Brewing a Better Future with Sierra Nevada

Mandi McKay, Chief Sustainability and Social Impact Officer at Sierra Nevada, shares how the company is raising the bar for sustainable brewing. 🌿🍺

Learn more about Sierra Nevada: 

• Sierra Nevada Brewing, National Parks Partner For Fan Favorite Beer
• Beer Industry Trends to Watch in 2024

Transcript

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Steven 0:01

Welcome to the Four Worlds Podcast from Tomorrow's World Today. We're diving into the latest in tech, science, and sustainability, from nature's mysteries and the world of inspiration, to the hands-on crafts of creation, the bold breakthroughs of innovation, and the scaled-up wonders of production. This is your ticket to the stories shaping tomorrow. Welcome into the show, everyone. Today, we're focusing on sustainability. And bringing in that, we're so happy to have the Chief Sustainability Officer with Sierra Nevada Brewing, Mandi McKay. She joins us today. Mandy, how are you? Thank you so much for joining us.

Mandi 0:40

Hi, good. Thank you, Stephen. It's a pleasure to be here.

Steven 0:43

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you and jumping right into it, sustainability in the beer making process, I guess is what we're going to be talking about. So let's just go back to Sierra Nevada's goals and their missions with sustainability. Give people a little bit of background, how important sustainability really is to your process.

Mandi 1:03

Yeah, so sustainability, the word itself literally is one of our core values. So it was truly built in to the company's founding, our e How we think about our operations and how we do business. And it's been that way since day one. So, you know, we were founded in 1980 by Ken Grossman in Chico, California. And we now have two breweries spanning the country and about 1100 employees. And so, as I said, it's truly embedded in the fabric of who we are and how we operate. I've been with the company just about 17 years now. helping lead and grow our sustainability program. So I've seen it evolve, but what I can say is it's truly, it's why I've stayed. It's why we have a lot of employees come to work for us. It's because we do it right and we embed it in everything that we do from day-to-day operations to our products and how we think about our communities and our employees.

Steven 1:59

Yeah, and take me to the two locations. There's one in North Carolina and there's one in California. How are they similar and how are they different when it comes to sustainability and kind of implementing sustainability in the beer making process at these two locations?

Mandi 2:18

Yeah. So again, we were founded in Chico, California. So our headquarter brewery and kind of our home base is Northern California. So Chico is about an hour and a half north of Sacramento. So we've been here for almost 40 years, 45 years. And when we opened our North Carolina brewery about 10 years ago. Obviously, we took a lot of learnings from everything we did in Chico and got to put that in place and think differently and with much more forethought and planning when we opened Mills River. So let me start with, so we do the same core philosophies and thinking around closing loops and zero waste and energy and water efficiency all We're approaching those things. We're doing the same work, but the approaches are different. So with Chico, it's an older facility. We've added on over the decades. So it's less efficient just inherently because we've had to literally add buildings onto that facility over time. Whereas when we opened Mills River, we can design in a lot of efficiencies, also a lot of guest experience, and people can actually see the process and see all the cool work that we're doing around sustainability. The other difference that I would say is in Chico, you know, We grew up in this community, so people know who we are. They know our commitment to this work. They know how we operate. So when we opened Mills River, that's a new community that people didn't know us as well. So when we went there, it was intentional to literally show in the building itself. how much we are committed to sustainability and sustainable operations. So we knew during the design process, we want to be LEED certified. So LEED is leadership in energy and environmental design, and it's a building certification that you can achieve for natural lighting, water efficiency, energy efficiency, the building materials that you use if you recycle and capture rainwater. So we knew very early on, hey, we're going into new community. It's really important for that community to know, who we are as a brand and as a company. So lead certification was something we chose to specifically do. And when we started building that brewery, we thought, well, let's just make sure we're lead certified, which is like the lowest level of certification that you can get. But then you can go up to silver, you can go up to gold, you can go up to platinum. So as we started building, you know, we couldn't help ourselves. And we thought, well, what does it take to get to gold? What does it take to get to platinum? And what's really exciting about what we were able to achieve out there and how we got that platinum level certification was what we did in the brew house around sustainability and efficiency. So again, we took everything we learned for the past 40 years in Chico and basically built one of the most efficient brew houses that you can in that North Carolina brewery. That energy modeling that we did to as part of the LEED certification, that is what got us to that platinum certification. So it's all the heat and steam that we are recovering and recycling, all the energy efficiency processes that we put in place to that brew house, that's what kind of got us to that final platinum certification. And so... The other thing I'll touch on is the difference approach with water. So obviously we're thinking about water a lot as a brewery because it's something we use a lot of. But in California, you think about water very differently than you do in North Carolina. So in Chico, we do a lot more drought tolerant landscaping and removing lawns and things like that. And then still, of course, all the efficiency work inside the brew house. In North Carolina, where it rains most of the year, we can actually do rainwater capture. So we installed rainwater systems. And an underground cistern and we can capture all that water and use it for non potable needs like toilet flushing or irrigation. So we wouldn't do that in Chico because it just it doesn't rain enough doesn't make any sense to have rain water at that scale in Chico. So those are just a couple examples of how we're working on the same things but approaching them very differently at the two facilities.

