distillery Co Scaled Production While Reducing Waste
Michael Langan 0:09
Hi, my name is Michael Langan, and I’m the head of distillery for Yellow Rose Distilling Company out of Houston, Texas. I’m going to talk a little bit today about our process down in Houston, what we do, and some of the small, incremental steps we’ve taken over time to make ourselves a little bit more environmentally friendly—with a focus on increasing efficiency, production, and throughput to help our business grow while also helping the planet. I’ve been in the spirits world for about 10 years, previously with A. Smith Bowman Distilling Company and here with Yellow Rose for about three and a half years now, and prior to that was in the world of craft beer out in California.
Michael Langan 0:50
A lot of times, one of the big issues we face running a production facility is how to pay for all this equipment and get investment into doing things the right way. In the process of building and rebuilding several distilleries, I’ve found that trying to make changes purely for sustainability’s sake is a tall order because it always looks like it costs too much money for the return. What we’ve had better success with is finding ways to leverage capacity and scale: how can we go faster, use fewer resources, and make better use of what we’re buying? Over the last three years, we faced four core problems at Yellow Rose: capacity, chilling (cold), water usage, and boiler efficiency (hot).
Michael Langan 2:01
The first problem was capacity: we simply weren’t making enough product. Since we had a small physical footprint and couldn’t expand up or out, we found a partner distillery in Houston to buy some of their capacity. They produce a portion of our wash according to our recipe, allowing us to focus on the true craft of the spirit run on our end. This enabled a 5x increase in capacity with no real capital investment in materials—just a new partnership. Additionally, we transitioned away from small barrels. While small barrels sounded great early on, they became unsustainable: small barrels cost almost the same as large barrels, but they require significantly more trees, handling, and fuel to move. Moving to full-sized 53-gallon barrels paid a massive ROI, yielding four times as much liquid per barrel for the same barrel cost.
Michael Langan 3:54
Our second problem was process speed: our spirit runs were taking nearly 12 hours, requiring multiple shifts and high labor costs. We invested in our chilling capacity to speed up the distillation. By upgrading from a repurposed air conditioner unit to a custom-built chilling apparatus—utilizing a dedicated chiller, heat exchanger, and a cold water loop from a cold liquor tank—we cut two hours off our distillation time. This brought spirit runs down to a scale where a single operator could manage them in one shift. Furthermore, because the cold liquor loop continually recirculates the same water, we stop sending cooling water down the drain.
Michael Langan 5:32
As our production scaled, smaller utility equipment began breaking under the increased load. Our small reverse osmosis (RO) system—used to purify water for proofing and batching—failed twice in a row. We invested in a larger, industrial-scale RO unit. Moving to higher-efficiency technology dramatically reduced our wastewater ratio: whereas our old system required four gallons of feed water to produce one gallon of purified water, our new setup uses less than one gallon of waste per gallon produced.
Michael Langan 6:18
Our final problem was heat efficiency on the boiler side to help the still run faster. We replaced an old, inefficient open-flame burner boiler that ran on a basic on/off cycle and consumed high volumes of gas. Our new boiler features a ramjet burner with a 4:1 turndown ratio, meaning it enters an economical standby mode when loads drop low and ramps up efficiently as needed. This cut another two hours off our distillation time, bringing a full spirit run down to a comfortable eight-hour day. This efficiency enables a single operator to run the still while creating the option to add a second shift to double capacity without needing three full shifts of labor. Thank you!
10 Eco-Friendly Ideas for Small Businesses
Elana Effrat 0:11
I’m the Marketing Director at One Eight Distilling. As a marketer, it can be frustrating because everyone wants to focus on green marketing, but for us, sustainability is simply a part of who we are by default. Washington, D.C. aims to be the greenest city in the United States, and we want to be part of that. I wanted to share a few actionable steps for other small businesses that don’t have many resources but want to make a difference through local partnerships and waste reduction.
