Jaime Emmerson

Company name: Full Sail Brewing Co. Headquarters: Hood River, Ore. Founded: 1987 Leadership: Irene Firmat, Founder and CEO 2008 sales: $20 million

For Full Sail Brewing Co., sustainable business practices are as much a part of its recipe for success as its Willamette Valley hops and Hood River Valley barley.

“Being sustainable used to be called being cheap,” says brewmaster Jamie Emmerson, who has been at Full Sail for 19 years. “We don’t heat or cool the brewhouse,” Emmerson says. “We open the windows.”

The once-small brewery located in Hood River, which in its first year produced 287 barrels of ale, today churns out more than 130,000 barrels annually. While it does have access to cheap electricity produced at nearby Columbia River dams, the employee-owned company long ago took measures to cut back on its energy and water use.

Full Sail compresses the workweek at its brewhouse to just four days, reducing its energy use by as much as 30 percent compared to similar brewhouses. Its heat exchanger allows Full Sail to brew beer using half as much water as typical breweries. It was one of Hood River’s first purchasers, and is now the city’s third-largest purchaser, of renewable energy through Pacific Power’s Blue Sky program.

But Full Sail’s energy use practices are not the only reason it’s garnered numerous sustainable business awards, including the Governor’s Sustainability Award and the city of Portland’s BEST Business Award. Rather than paying costly tipping fees for its spent grain, Full Sail invested in a less-costly arrangement: A truck delivers more than 5,000 tons of the company’s spent grain and yeast to the Oregon Coast each year to be used as feed for Tillamook dairy cows.

Its own wastewater treatment facility ensures the Mount Hood spring water coming into the brew house is cleaned before going out into the Columbia River.

But one of the measures founder Irene Firmat is most proud of is the human sustainability side of the company’s operations. The decision to adopt an employee-owned business model in 1999 means her staff is more invested in the energy-, water- and waste-saving measures in which Full Sail engages. “It provided a way for people to share in long-term decisions.”