Steven 6:12

And you know, the one in North Carolina, I used to live in Greenville, South Carolina, and there was a few trips up to Asheville where it wasn't a trip without stopping. to sierra nevada and and and i want to touch on that you know just at that location just from a personal experience it goes beyond the beer i mean the food a lot of it is grown on site in a true kind of farm to table aspect so maybe someone thinks of sierra nevada most people might think of it just beer but explain how even the food one it's delicious and two it's right there for you

Mandi 6:47

yeah you make a really good point and it's something i often share is that yes we are brewery, but we do a lot more than just make beer, right? Like the beer is amazing. That's who we are. That's what we do. But we also run amazing restaurants and tap rooms. And then to your point, both of our restaurants do utilize our onsite garden. And so we have teams at both breweries that that is what they do. And they farm and grow produce for the restaurants. We do it organically and we have a whole team dedicated to that work. And so we're growing fruits, vegetables, herbs that go directly into the restaurant, obviously the most local sustainable food you could get. I mean, we're, we still have to purchase, you know, quite a bit of food and we're not doing everything, but for the things that make a lot of sense for you to grow yourself, we are doing. And so we're, we're farmers, you know, we're brewers, we're farmers. We do all kinds of things. Especially in North Carolina. We also, we have sheep and chickens and a couple of donkeys. And so, yeah, we do, we definitely have more than just beer. So when you come to that site in particular, you you get a much bigger experience on top of our beer.

Steven 7:54

Yeah. And I think that's really important to mention because Sierra Nevada, it really is, it's more than just beer, but really what brought us to this interview was of course beer. There's two beers coming out this summer exclusively for this summer. Let's jump into that because it's the summer of sustainability and sustainable brewing with the Summerfest and the Pale Ale. Just kind of go over the processes with these two beers coming out this summer. and, you know, how you fit sustainability in that brewing process.

Mandi 8:24

So I'll talk about pale for first. So pale ale for... listeners that don't know, you know, it's our, it's our flagship beer. It's how we're known. People only know us by Sierra pale ale. And that's great because it literally is a pioneer brew. It's helped, it helped launch the American craft beer industry and it's, it is the standard and the go-to for so many people. And there's a reason for that because it's iconic and it's really good. And so what I would say to that is one thing that's really exciting this year that we are doing with pale is our partnership with the national park foundation. And so what, What's unique, but also really exciting and something we've never done before is take something like our flagship, which normally you don't touch a flagship.

Steven 9:09

Hands off.

