S5 Episode 3: Benefit Corp Rapport

It's Earth Month, and we're talkin' good. Good recycling numbers. Good savings in water usage. Good use of spunding to offset carbon emissions. What is spunding? Listen and find out. In this episode, Brett, Liz, and Tom run through the highlights of the annual Allagash Benefit Corporation report, which dives deep into the details of how Allagash, as a business, brews for the good of their employees, community, and environment.

Transcript

From Maine, With Love — An Allagash Brewing Podcast

Earth Month Episode · April 2026

Brett: This is From Maine with Love.

Tom: Wow, I just got a really good look.

Brett: That's a great way to start.

Liz: It's nothing.

Brett: This is From Maine with Love, an Allagash Brewing podcast where we talk about beer, our community here in Maine, and things that generally make us happy. And we're here to talk about Erf Munf.

Liz: Erf Munf.

Brett: That's our fun way internally of saying Earth Munf because we think it's funnier. We spell it E-R-F M-U-N-F, so you can say it Erf Munf.

Liz: Erf Month. Yeah. And this is not new. We have been doing this every April for the last literally, like, seven years.

Brett: Probably seven years. It's been a long time.

Liz: Yeah, but it makes us laugh.

Brett: It does every time. We do actually take it seriously. And you're gonna hear that in this one — that's for the chalice heads. I haven't said chalice heads in, like, the past two episodes because I feel like the guests have all been serious and I'm like, I feel nervous, and I need to push through that nervousness.

Liz: Yeah. Sorry, chalice heads.

Tom: I thought you were gonna say because I'm not serious. You're like, "Time to break out the jokes."

Brett: No, no, no. Hopefully this will be a fun one because we have with us — me, Brett, speaking — Liz, and Tom, our merchandise inventory manager.

Tom: Hello.

Brett: Excellent guest. Tom has visited us previously on the spooky scary episodes. And I'm so excited to have you here. It's actually very fitting because when I started at Allagash, Tom was — when I started or very soon after — the leader of the green team here at the brewery.

Tom: That's true. Facts.

Brett: Yeah. True facts. How long were you the leader for?

Tom: Uh, it was just a few years. I replaced Luke when he left. And then we hired a sustainability coordinator, and she took over. I was like, "I'm very grateful to not have so many meetings 'cause I am super busy doing other things."

Brett: Yep, and then now I have taken on that mantle, co-leading with Meg. Meg works in HR — awesome person.

Liz: I'm sure she's fun.

Brett: Yeah. Liz is just here... Liz, you know some of this stuff. It's gonna be great. We've already got a lot of stuff to talk about. And I literally wrote down "talking turkey." I don't know why, but we're not gonna talk turkey yet because we're gonna get the secret question first.

Liz: Secret question.

🪐 Secret Questions

Brett: Liz, so in honor of Earth Month, what is your actual favorite planet?

Liz: Uh, wow. Does it have to be a planet?

Brett: No.

Tom: Are you gonna say Pluto?

Liz: Oh, I mean, that's a great call. I do feel more bad for Pluto than one should probably feel for a planet, but I was very sad when it got kicked out all those years ago.

Brett: I feel like it got, like, let back in and stuff too. I don't know if anyone knows.

Tom: Who's keeping track?

Brett: I'm not.

Liz: Venus. I don't know. That's a fun one. Big moon fan.

Brett: Moon fan. Ooh, moon cool.

Liz: Yeah, moon cool. I'm happy for our astronaut friends who just made it back to Earth. Artemis 2. Wow, that was fun and thrilling to watch, and so hopeful — good news to follow.

Brett: If you want a good moon documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon is pretty dang awesome. It's Ron Howard. It's like every astronaut that has walked on the moon — you just get to see who these dudes are. It's wild.

Liz: Usually it's me at the end of the day walking out on the back porch and being like, "Moon." And then I'm like, "Wow, that feels good."

Tom: Me love moon.

Brett: Tom, you know what? I'm gonna let you choose your own adventure. Do you want a work-related question, or do you want one that's so out of left field that you're gonna be like, "What the hell are you thinking, Brett?"

