Our first month of trading is drawing to a close. While there is still an inordinate amount to build, move, explore and create - we wanted to post some more material about us and our goals. In part, so that we didn’t fall at the first hurdle and leave a single post hanging in the ether and even more importantly to actually help people understand what we are all about!
So, over the course of a few posts we will try and get across what makes us tick. Why we set up Lacuna Brewing Co. the way we did and what we think about all the important bits of our brewery.
The first and we would say the biggest element is our sustainability.
Starting a business has many complexities, but one area that was startlingly simple for us was the need to be environmentally sustainable. There are so many reasons to be sustainable that will be familiar to us all, and starting a business in this way shouldn’t be seen as something unusual - not any longer.
Of course there are levels to sustainability. The reality is that trade-offs between creating a business without any real footprint and being able to compete long enough to survive, mean that where we start out is not where we hope to end-up, in the medium-term.
However, we believe that by starting with a broad ‘sustainability’ ethos at the core of our business, over the thousands of small individual decisions we have to make, each will be driven by this value. Which in the long-run means these will add-up to a chain of positive choices.
The core of our plan is to achieve carbon neutrality over the medium-term and we will be set-up from the beginning to minimise our footprint and offset carbon by planting trees in the local area. This will be done in partnership with the wonderful Plant One. They are a Community Interest Company that brings business, individuals and landowners together to plant native trees in Cornish soil. All of their sites are open to the public to be enjoyed and explored as much by people as the wildlife that will also benefit.
Alongside the tree-planting, we will not have any single-use plastic in our operations and we will work with our suppliers, customers and any other stakeholders to help reduce and remove this in areas in which we don’t have direct control. Similarly, in our own transport we will use an electric van, which we are thoroughly enjoying, despite the sometimes slow climbs up the hills around Penryn! Given that an electric van is only as good as the source of its power, the electricity that we use to power, well everything, is generated from entirely carbon-free sources.
We get that we are not a totally footprint free business, but we are certainly aiming to get there and while sustainability is at the centre of our goals, we primarily need to make some damn tasty beer, otherwise the rest of it will be purely academic! So it’s a start and it’s at our core, but this is by no means the end, we will keep trying to do more and more until we truly are a fully sustainable brewery that just happens to make delicious beer to boot!
I hope that all makes sense and if anyone has any cool ideas or suggestions on how we can do more, we are more than happy to hear about them and chat with you.
Thanks for reading xx