Mandi 9:10

Exactly. It's a flagship for a reason. It's an icon for a reason. It stands on its own. We've never done anything like this, but when you think about... what Sierra Nevada stands for. We have this very deep connection to the natural world that comes from our founder and our owner, Ken Grossman, that has been carried with us for all these decades. When you take another icon like the national parks that we all know and love that are truly iconic places, you can actually bring the two icons together and it makes a lot of sense. And so you're kind of celebrating the two icons and they help each other. So we're really excited about that partnership. It launched about a month ago and you'll see some limited pale ale packaging coming out this summer. So we're highlighting six different, um, national parks and, um, literally on the packaging, you will see these landscapes, excuse me, I think it's four national parks, um, you'll see these beautiful landscapes that kind of take the pale ale imagery, but show off a national park. We're also donating to the National Park Foundation as part of this partnership to make sure they can keep doing their work around landscape and wildlife conservation, things that we care a lot about. For pale ale, I'm really excited about that campaign and that partnership, and we'll see where it goes, but they're kind of collector's items, at least I hope they will be. I hope it gets people excited about pale ale and reignites their love of pale

Steven 10:30

ale.

Mandi 10:30

Put them to a national And like collect those packagings.

Steven 10:34

Yeah. Yeah. And I have the national parks. It's Yosemite, Yellowstone, Big Bend and Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And I've looked at the pack. I mean, just it's really, really cool packaging. I was looking on the website, just looking at the design of the cans in the in the packaging itself. And that kind of piques our interest because we are the four worlds podcast. It goes inspiration, creation, innovation, and production. Creation and inspiration are really coming together. The natural world, just like you said, and the creative world with these designs on the packaging. So I just wanted to throw that in there. Just such a cool aspect and a really neat idea. And of course, it all goes to a good cause in the national parks.

Mandi 11:18

Yes, agreed. Again, we're super excited about it. And it's the first time we've ever done something like this. like it. So pale ale, again, it speaks for itself, but also this partnership is just really exciting. And on Summerfest, it's another almost iconic in its own way, seasonal that we've had out for many, many years. People look forward to it, just like all of our seasonals. But Summerfest in particular, for the last couple of years, we've been putting in some sustainably grown barley that we have a partnership with out of Oregon. So we are doing a lot more. We're thinking a lot more about our supply chain. So we've always had this strong connection with our barley farmers and our hop growers. But as we move forward into some of the work that my team is doing around our hop forward ambitions The supply chain is coming in a lot more, and we're going to be thinking and talking more with our suppliers about farming practices or recycled content when it comes to packaging materials. So I'm really excited about the barley that is in Summerfest, and you can learn more about that. So we're doing a lot more of thinking about the ingredients and showcasing them in some of these iconic products that we do offer.

Steven 12:26

Right. And it's something you don't – it's important, but it's something you don't think about when you're cracking open a beer. And it really is – It's good to shed light on that actual process because some people just don't understand what it takes to go through that. And then when you're doing it in a sustainable way, it's really important to shed light on that. Right. So

Mandi 13:05

I've used a definition, the same definition for decades now on what I think sustainability means. It really is kind of a textbook definition and there's two sort of parts to it. One is just a philosophical idea around it, which for me, the one I share most often is that it really is this idea of meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing future generations' ability to do the same. So at a very big macro level, That's what sustainability means to me is we should be doing things today that aren't going to negatively impact the future and future generations to also live the way we do. Right. So that's kind of very big, high level. There's also when you break it down, what you're really saying, what sustainability really means is sustaining a system. In this case, we're a business. It's a brewery. So we're trying to sustain our business. And that starts all the way with our supply chain to our operations and then our consumers down the line. There's usually a three part definition also where in most systems, whether you're a business or a city or a county or a state or a household, you are trying to balance the environmental, the social and the economic needs of that system. So a lot of times people equate sustainability all with the environmental piece. which is, that's fair. And that makes a lot of sense because usually that is where the work is being done. Again, for us, it's energy efficiency in our brew house or water efficiency or zero waste. But you also need to think about the social piece and the economic piece. So for a business, yeah, it's sustainability is quarter our values. It's who we are, but we are also a business. So at the end of the day, we do have to be financially viable, right? And that we have money to reinvest and do more work and take care of our employees and do more initiatives and projects. And then, of course, on the social side, for us, it's our employees. It's our consumers. It's the communities in which we work and live. So... That's how I think that's how I've always thought about sustainability. That's how I try to communicate it and share it is a lot of environmental work, but it's also much broader than that. And they all support each other. So often the work that we do around efficiency or zero waste does positively impact the bottom line. So they're not mutually exclusive, right? Things that you're doing to reduce emissions or reduce waste or save water often do have financial benefits as well. So they all have interplaying with each other and support. on each other.