Tom: Did you write the out-of-left-field one down, or are you just gonna — all right, let me hear that one.

Brett: In the song The Devil Went Down to Georgia, who actually wins the violin duel, in your opinion?

Tom: I mean, we're all winners when we listen to that song. Is that a good answer?

Brett: It's a very good song, but it's one of those songs where the devil does his devil violin thing — it's really raw and whatever — and then the protagonist, Johnny, he does his thing and they're like, "Oh, he beat the devil with that one," and I'm like, I don't know if you can objectively say that's better than what the devil just did.

Tom: Who is the judge in that song?

Brett: The songwriter, I think.

Tom: So they were just happening to walk by and see this magical duel happening and they're like, "Hold on."

Brett: In the song itself, the devil is like, "Ah, you beat me." Which — the devil wouldn't say that.

Liz: Yeah. Definitely not.

Tom: Unless it was a trick.

Brett: To make everyone listen to fiddle music. All right, thank you for choosing that one.

Liz: My secret question for you, Brett — what is your favorite piece of trash to pick up?

Brett: Oh. Oh man, how on brand. We do a lot of cleanups here at Allagash.

Liz: We've got two coming up on Friday — one Portland Trails and one with Allagash.

Brett: Oh, that's such a good question. We do an East End Beach cleanup every single month, and one of the pieces of trash that's kind of cheating because we go by weight — when you find, like, a soaked towel. Somebody left their towel on the beach and you're like, "That's 20 pounds, baby." All right, number's going up.

Liz: Yep.

Brett: Ciggie butts are least favorite and also unreal how they're everywhere. Like, as soon as you start looking for them, you're just like, "Oh wow, this is literally everywhere." They should make them bright orange or something so you can pick them out easier. 'Cause they're sand colored — not easy to see on the beach.

📋 The Benefit Corporation Report

Brett: So we are gathered here today to talk about something very tangible that is actually available on our site right now — it's our Benefit Corporation report. We release one every single year, and it's part of our requirement as a benefit corporation. I have a very confusing thing I'm gonna try to make non-confusing.

We are a B Corp — that is a separate thing from a benefit corporation. A B Corp is a designation you get from B Lab, which is a separate nonprofit that assesses businesses based on a bunch of criteria and gives you this certification. That's one thing. A benefit corporation is a legal designation that we have to apply for through Maine. We applied for that in 2019 and we got it. Fun fact — we're the first benefit corporation in the state of Maine.

Liz: Oh, yeah.

Brett: We applied on the first day that it was available, and I feel like we lined up like it was like the line up for Pokemon cards or whatever.

Liz: Was there anyone else in the line?

Brett: No, there literally wasn't. We went like probably an hour early, and I don't think anyone showed up. So there was no Rob Todd with a tent overnight on the street. But we got it, and so that's a fun fact. We're not the first B Corp in Maine, but we are the first benefit corporation, which is pretty cool.

Part of that legal designation is we have to release a report every single year to publicly display the work we're doing to benefit our community, employees, and environment. We changed up the format this year. This year we focused on the process of brewing rather than just the general parts of a company like governance or community. We focused on brewing and how that applies to all these different things. What I wanted to do today is just talk about each one of these steps and the highlights — we highlighted very specific points within each one to show: if we're treating this one thing this carefully and thoughtfully, then hopefully that paints a picture of all the different stuff we're doing at the brewery.

Liz: Yeah. And I feel like over the years we've sort of told similar stories, and what I liked about what you did this year is we seemed to go even deeper on, like, okay — let's actually focus in on a very small, quote-unquote, thing that has a big impact instead of larger topics. I love the new format. It's super digestible. You don't have to flip through a PDF.

Brett: Yeah, no PDF this year. We're doing it on a blog, baby.

Liz: Yeah, we're blogging it up.

Part 1: Bringing in Materials

Brett: To brew stuff, you have to get stuff to brew with. Maine-grown grain — this past year we brewed with over two million pounds of Maine-grown grain. We have an entire episode dedicated to it. That's big as far as supporting local community.

I think Bissell Brothers buys a ton. They might actually buy a million.

Liz: Yeah, I think I saw that as well.