Elana Effrat 1:16
We love working with our local community to meet their needs. For example, Number 1 Sons, a local pickle company, uses our spent gin botanicals to make seasonal pickles. We’ve also explored teaming up with local D.C. tea makers to use our botanicals in their tea blends. Additionally, we collaborate with breweries to age their beer in our barrels, and we worked on a project with a chocolatier and coffee roaster where we filled used barrels, returned them, refilled them, and came out with an awesome whiskey. Most recently, we partnered with D.C. Central Kitchen during COVID: when they were left with unused wine, we distilled it into mature brandy and donated it back to them for fundraising events.
Elana Effrat 2:45
Like many small distillers, we also produced hand sanitizer from spent beer and wine when our distillery was shut down for six months during the pandemic. For local logistics, rather than using platforms like GrubHub, we partnered with a local, women-owned bike messenger service in D.C. to deliver our spirits locally. Furthermore, we keep our supply chain as regional as possible: our shipping boxes come from Baltimore, and our labels are digitally printed in New York to cut down on transportation costs and lower our carbon footprint.
Elana Effrat 4:11
It’s all about local ingredients. Transportation accounts for a fifth of global CO2 emissions and a third in the U.S. By sourcing our grains from farms just 100 to 200 miles away, we reduce our transport CO2 emissions by 19 times while capturing local terroir. We also collaborate directly with our farmers: when we needed Appalachian allspice for our gin, a local farmer grew it for us, and this past year, we were even able to have it locally foraged fresh.
Elana Effrat 5:37
Our distillery roof is outfitted with a full array of solar panels. D.C. offers great solar incentives, so the panels were leased to us at no upfront cost while we simply pay for the electricity generated. In just one year, our solar offset equivalent is equal to growing 973 trees or removing over 109,000 driving miles. We monitor this in real-time using an eGauge system to track production and usage daily.
Elana Effrat 7:34
Small operational choices make a huge impact. For instance, using steam instead of chemicals to clean our mash tun and fermentation tanks allowed us to reduce chemical use by 98%. Recirculating cooling water also saves immense amounts of water. Other simple actions include installing motion-sensor lights, switching to LED lighting and biodegradable cups, and paying our team above minimum wage. Sustainability isn’t just about the environment—it’s about treating people fairly and choosing partners who share your values. Thank you!
Building a Sustainable Business Model
Amanda Victoria 0:09
I’m Amanda Victoria, and I am the CEO and co-founder of a little whiskey spritz brand called Sipphony. Has anyone heard or seen Sipphony, or even tried it at this point? We’ve come a long way since debuting last year at BCB, which was a very exciting moment for us. This is a picture of me with bees on my face. They didn’t sting, and no bees were harmed in this photograph, but I wanted to start with something that is a bit provocative just to showcase the dedication that we have at my company, Sipphony, to the environment. It is not a marketing plan—it’s something that we do 365 days of the year, and it’s something that the company was founded on.
Amanda Victoria 0:57
I myself come from the world of wine and spirits, mostly spirits, and I started in 2005. I started as a cocktail waitress at a little bar in Soho called Pegu Club. Before that, I was a hostess at another little bar, a Michelin restaurant called Wallsé, still in the West Village today. But this was back in 2004, so I’ve been in the business for a long time. I bring it up today because during my time in the business, I’ve seen the amount of waste we have made in the world of wine and spirits, and it’s something that stood out to me as I worked for many of the big suppliers—the Bacardis and the Moët Hennesseys of the world. I was an educator for many years and had the opportunity to travel on behalf of family-known businesses and generationally known businesses—businesses that had very big budgets and businesses that had smaller budgets—but overall, I saw a lot of waste. Everyone knows about POS and the stuff that we create; it’s something that I wanted to do in a more mindful way with my company, to the point that Sipphony was created to be environmentally sound from the very beginning. It’s in our DNA.