Steven 15:30

Right. Yeah. Again, I mean, you said it best, you know, when it comes down to it, you are a business and, and keeping that business afloat, you have to keep it sustainable. You have to sustain, you know, you have to sustain those operations, you know, and going in, going into that through the brewing process, of course, through your side of work, you know, what are some of those, let's say cutting edge technologies or practices that Sierra Nevada has implemented in the process that are innovative to the industry?

Mandi 16:00

Yeah. A couple of things that I would say there's still... They were innovative, and I'm not sure if they're still cutting edge.

Steven 16:09

Maybe at one point they were cutting

Mandi 16:12

edge. At one point they were, and it is still hard to do, so I will talk about them because we do them really well. So a couple things that Sierra Nevada does within the brewing process specifically, I already kind of mentioned it, but a lot of heat and steam recovery. That's what makes something super efficient. And so what we do really well, and I'll explain that. I'll give a couple examples.

Steven 16:30

Yeah, please.

Mandi 16:31

we think about anything that's leaving a process. So like a waste stream or a byproduct, we are really good at thinking about how to reuse that and bring it back in as a resource, either for the same process or a different process. So let me give an example. So brewing is very heat intensive, right? You're doing a lot of boiling and using steam. So off of our kettles or anytime we've got a situation where we are boiling a liquid, you're obviously going to release heat and steam as part of that process. So you can install things like heat recovery, vapor condensers, steam recovers, steam recovery condensers. You bring all that, you condense steam back into water. Now you've got hot water that can go back into the next batch of beer, right? Or same with steam and heat. If you can collect heat, you can now use that heat to warm up cold water. Sometimes you need to do that. We need hot water for the brewing process. So if we can get heat from the current boiling process, use that heat to heat up the water for the next batch of beer, that's another process we do. We do a lot of that, both in the brew house, but also in a couple other systems that we have to make electricity and energy where we're covering heat off those as well. So almost any time we've got heat leaving a system, we're capturing that and reusing it in some way. Again, it's not super innovative. It's just literally thinking about hey, this is a waste stream that we could probably reuse and make ourselves more efficient. So we do that really, really well. And that's part of what led us to that LEED Platinum certification. A couple other examples. So same thing, you've got heat or steam leaving a system. Oftentimes we need to cool down The wort, so this is the liquid that is eventually going to become beer, is called wort before it becomes beer. That wort has to get cooled down before it goes into fermentation. You can't add yeast into hot liquid, otherwise you kill your yeast, and the yeast is what is going to make your alcohol for you. So when we have a boiling liquid that we need to cool down very quickly to send it to filtration, you can use a heat exchange process. So you've got this hot liquid, you need to cool it down, you run it past Very simple, but again, kind of innovative and really smart ways to think about heat transfer and heat recovery. Those are the best examples that I have for efficiency in the brewing process. And then I would just say, we think a lot about what our R&D team and our brewing teams are doing now is how do you like, how do we get really detailed and efficient with like our boiling times? Do we really need to boil for an hour and a half? Could we boil for an hour? Can we reduce that temperature just a little bit? And what impact does that have on the beer or not? So now we're getting into like, we've done a lot of the low hanging fruit. Now it's the next step of really dialing in timing, temperatures, different ingredients or different ways. Is there a different barley that doesn't have to boil as long? So there's all kinds of things that we're thinking about in our R&D side to continue kind of that efficiency journey.