Brett: There's a lot of different people using this grain, which is great because it shows that it's cost effective, it's quality, it's everything else. So it's awesome that more people are using it.

Liz: And just super happy for the farmers who have been able to make this work on their property.

Brett: All right, we're moving on to something much more exciting. It's cardboard. We're talking about cardboard trays.

Liz: I think you have to explain why — cardboard trays is not what you think of when you think of being a voluminous part of our production.

Brett: So a cardboard tray is something you would carry your beer in. When you ship a case or carry a case to your car, it's probably in a cardboard tray. If you're stacking a ton of beer, you need something that helps maintain the structure of that gigantic stack of beers. You get two 12-packs of cans in a cardboard tray.

This was, I think, two years ago — but one thing about a lot of these facts is that these are things we've been doing for a while but literally just never talked about. A big part of this report was actually me just going to other departments and being like, "Tell me all the stuff you guys are doing that you're proud of." There was stuff like this that came out where it's like, that's crazy, I didn't know we did that.

So — we needed to order some new trays. We made the tray height smaller. Still great for structure, just a little lower. It actually shows the beer better, gave us a chance to rebrand it so we got some newer branding, newer logos on it. But the crazy thing is that it saved 280,000 square feet of cardboard every single year — which is the equivalent of 33,000 pounds.

Liz: That's a lot of cardboard. And we're literally talking, like, an inch?

Brett: Yeah. Literally an inch, I think.

Tom: That is a lot of cardboard. By just shrinking something down a little bit.

Brett: Another one that's just kind of baked into the DNA of how we do things — kudos to Pete, our warehouse director and shipping director, Pete's the man of the warehouse.

Tom: He's the head chef at the warehouse.

Brett: Thank you. Pete's team worked with the cardboard shippers. They were doing stuff where they were wrapping it in plastic and wrapping each 25 trays in four plastic bands. There are about 2,500 trays in a pallet. So they basically asked, "Do we need all this stuff?" They ended up taking away the outer wrap, wrapping the entire 2,500 in just those four plastic bands — and also changed the orientation so they could ship half the trucks for the same amount of cardboard. All these little things add up to just this massive win for fewer trucks on the road.

Tom: It's amazing to think you have one little thought — "Do we need all these plastic bands?" — and then it snowballs into, "Let's change all the things."

Liz: 'Cause when you see one pallet, you're kinda like, "Eh, I guess that's right." But then you start to see the waste that comes from many, and you're like, "Ugh, I don't feel good about that."

Brett: This is also a straight up good business decision. Fewer trucks means less money to make trucks go. Less plastic is probably less cost. You don't have to deal with the waste.

Part 2: Brewing

Brett: Can either of you tell me what spunding is without reading the thing in front of you? Spunding — what is it?

Liz: No.

Tom: Also no.

Brett: All right. In the brewing process, we do something called spunding, which is basically you cap a tank. When beer's fermenting, it creates CO2. You cap the tank at a certain CO2 pressure rather than letting all of that CO2 go away. You could just let it all escape and then have a nearly flat beer that you'd have to re-add CO2 to later. By capping that beer and keeping that carbonation in — it costs us nothing. It's just purely something we've baked into our process. Every year, we save how much carbon dioxide?

Tom: A spund worth.

Liz: Two kitchen spunds.

Brett: One metric spund. How much? Someone say it.

Liz: 18,737 pounds of carbon dioxide saved.

Brett: Whoa. One process. That's it. It's crazy.

Liz: When you talked to Ian about this, was he just like, "Oh, somebody decided this years ago. Okay."

Brett: Yeah. I think it like — it's a process thing we built in there. I actually think that'd be fun to go back and see how long we've been doing it. Some things in brewing, like heat exchangers, are a big one — where the hot water goes one way, the cold water goes the other way, and they exchange their heat so you cool down the wort and heat up the water for the next batch. That's something cool and amazing, but every brewery does that.

Tom: In general you hear a lot about reclaiming CO2 in the brewing industry. That's a hot topic. So I think not having to waste CO2 is always good.

Brett: This is just claiming CO2. Not even having to reclaim it.

