Frogs Hollow Brewing Co.

Focus: Using circularity to drive tangible & realistic sustainability improvements.​

Background: Co-founded by Richard Northam and Mitchell Piercey, the Frogs Hollow Brewing Company is an independent 500 litre microbrewery on New South Wales’s Sapphire Coast. Operating fully off-grid, and with a finite, rather than infinite, growth business model, their aim is to operate as sustainably as possible within the real-world constraints that they have.​

Circular innovation: Focused on making multiple areas of their manufacturing and distribution operations more circular, ranging from only using renewable energy generated on site, to  transitioning away from the use of caustic cleaning products to a biodegradable enzymatic cleaner (Enzybrew 10).​

All water use is harvested rainwater (310,000 litres of water storage to support the brewery operations), with significant efforts made to optimise water usage – typically between 1.5 and 3 litres of wastewater is created per litre of beer (depending on the type of beer) vs. an industry standard of 5 to 6 litres.​

Other by-products from the brewing process such as spent grain goes to feed a local farmers livestock. Used hops and yeast help to enhance on site composting efforts as part of regenerating land previously used for intensive farming.​

Impact and future development: Frogs Hollow understand they are on a journey, and, despite the impact their various initiatives have already had on making their business both more sustainable and competitive, know they will constantly be looking for and making changes to become ever more circular.​

One of those changes is their current roll out of a Paktech re-use scheme, with wheelie bins distributed around the local area where consumers can return their Paktech can holders, diverting them from the recycling stream or landfill.  A Paktech holder can typically be reused up to 50 times.​

For more information: www.frogshollowbrewingco.com.au. ​