Steven 19:42

Yeah. And really, you took the words right out of my mouth because I was going to ask, what are those behind the scenes? What does that look like when it comes down to thinking of new ways to, maybe not new ways, but just ways to kind of stay ahead of the curve and just continue to innovate and build on what's what you already have as a foundation.

Mandi 20:03

Another good example of kind of that behind the scenes, and it's hard to explain and it feels really nuanced, but water, on the water side, Most of the water consumption and the water usage in a brewery is for cleaning because you have to keep everything clean. There's multiple stages of cleaning and it's very important for beer quality and microbiology and all those things. A couple things we've done is the cleaning processes that you do have to use to clean out tanks once beer is smoothed out or the pipes. They're called CIP processes and we've spent a lot of time thinking about can you reuse some of that cleaning water or cleaning chemical? Can you recover it and use it again instead of building up a whole new batch. We've done a lot of work on that and significantly reduced water and cleaning chemical, which again goes back to that, like it saves water, but it also saves money on chemicals. So they kind of go hand in hand. There's lots of ways to kind of think through and how much water do you actually need? is the spray nozzle covering the entire tank or is it only hitting one side of the tank so now you're having to use more water to get the rest of the tank so there's like there's a lot of very like details and variables that go into like how much more efficient can we get with our water and our chemicals especially in those in those cleaning processes because that's where most of the water is being used

Steven 21:18

yeah and i just want people to to when they listen to this realize all of the little intricacies that go into that can of sierra nevada or the draft of Sierra Nevada that you're drinking because it really is. And I could see it in you just going through each and every little detail that you, the production staff, everyone at Sierra Nevada really, truly cares about the product and always continuing to be better.

Mandi 21:46

You know, I really appreciate that because we do take it very seriously. And there is a lot of work that does go into every can or bottle of beer. And, you know, you don't see it. And I wouldn't expect people to, you know, you don't really,

Steven 21:59

we

Mandi 21:59

all buy beverages and you don't necessarily think about all that. But there's a lot. And we think and hope that you can really taste that, right? That comes through. It's very high quality. We think we put a lot of time and effort into the innovation and the quality and the sustainability of our products. Hopefully you can taste that as well.

Steven 22:18

I personally, from a personal effect, you can, you can, you can, you can taste, let's say like you can taste the love that you guys put that you guys put into the brewing process. Now let's talk, you have the, you have the Chico, California and you have the North Carolina facility. Take me through a distribution where, you know, where's it go? Is it all over the country? Give someone, you know, give me an idea of, of how much you're actually distributing from these two locations.

Mandi 22:44

Yeah, that's a great question. So we're currently, we're the third largest craft brewer in the country. And again, we have our two brewing facilities, California and North Carolina, but we do distribute to all 50 states. So you can find our products in all 50 states. You're not going to find every one of our products in all those states. Our, you know, we're certainly largest markets are in California and North Carolina and kind of on the coasts. But again, we do distribute all over. So we're a pretty large brewer when it comes to craft, but we're still pretty small when it comes to just sort of brewing more broadly. We're actually still kind of a medium, small size business overall, but large in craft beer because most of craft breweries are very small, right? So we're large in terms of craft. We make about a little over a million barrels of beer a year. That is big for craft, but small for kind of domestic beer and breweries overall.

Steven 23:40

And just talking about that brings up another interesting point. What kind of challenges do you face? Just thinking about, in the grand scheme of things, being kind of a smaller craft brewery, what are some of those challenges that you face to continue to produce as much as you do in a sustainable way?

Mandi 23:59

Yeah. From a sustainability perspective, there are some challenges because if we were larger, some of those things would make even more financial sense or be easier to do. So we are kind of in a weird middle space where we're not small, but we're not big. Sometimes that's a benefit. Other times it's a barrier and a challenge where it has made sense, especially from sustainability. So things like recovering our CO2. or treating our wastewater, our own wastewater on site, those things you do kind of have to reach a certain threshold to where they make sense to do. So much smaller breweries, Right. Right. Recovering our CO2 means all the CO2 that's coming off of our fermentation tanks. We capture all that CO2. We could just release it. And that's what most breweries do. It just goes, vents to the atmosphere.