Brett: We've talked about spent grain a ton. We send spent grain to cows. It's really heartwarming. When grain is done from the brewing process, we don't need it anymore, so we put it in a tank. And Norm — or a son of Norm at this point, because we've been doing this forever —

Liz: Norm's network.

Brett: Norm's people come in a big truck, get all the spent grain, and distribute it to cattle farmers around Maine. Now we know how much, or we've always known, but now we're actually saying it — 5.8 million pounds of spent grain every single year. Plus spent yeast.

Liz: Do cows eat that?

Brett: No. Luckily. This is spread on fields. We actually send some of it to an anaerobic digester, which makes sure no carbon dioxide or methane leaks out as it decomposes. The spent yeast — another thing we don't need after we use it — we send it to two different sources. That's 1.5 million pounds. So between spent yeast and spent grain, we're keeping 7.3 million pounds out of the landfill every year.

Tom: That's a huge number.

Brett: Probably the biggest one.

Liz: I've been trying to go visit a cow farm to just, like, illustrate that spent grain goes to cows, and I've yet, over my many years here, actually gone to the farm.

Tom: The next time Norm is here picking up, just hop in the truck. Go for a little ride.

Liz: I happened to come to work two days ago when the spent grain truck was filling up, and it was amazing. But the guy in the truck was just staring at me 'cause I was staring at him. And he had this amazing headset on. He was on top of the ladder with this amazing headset on — like he's a helicopter pilot or something.

Brett: Objective bravo. I actually went to the cow farm. We got pictures of cows, pictures of Norm. We have, like, a majestic picture of Norm standing in front of all his cows.

Liz: Ugh. What a dream.

Brett: Cows are interesting 'cause they're gigantic. And they're curious, so they, like, follow you. And you're like, "I know you're harmless, but you're big. What am I doing?"

Tom: Don't tip 'em over.

Brett: That seems hard. They're big animals.

Part 3: Packaging

Brett: We've gotten the materials. We've brewed the beer. Now we're going to packaging. Can washing.

Tom: Why are the cans so dirty?

Brett: They're not dirty. We're washing the outside. The can is empty and totally clean. We spray ionized air into it anyway — just in case. We actually have multiple X-rays during this process to make sure nothing else is in the can but beer. Beer gets filled, beer gets capped. You like to cap on a little bit of foam, so every can gets a little beer coming on the outside. You need to wash that off right afterwards.

Sam — one of our engineers — he just saw the way that our can washer's spray nozzles were situated and said, "That doesn't look like the best way that could be done." So he made another little spray orientation, and it sprays the cans better, rinses them more thoroughly, and saves us 1.5 gallons of water per minute.

Tom: That's awesome. That's amazing.

Liz: It's, like, reason 5,020 where I'm like, "Oh, wow, it's really cool we have an engineering team." To be able to look at something and be like, "That's not quite right" — and then just make it.

Brett: This is one of those facts I've always tried to pin, because every time I do, a brewer's like, "Eh, it's not the only reason." But it's the fact that we use half the industry average of water — 3.4 gallons of water per gallon of beer. That awesome stat comes from stuff like this. All these little decisions we're making all over the place.

There's a whole other story where our water usage was going up and we were like, "What are we doing here?" So we looked at everything all over the brewery, and it turned out it was literally a single leaky gasket near the water main. We had the whole thing so dialed in that one little leaky gasket led to a spike that was super noticeable for us.

Tom: I thought you were gonna say it was Sam testing all of his sprayers, trying to figure out which ones work the best.

Part 4: Sending Beer Out

Brett: Beer has left our facility — what are we doing about it? We've got trucking efficiency — getting more full trucks out the door — but the one I feel like is most tangible and interesting is the recycling co-op. Tom, you know about the recycling co-op.

Tom: The recycling co-op started in 2020. We had an issue with trying to find homes for our recyclable materials — grain bags, pack techs, stuff like that. And we realized there were a bunch of other breweries also facing this issue. So we thought, maybe we just pile all of our stuff together — it'll be that much easier to recycle because you can fill a trailer, so it's much more valuable to the recycling people. They actually want that as opposed to, "Here's my one grain bag today." So we reached out to some people, got some members, and people started dropping off recycling at our warehouse. We baled it up and we're still doing it.

