Doing Our Part

Since our inception 10 years ago, Draught Works Brewery has been dedicated to bettering our business and uplifting the greater Missoula area with good vibes, world class beer, and community-minded business practices. From initially purchasing pre-loved stools, to hiring our friends at Blue Dog Furniture to build our bar out of reclaimed pine rescued from Flathead Lake, we’ve historically worked diligently to reduce waste, the costs associated with waste, and reuse and repurpose anything and everything we can.

We’ve come an extraordinarily long way in reducing our ecological footprint since we first opened our doors in 2011. A few years ago, we replaced most lights around the brewery with more energy efficient LED bulbs, fixtures, and automatic motion sensors in lower traffic areas, so that we’re not lighting any empty hallways or rooms! Though lighting upgrades and adding additional insulation to our building were a great place to start, our biggest and most lucrative energy conscious investment to date is our work horse of a heat exchanger, which can rapidly raise or lower the temperature of our wort or beer as it’s being brewed. 

“I can’t stress enough how much money and energy our heat exchanger saves us. It’s better for the environment, but it’s also great for us financially. Our current energy bill is only slightly larger than when we first opened our doors, which is saying a lot considering our square footage has almost doubled,” said co-owner Paul Marshall.

Not only are we constantly working to reduce our energy output, but we’re also dedicated to reusing and repurposing everything we can, most notably non locally recyclable plastics and spent grain. As you can imagine, breweries our size create an exorbitant amount of spent grain during the brew process. On a big brew day, we often create 12 to 16 55 gallon drums of spent grain per day!  We have proudly partnered with a number of local farmers and Eco Compost to put this spent grain to good use as supplemental feed for livestock and compost. 

Though we’ve been recycling cardboard, aluminum, and locally recyclable plastics in our taproom for years, earlier this year, we had custom trash separators built by our dear friend Tom Russell, so that we could begin composting and more effectively recycling aluminum in the taproom. Unfortunately because of COVID, our composting dreams got off to a bit of a slow start, but we’re proud to say that people have really caught on since this summer, and we’ve even convinced a couple of our favorite food trucks to make the switch to compostable to-go containers. 

We’re not perfect, but we truly aspire to continue to educate ourselves and make calculated changes to reduce our ecological footprint and we encourage all local businesses and community members to strive to be better with each passing year. We love the Missoula community, and we’re dedicated to doing our part to keep this city shining brightly.

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