Steven 25:08

We

Mandi 25:09

capture all of that. We compress it down. We reuse it. So again, closing a loop and using a waste product as a resource. We use all of that collected CO2 to purge tanks, to move beer from process to process. We use it for some of our draft systems. So if you come on site and you're getting a beer poured on drafts, you are likely getting it. It's being pushed with recycled CO2. So once you get to a certain size, things like that makes sense. Similar with wastewater treatment, you reach a certain size and it makes a lot more sense for you to pre-treat your brewing wastewater before you send it to the municipal treatment plant for further treatment. So both of our breweries, we have these really, really amazing, great examples of closing the loop, wastewater treatment plants. And what those are doing, they're anaerobic digesters. So we're taking all the brewing water that's used to make beer. So no sewer water, no sinks, no kitchens, no bathrooms, but all the water that's used in the brewing process. Goes down the drain, it goes to our onsite wastewater treatment plant, goes through anaerobic digestion. So it's basically a little bacteria, little anaerobes. They're eating all the leftover organic matter in that water. They generate a biogas as a byproduct of that process. They are treating the water. That water then goes to the city for further treatment. That biogas that we're able to capture from the wastewater treatment plant, we use that biogas to then make electricity for the brewery. We do that by sending that biogas through microturbines. Microturbines use a gas to then make electricity. So super cool cool onsite closed loop example of literally going from brewing wastewater to electricity for the site. So again, when you are large enough, you get to do fun things like that. But where we're not large enough is sometimes, you know, it's, we're kind of like certain size of equipment. So like for one example, we're looking for a new alternative for some of our small product runs where we need a certain kind of carrier. So like a six pack carrier.

Steven 27:13

Yeah.

Mandi 27:13

We are too big for the small machine. We are not big enough for the big machine. And so we're kind of trying to find this perfect. We've got to find somebody that has this midsize machine so that we can, we want to move to this different six pack carrier. So that's, that's one example I can think of where it just like we're right in the middle. Yeah. Perfect sometimes, but challenging. It

Steven 27:36

sounds like you're in the market to commercialize the midsize yourselves. Yeah. There, a new project for you.

Mandi 27:44

Yep. We can lead the way. And we often do. We've often been kind of a leader or a guinea pig on some technologies and things, which is part of the innovation that we do.

Steven 27:54

Yeah. And how do you stay ahead of that, trying to be, let's say, a model for others?

Mandi 28:03

A

Steven 28:04

loaded question. A loaded question, right?

Mandi 28:07

We are lucky in that Again, we are founded by somebody who has always thought about, so he's driven by efficiency. He's also driven by, hey, I'll take a risk and be the first person to use hydrogen fuel cells, for example. We were like the first brewery to ever use hydrogen fuel cells to make electricity. And we are still the first and only brewery that has an onsite hot rock composting system. So we've taken risks. We've thought about things differently. We are often a pilot for, for different technology. So I think that's part of it is that you have that spirit and interest and curiosity to like try things. I think that's what helps keeps us, you know, doing that. And as a leader, you know, we're proud of being a leader and we do think about being a leader for the rest of the craft brewing industry. I mean, if you, if we can help lead it, then everyone wins and everyone, you know, the whole industry kind of benefits from anything that we or other breweries our size do. So I think we, we know that we know we have a responsibility and a pride in the leader that we have. So we want to make sure we're doing our part for the industry and beyond.

Steven 29:13

Yeah, absolutely. And from the top down, there's, I'm sure, a lot of hands that go into the brewing process and everything in between. How do these teams, whether it's, again, from the top down, how do they ensure that these systems stay efficient, that are effective and are scalable across all your facilities?