Liz: I didn't know we were still doing it. That's so good.

Tom: Every month.

Brett: Kudos to Zoe, our sustainability coordinator, who really set this thing up to just roll. We're picking up where people are dropping off one day a month during a certain time window when our team has bandwidth. A fun fact about the recycling co-op — the green team is actually picking it up now, just starting last month. We have members from all across the brewery who are gonna go there to help people unload their trucks, put it in the baler, weigh it, keep track.

The things we're actually taking in this recycling co-op: number two and number four plastics — pack techs and stretch wrap. There's a lot of stretch wrap in brewing.

Tom: Oh, yeah.

Brett: We have tried to minimize it. To the chagrin of many folks who use stretch wrap — we use as little as we possibly can to keep things structurally sound so things aren't falling on people's heads from 40 feet in the air at our warehouse.

So we take all that stretch wrap, bale it up, and take it to the nearby Hannaford — the grocery store chain right around the corner. They have tons of stretch wrap they go through because of food products. They take all that stretch wrap and bring it to Trex, which makes plastic decking.

Liz: As a deck. We like a second life.

Brett: You might have some Allagash Brewing Company stretch wrap in your deck.

And then the other one is number five plastic — grain bags. If those grain bags are not dirty, we'll send them straight back to the grain folks, like Blue Ox Malt House or Maine Malt House. If it is a little bit dirty, we send it to Casella, who will properly recycle it.

All told, Liz, how much have we recycled in this program since 2020?

Liz: 180 tons.

Brett: 180 tons. We're talking big numbers, baby. It's Earth Month!

Tom: If you had to pick an animal to relay what that weight is similar to — which animal?

Brett: I think I'd be saying a blue whale.

Tom: Blue whales are ginormous.

Brett: It's the weight, not just the size. It's not like you could make a blue whale out of plastic.

Liz: I mean, maybe.

Tom: Now I kinda want to. I'm gonna get Trex on the phone.

Brett: Sorry, Trex — we gotta make a blue whale. It'll become an attraction.

Part 5: Our Company

Brett: We're a company. We have about 130 employees, a sales team spread over the 22 different states we distribute to, and a lot of people back here in Portland. I want to highlight something. There's also a caveat — we have great working conditions, very nice snacks in the break room, good hours, healthcare, and the fundamental things you need as a company. This is not trying to be like an ad agency with a ping pong table. What we've got are traditions. What are some traditions we've got?

Liz: One of my favorites — which is a newer tradition, put on by the green team, thank you — is Bring Your Own Bowl Day. The green team cooks up a bunch of better-for-you options. You start with your base — rice, brown rice, quinoa, salad — and then you can take your bowl in any direction. We had a Southwestern theme last time: black beans, lots of vegetarian options, local Maine fish, tofu.

Tom: I took mine in every direction last time. I piled everything on there.

Liz: And you feel slightly proud of your bowl. You're like, "I brought my own bowl to work. And it doesn't get thrown away." Me and my bowl and my endless bowl options.

Tom: I feel like the first year we did that, people tried to bring wacky bowls.

Brett: Yeah. I sent out a really aggressive email where I was like, "You're not gonna have a better bowl than me." Salim from the engineering team had, like, a metal pipe that he'd welded an end onto — that was his bowl. And I was like, "You sir."

Tom: He's still using that to this day as far as I'm aware.

Brett: We got Pinewood Derby — people come to play, it's awesome. Hearts of Pines soccer game — we're sponsors, so we go once a year to watch that team. Look them up if you don't know anything about them. It's a literal phenomenon. Maine Maple Brunch — Maine Maple Sunday is an awesome time here. Chili cook-off —

Liz: Ugh.

Tom: There's a trophy for that one.

Liz: You gotta come prepared. It's not like, "Oh, I'll just have some chili for lunch." You're getting tasting samples, you've got like 16 chilis to get through. "What's the best green chili? What's the best bean chili? What's the best meat chili?" There's like ten meat chilis.

Brett: Yeah. You have to strategize. You cannot take a lot of each one — you take a spoon's worth, and then after you're done with all of them, you go back for the ones you thought about. And you leave feeling great.

