The sun is our friend. 

Many of you know we get between 35 and 40% of our electric from Solar Energy at the Brewery and when the sun is out we generally aren’t paying for electric.  We have even gone as far as trying to get a team of scientists to tackle the problem we are facing when the sun goes down at night and our panels stop producing.  I was told this isn’t possible but as a child I was also told to never give up.  So I am a bit conflicted.  

It gives me one of those good feelings to know we are doing things right here.  The massive amount of money we spent on insulation has paid off in the form of much lower electric bills.  The fact we are barely heating the warehouse also helps a bit.  Our hand dryers (Xcelerators)  in our bathrooms which rather than drying your hands actually force the water from your hands Chuck Norris style have cut down on tremendous amounts of paper waste.  Our fancy warehouse lights are without a doubt super energy efficient and are all set on motion detector timers.  

My mother was the driving force behind getting solar panels on our roof and Straight-Up Solar came through installing them.  I, as the Captain of the Barley Ship, realized rather quickly that the budget I was trying to live by had been blown out of the water.  And not just blown out of the water but destroyed by a massive nuclear weapon and the few pieces left were then pulverized with a ray gun.   In fact, we didn’t have money for solar panels and even had to put off a few things more things... like heat for the warehouse, tables for the upstairs rooms (both of which we are working on now).

But my mom, has for many years wanted Solar and she is a big proponent of it. She has been since I was a kid.  I remember as a kid touring houses that were using solar energy in different capacities.  I guess she channeled Thomas Edison, “I’d put my money on solar energy... I hope we don’t have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”  Well my dad and her lent me the money to install solar and it’s about time we really let people know that we are doing are best to limit our grid usage and to minimize waste in our brewery.  Tapping into solar energy was the first step in our plan to minimize the carbon footprint of our little pub.

Let me know if you have any questions about our Solar energy and more importantly you can rest assured here that we are constantly monitoring our recycling, cutting our electrical usage and making decisions with the hope that we can minimize our environmental impact.  

And to that I simply say, Cheers to Mother Earth who most of the time is probably a bit perturbed with our wastefulness.