Even St. Patty’s beer isn’t this green

Brothers Jesse and Samuel Evans are bringing their New Chicago Beer Co. to the city, and along with it, some new ideas about how to run an energy-sustainable business.

Audrey Thibeau/The Plant Chicago

The Plant. Home to the New Chicago Beer Co.

The Evans brothers are building a completely sustainable production brewery in the Whiskey Point section of the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago in collaboration with The Plant Chicago, a 93,500 square foot former meatpacking facility that has been converted into a net-zero energy vertical farm.

“We were at a Whole Foods in Evanston having brunch and there wasn’t much to read. But there was this magazine called Mindful Metropolis, which is a conscious community magazine with a lot of yoga and that kind of thing. They had this story about The Plant in the very early days,” Jesse Evans said. “On the caption of the story we saw that they were planning on having breweries. So, we decided to contact them, partially to see who these guys were and partially to try and see if we could be one of the breweries.”

The Evans brothers contacted Executive Director John Edel and took a tour of The Plant.

“When we got to the end of the tour we ended up at this four or five thousand square-foot hall with 18-foot ceilings and he goes ‘this is the brewery.’ We had kind of realized by that point that there wasn’t a brewery in there yet. So we were asking about it and found out that he was looking for the right brewery to move in. So we were like ‘we’re the right brewery’, and that’s really kind of how it started.“

The Plant is still in the process of being built, however, some parts of the structure, such as the vertical farm, are already operational. When complete, one-third of the space will hold aquaponic-growing systems and the other two-thirds will incubate sustainable food businesses by offering low rent, low energy costs, and a licensed shared kitchen.

The Plant plans to create 125 jobs in Chicago’s economically distressed Back of the Yards neighborhood. The new jobs will require no fossil fuel and neither will the building itself. Instead, The Plant will eventually divert over 10,000 tons of food waste from landfills each year to meet all of its heat and power needs.

Audrey Thibeau/The Plant Chicago

The Plant emits steam not smoke.

“I realized that this is going to be at net carbon zero brewery and that was really exciting to us,” Evans said.

Funded in part by $1.5 million grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, The Plant will install an anaerobic digestion and a combined heat and power system to operate completely off the grid. Anaerobic digestion is a recycling system that uses bacteria to break down food waste to generate methane gas which, in turn, powers a turbine that generates electricity.

By 2015, the enclosed, odorless anaerobic digester will consume 27 tons of food waste a day including all of the waste produced in the facility and by neighboring food manufacturers.

The New Chicago Beer Co. will be doing their part to keep The Plant running. The brewing kettles used by the Evans brothers will depend on steam instead of burning non-renewable natural gas from the grid. The carbon dioxide from the fermentation process will be captured and transmitted to hydroponic operations. Thanks to this system, the brewery will be able to churn out strong ales, their specialty, with a virtually net-zero cost to the environment.

“We already had a tendency to do things the right way, but we had no idea that the whole system could be this fantastic,” said Evans who was already conscious of sustainability thanks to a spell starting a much smaller professional brewery, Lucky Hand, with his brother in northern California before moving back home to Chicago to be closer to family.

According to Evans, New Chicago will be releasing its first beers over the next couple months. They specialize in what they call strong ales, meaning that the brews contain a slightly higher than usual alcohol content, and will be using local and seasonal ingredients from around the Chicago area. They will also source some ingredients from inside The Plant itself.

New Chicago has recently signed a distribution deal that will make their beers available on draft and in bottles across the city in the coming year.

“Having that alternative energy aspect to our brewery is really kind of something we like to say is to put on the back label,” Evans said. “We don’t want to make it a big deal because if we can do things this way then it’s probably a good idea. It’s the right thing to do.”