Liz: And there's a golden ladle.

Brett: Golden ladle. So good.

Brett: We got the green team. And then we got Bellagash — Tom, you can say it.

Tom: Trip to Belgium.

Brett: After five years. That's it. All right, see you later.

Tom: That's the track.

Brett: Listen to the episode, it's pretty cool.

Tom: After 10 years, you get a sabbatical, and then every five years, why don't you just take another one?

Brett: 30 days, basically a month-long sabbatical. No requirements. No paid stuff.

Liz: You don't have to learn anything if you don't want to.

Brett: You can unlearn stuff if you want to. I'm going this summer. June 13th will be my 10-year. I'm taking it during the summer — gonna be amazing. I haven't fully planned it out yet, but I'm excited.

Tom: Don't. Go where the wind takes you. Visit the cows.

Part 6: Giving

Brett: We talked about beer, we talked about our company — now we're talking about how our company interacts with the community. There's a lot we could talk about, but this one I felt was indicative of a really interesting way it's both encouraged for employees to live that value, and also the number of ways in which employees can do that. So I'm just highlighting all the different ways you can actually give through Allagash.

Donate and get matched: You can donate up to $300 and Allagash will match it to whatever you're donating to.

Board service: If you serve on the board of a nonprofit, Allagash will just donate $300 straight up.

Giving Tuesday: No giving required by the employee. You literally just tell Allagash what nonprofit you want to give $100 to, and Allagash does it. Jo processes all 130 donations.

Liz: Shout out to Jo. Who answers the phone? Jo. Who answers the emails? Jo. Who processes all those donations? Jo. She does a lot.

Brett: Charity events: If you're participating in a 5K, a triathlon, a walk, or any event for charity — bang, Allagash donates $250 for you to be a part of that. I did the Dempsey last year for the first time.

Liz: Are you doing it again?

Brett: I think I might. I need to get the right running shoes. I was pleasantly surprised by what I did. I chalk it up to the Costco all-beef hot dog I ate the day before. I think it really put a pep in my step.

Liz: Yeah. I think, to your point of putting the power into each employee's hands — what did you total that up to? $1,250?

Brett: Yeah, all from Allagash.

Tom: And it's nice that you can direct it in different ways. Like, you don't have to just donate to one place. You can do all the different things you're into — animals or people or whatever.

Brett: The one I forgot to put on here is the 16 Hours VTO — we have 16 hours of paid volunteer time off. When you complete all 16 hours, you hit the 16-hour club and then you can give, I think around $200, to whatever nonprofit you want — most often the one you've been volunteering for.

Wrapping Up

Brett: There you go. We did it.

Tom: That's a lot of numbers.

Brett: That's a lot of numbers. And it's not even all of them — go to the Benefit Corporation Report if you wanna see more. We have basically three facts for each section.

Liz: And a Rob take.

Brett: Ooh, a Rob take. I had different pictures of Rob for each Rob take and Rob was like, "Take those pictures off."

Liz: Rob's feedback was too many pictures of Rob.

Tom: I feel like that could be a good spinoff podcast — The Rob Take.

Brett: It'd be surprising, too. I feel like he would come up with takes where you're like, "I was not expecting that, Rob — and I've learned something."

Liz: It would be, like, a very knowledgeable beer sales take, and then it'd be, like, a coffee take.

Tom: I wanna know what his favorite planet is.

Brett: Well, if we ever have him on the show for the first time — for longtime listeners, every time Rob is on here, he says, "I don't think I've been on this before." And I don't know if it's a joke or if he literally doesn't remember being on the podcast. I'm just gonna let him say it every single time and I'm gonna laugh.

Brett: All right, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Liz.

Liz: Sure.

Tom: Thanks for putting all this together. A lot of info to brain dump out of people's brains into your brain... into the blog.

Liz: I can say I didn't know what spunding was before this, so.

Brett: Yes. Thank you. I hope this was digestible to the folks listening. All right — this has been an Allagash Brewing production. If you have something you'd like us to talk about or a question for our team, just send us an email at podcast@allagash.com. And as always, thanks for listening.