Mandi 29:34

It is 100% a team effort. And we are getting, I think every business probably struggles a little bit with, you know, collaboration and cross-functional work is so critical. And I think we've inherently always done a good job, but everyone has ways to improve. And so we are, it's a constant, you have to constantly remind yourself and your teams around you to bring people in. We're all on the same team. We're all working on this together. And, you know, but we're really lucky that that has always kind of been inherent to who we are. And I think it goes back to Ken and our founder, who's his impact. You see it still today. Right. So it's how we operate. But we do have so I will say my team, we have two people dedicated solely to sustainability at each brewery. So one one person in Chico, one person in Mills River. That's their whole job is to make sure the programs that we have in place for zero waste, for efficiency, for greenhouse gas reduction. Those programs are maintained. They're top of mind. So that person is, you know, managing and keeping everyone kind of connected on that work. But it does take all teams. And I would say in the same way that it takes everyone committed to quality. or to safety. Sustainability is the same. So everyone's job in some way is a sustainability job or a safety job or a quality job. So that's how, but it is, it takes intention and action and reminding, you know, that's, it's everyone's job and we're all, we're all kind of like part of it. So we do have people dedicated to it, but it's definitely embedded into everyone's role.

Steven 31:02

Absolutely. I mean, again, you said it best. It's, it's a team effort when it comes down to. Let's get into the, you know, two beers that we, you know, talked about with the in the Summerfest, especially the Pale, those exclusive packaging. Who can find those? Where will those be distributed? Just so people can keep an eye out.

Mandi 31:21

You should be able to find them anywhere that you normally find pale ale. What I know is going to be challenging and we weren't able to really figure out is like, you know, if you live near Great Smoky or Yosemite or Yellowstone, you may not be able to find that particular package. So, you know, you may find one of the other packagings, but you should, it really is a whole summer long campaign. So anywhere that you normally are used to seeing pale ale, you should start seeing those specialty packagings. And so you'll, I I forget exactly how long the campaign is going, but all summer long, you should be able to find it. And we're already talking about, you know, is this, do we continue this? Do we expand it? Do we do something different? So it's again, very excited about it. It's a first time for us, so we'll see how it goes, but I'm really hoping people are excited by it. I

Steven 32:09

know I'm excited too. You have a lot of national parks to pick from. That's true. To keep it going. It's a sustainable thing you got going with the national parks. Yeah. So as we wrap this up, how can people stay connected with Sierra Nevada? How can they learn more? The floor is yours.

Mandi 32:28

Well, what I'd love to share with people that we launched at the end of April on Earth Day was our new hop forward commitments and ambitions. So as we've talked about Sierra Nevada, this work is core to who we are. We've always done it. We're really proud of everything we've already invested in sustainability and operations in our communities. But what we've never done is formalize that externally and really really set future facing, you know, targets and goals and ambitions. So we just launched kind of like our first ever five year roadmap and strategy around sustainability and social impact. It's called hop forward. Um, you can find that on our website. Uh, you can see all the goals that we're going to be working on for the next five years across five different pillars. So that's what I'm most excited about and what my team's going to be doing. And then you can, you know, please go to the website cause there you can also find interactive maps. Um, So you can look at each one of our sites and you can literally hover over and kind of do a virtual tour of all the processes, programs, initiatives that we've done around sustainability. And it gives you, it's just kind of a fun, interactive way to like tour the sustainability efforts at each of our breweries. You'll find more about Hop Forward there. You know, we have a newsletter where you can keep up on the new products that we're coming out with and, We usually share a lot of fun updates in there as well about, you know, we just got three new electric vehicles that I'm super excited to talk about. So, you know, you can learn about different things like that way too. But I really appreciate, you know, being able to share our story and talk more about it. So thank you so much for having me.

Steven 34:00

No, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, Mandy. You know, it has been great just learning through the process and how much sustainability matters in this process. Thank you so much. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you again, Mandy. Thank you to Sierra Nevada. Until next time, everyone, we'll see you soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Four Worlds Podcast. Until next time, you can catch up on the latest innovations shaping our world at TomorrowsWorldToday.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel.