As the global CO2 shortage continues to affect the food and beverage sector, consumers are already facing higher beer prices.
In an interview for Yahoo Finance, Denver Beer Co. Co-Founder Patrick Crawford mentioned that the price of beer cans has jumped between 15% and 20%.
Other raw materials have also become significantly more expensive, Crawford shard, such as barley that has gone up 27% year on year.
To mitigate the issue of rising costs, Denver Beer Co. has looked into implementing carbon capture technology in its operations, which allows it to capture the CO2 that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere during the fermentation process.
Relevant: Beer Shortage On The Horizon Due To Lack of CO2
The captured carbon dioxide can then be reused once the fermentation is complete and put back in the beer to give it that signature fizziness.
The practice is in line with the company’s plan to become more sustainable and capture as much as 100,000 pounds (~45 metric tons) of CO2 annually from its processes, which is far more than it can use and the rest can be sold.
However, carbon capture itself is expensive and therefore, not all beer makers can afford to equip their breweries with the budding technology, with the smaller local brewers being especially disadvantaged.
Read more: UK Beer Production Threatened By Soaring Prices Of CO2
