Bread & Water Brewing Company Spring Release: A Meditation on Zero-Waste

Tim and I started “Bread & Water Brewing Company” with my brother, A.J., as a fun outlet in 2018. It served as an opportunity to get together with family and share something tasty with clients and friends. The original Winter Ale label design was inspired by various ephemera from both Tim’s and my families. We had one more release in the summer of 2019, Secret Pupusa, but when 2020 hit like a ton of bricks we had to put this project on an extended pause. 

After a long hiatus, Bread & Water Brewing Company is back with our newest release: Trudy’s Pale Ale! This beer was made in honor of my late grandmother, Gertrudis Paniagua. She was born in 1928 in San Salvador, El Salvador. After moving to San Francisco, CA in 1959 with two young kids, a sixth-grade education, and a killer work ethic, she and my grandfather were eventually able to achieve the “American Dream” of owning their own home. Having come from such humble means, my grandma never wasted a thing. Wrapping paper was carefully saved and she didn’t replace household items unless they couldn’t be patched up or repaired. Her minimalist-before-minimalism-was-cool lifestyle served as inspiration for this package design. Tim allowed me to take creative lead on this project and I challenged myself to get the packaging as close to zero-waste as possible. 

Why try for “Zero-Waste” Packaging? 

While real estate development isn’t synonymous with virtuous career opportunities, I felt a decent amount of purpose in my previous job working at a company that cleaned up, redeveloped and monitored previous industrial-use sites. When I joined Tim to launch Gatto Design, he had a frank conversation with me that good package designers acknowledge that they are essentially designing trash. I derive a lot of satisfaction from helping clients bring their brands to life, but the wasteful aspect of our job weighs heavily on me.

The economics of the “luxury” and “premium” wine space don’t typically lend themselves to packaging options with lower environmental impact. Because of fears around consumer’s perceived value of a product, heavy glass and tin or polylam capsule closures are still the norm. Efforts to make labels as water-resistant as possible mean that plastics and synthetic glues sneak their way into paper. Hot stamped foil, while beautiful and eye-catching, doesn’t exactly have an “eco-friendly” reputation. 

Since reading Cradle to Cradle as a college student almost twenty years ago, I’ve known about the limitations of recycling for a long time and have only grown more disheartened about this waste management approach as global markets for recycled materials close up. With 2020 marking the year scientists estimate that human-made items tipped the scale to outweigh all living biomass on Earth, I was starting to feel like I was not doing my part to bring awareness to this problem. 

I am willing to admit that I don’t know what the solution to humanity’s waste crisis is. My bachelor’s degree is in Environmental Policy Analysis and Planning meaning I’m well aware that all policies have unintended consequences. I’ve also been to enough public hearings to know that a policy I view as a smart proposal whose benefits clearly outweigh its costs will likely still face fierce opposition (see the pilot episode of Parks and Recreation for some stunningly accurate satire). Last year, a piece of California legislation that would have required beverage distributors to create “their own container stewardship organization and develop a plan to recycle their own containers” sounded so promising to me, but it failed in the state Senate due to opposition from the beverage industry. 

Approach

Instead of wallowing in despair, I decided to pursue this project and see where it takes me. My brother has a lot more brewing experience than I do, but with the arrival of his second kid last fall and a new job, he had to step away from his “Head Brewer” responsibilities, making this my first solo brewing attempt. I defined my objective for the packaging as "create a zero-waste package design for a family-run brewing operation, inspired by the Paniagua matriarch’s strength, femininity, and Salvadoran ancestry.” I decided to reuse bottles from my household beer consumption, which meant the glass shape would not be uniform. 

Given these parameters, I started sketching and landed on a design that consisted of a hand drawn portrait of my grandmother based on a photo of her in her late 20s, framed in type inspired by hand-painted signage common throughout Central America. I landed on the name “Trudy’s Pale Ale” because my Grandma once shared with me that she didn’t like the nickname most people called her, Tula, and she instead preferred the name her neighbors began calling her, Trudy. I decided to set everything in a bright pink circle because I wanted the branding to be bold enough to transcend the different bottle shapes. Plus, my grandma had an epically pink bathroom. 

For branding treatments, I initially took inspiration from my son’s milk brand of choice, Straus Family Creamery, which comes in reusable glass bottles. A $2.00 deposit is refunded for every bottle customers return to the store. Their bottles are silkscreened because silkscreened designs can withstand multiple washings.

Commercial screen-printing is only economical at high production volumes so I decided to try my hand with a DIY screenprinting kit. I watched a few tutorials online and felt really confident that I was going to nail it. I forgot to take photos of my test prints, but close your eyes and imagine a pink blob… not exactly the endearing portrait of my grandma I had in mind. Since screenprinting bottles myself was looking less and less feasible and I had beer to bottle, I made the decision to print labels instead. I knew the durability of vinyl stickers would provide the most potential for bottle re-use, but I didn’t feel right generating more impossible-to-recycle plastic for this project. I ended up printing my label with a company called EcoEnclose. They have a super detailed Sustainable Packaging Framework that I found helpful in my decision making. I opted for uncoated paper on their “zero-waste” liner. The water resistance for uncoated paper is nil and my experiments coating them with a plant-based wax didn’t yield noticeable results, but I always try to frame things in terms of what I’m gaining versus what I’m giving up. I’m not giving up a durable package, I’m gaining a mindfully-sourced glass bottle package with a label that will biodegrade in less than a year. How great!

Conclusions

Did I achieve a zero-waste solution? Not exactly, but I found some great inspiration on my journey. In a sea of bad news, there are some hopeful beacons of light to acknowledge. In the last twelve months I have seen more clients forgoing tin capsules in favor of exposed or wax sealed natural corks. I learned about global design firm, IDEO, providing a channel for multiple organizations to pool resources in order to achieve environmental progress faster than they could on their own. Another local dairy producer, Clover Sonoma has invested in milk cartons made from fully-renewable materials.

One of Gatto Design’s commitments to our clients is to communicate with their print vendors early and often. A lengthy press check can be a tremendous source of waste, so we do our best to get details right before print day and make reasonable calls on press when a change can be perfected more efficiently in between print runs. While no material is perfect, we steer clients towards tree-free or recycled substrates whenever it makes sense for the project.

These are good faith efforts by small groups of people to reduce the environmental impacts of their operations. I have a hard time imagining industry changes happening at a scale that could reverse worldwide wasteful trends without government regulations and public investment, but I’m heartened whenever I see people trying. Even if this project does nothing to move the needle toward global sustainability, at least I know Grandma would be proud that I tried not to waste anything when I made a beer with her name and face on it.