Look, we love making banging beer as much as you love drinking it, but is a beer really banging if we don’t think about how its production affects other people and the environment? Here at Cold Town we are committed to Brewing Blue and Going Green.

That is, whenever you drink a can of Cold Town you can rest assured that we are doing our bit to reduce our carbon footprint and improve the lives of others wherever we can.

So what are we doing at the moment? We’re glad you asked…

The Beer

• Locally Grown: We work with one single malt supplier locally in Scotland to ensure that we are supporting locally businesses and bringing you the best that Scotland has to offer.
• Vegetarian & Vegan: All of our beers are suitable for vegetarians and most of them for vegans as we do not use any isinglass derived finings in our brews. Please see our individual products for more information.
• The Good Stuff: We don’t use any colour additives in our beer, a common practice in larger breweries.

The Brewery

• Our Location: We specifically chose to open at a ‘converted brownfield site’ – an area of land which was previously used for industrial purposes. This meant that we completely avoided much of the environmental impact associated with opening a new brewery while also repurposing an abandoned site to create jobs in the local area.
• Travel: As a city-based brewery, we have much lower staff and product travel miles than the average brewery. As a quick example, 80% of our team get to work by bicycle.
• Reduce Journeys: Our local deliveries to bars, restaurants and even some online orders are made with our own Cold Town Van. This helps us to reduce the level of lorry traffic going into heavily congested city centre roads and prevents the all-too-common damage to walkways that we see across cities. We of course ensure to only make journeys when necessary and make as many deliveries as we can in a single journey to minimise our carbon footprint. As of March 2021, we have moved all of our merchandise to our brewery so that we can dispatch them at the same time as beer orders and further reduce the amount of journeys being made per order.

The Packaging

• Recycled: The packaging that we use to ship our cans in is 85% recycled, and 100% recyclable. It is sourced from Forestry Stewardship Council certified sources.
• Can It: When we first started thinking about coming round to yer house, the important decision of “can or bottle?” was our first hurdle. After a lot of thought, we decided to go with cans for the benefits to the environment. Cans are much more easily recycled than glass bottles; not only that, but they create less packaging weight and volume than bottles which reduces our overall CO2 emissions when we distribute them.
• Plastic Free: We actively avoid using any plastic in our packaging and anywhere else we can avoid it. We are currently striving to say that we are 100% plastic free.

The People

• Working Together: We look to collaborate with small, local companies whenever we can. The more the merrier, we always say.
• Eric Liddell Centre: We teamed up with our friends McLarens on the Corner to make a joint contribution to The Eric Liddell Centre, who do fantastic work supporting those who are affected by dementia, disabilities and mental health issues. Our own contribution totalled £2,000.
• Doddie Beir: At the beginning of 2020 we brewed Doddie Beir to support the My Name’5 Doddie Foundation and raise awareness of Motor Neuron Disease. Bars all across Scotland had the beer on tap during the 6 Nations, with over 3,000 pints being poured over the opening weekend and over 10,000 total. All of the profits from Doddie Beir went straight to the foundation.
• Cold Town Lock Down: In the height of lockdown, we really felt for the students across Scotland who were forced to move into halls, many of who were moving away from home for the first time, only to be put into lockdown. Our heart really went out to all of the messages we saw across social media and the news, so we decided to do our bit and spread some cheer by donating over 3,000 free cans to student halls at Heriot-Watt University and Queen Margaret University.

If you have any questions about our sustainability aims or would like to make a suggestion, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.