Amanda Victoria 2:07
So this is Sipphony. If you haven’t had a chance to try it, please do—I’d love for you to try it. We are available now in about 13 different states. We’re a very small, family-owned brand. My partner, Joey Mintz, is right here in the audience. I would be nothing without him—he’s actually our resident horticulturist. He always has his hands in the dirt, if not leading our supply chain and operations. He brings in an element to the business of vetting all of our vendors from start to finish—small family businesses. We work with local farmers for our honey, for looking at where we get our lemon juice from. Our whiskey is something that we’re very meticulous about—we spent two-plus years just looking for the whiskey for this product.
Amanda Victoria 3:12
Sipphony was created in the summer leading after the summer of 2019. Everyone remembers “hot girl summer”—the original one before the pandemic. I was six months pregnant during that time, and like I said, I had been on the road for a couple of decades, nearly at that point, before taking some time off to grow my family for the first time. I was frustrated coming out of a summer six months pregnant—and a summer being pregnant period—but everyone was drinking a can in their hands. Everyone had a can in their hands, and I’m so glad they did, but I saw an opportunity to do something better in cans. Consumers didn’t really know what they were drinking at that time; they thought they were drinking vodka sodas when it couldn’t be farther from the truth. So the malt-based canned epidemic that happened in 2019 created an opportunity to do better by cans with better ingredients, and thus Sipphony was born.
Amanda Victoria 4:14
We are recently a certified B Corporation, which is a process that took years of auditing our supply chain, our vendors, the way we treat our people, and the way we treat the planet. Are you familiar with B Corp certification? Because I do find it’s more of a European thing technically, but here in the U.S., it’s a very exciting time. I noticed my toothpaste this morning was B Corp certified, and I’m like, “Yes, this is why I use this toothpaste!” But Sipphony is now B Corp certified, and it wasn’t an easy process by any means. A very hefty auditing process goes into it, again, to make sure that we are treating our people correctly and the planet correctly, in a nutshell. We’re also a member of 1% for the Planet.
Amanda Victoria 5:07
The way Sipphony looks at sustainability in our business and environmental wellness, as I call it, is twofold: from a production standpoint, which I’ve mentioned a little bit about so far, and also from a partnership standpoint. From a production standpoint, again, my co-founder, Joey Mintz, is my resident horticulturist and such a big inspiration for “drinking better,” as we call it—#DrinkBetter is a big hashtag we use a lot. The reason for the production point of the sustainability story is that it’s all about ingredients. It’s about talking about how spirits are originally an agriculturally based product; we’ve forgotten about the farms. I think that the wine industry does it very well—we talk about terroir, we talk about grapes, we talk about soil. But with spirits, we still have some work to do. So with Sipphony, we use this opportunity to talk about more of our ingredients and where they come from. You’ll hear me talk about ingredients a lot because it is exactly what we put our love into when it comes to production, our supply chain, and the vendors we use.
Amanda Victoria 6:56
As a small company, another thing I think large companies could also be doing more of is partnering with the people who know best: full-time non-profit people who work in environmental wellness and save the planet every day. One of our partners, Detroit Hives, is an organization—a non-profit organization out of Detroit—that spends all of their time converting abandoned parking lots in the city of Detroit into gardens and apiaries for honeybees, and then teaching children, the next generation, how to do better for the environment. By committing 2% of our revenue yearly, this is something that we do every day.
Amanda Victoria 8:02
These are just a few of our commitments and partners: New York Bee Wellness, Ulster County Bees, Detroit Hives, The Bee Conservancy (through our partners with Breakthru Beverage), Island Bee Project, City Growers, B Corp, and more. Some quick takeaways: there’s a great book written by my neighbor up in the Hudson Valley, a woman named Amy Larkin, called Environmental Debt. Her whole mantra, and something I like to share, is: “Without nature, there’s no business overall.” So it’s a great book to pick up if you’re looking for little ways to tweak your business here and there to do better by the planet. Saving the world through a whiskey spritz is a very long and lofty goal, but it’s something we still very much believe in. Thank you!