BREWERY

Brewery

Unison Brewing is located a 10 minutes drive or 20 min cycling from the centre of Joensuu. 

Our beers are brewed in a respon­sible way and we aim to be an envi­ron­men­tally friendly brewery. In general the oper­ation of the Pine Mountain Brewery is well planned and the know-how and the equipment guar­antee, that the brewery has a stable base for good quality beer production.

The capacity of the brewery is up to 100 000 - 150 000 liters per year.

Equipment

Mashing, boiling and hot water tank, each 2000 liters
Hop-back tank
Fermentation/​maturation tanks, each 2000 liters

Bottling and labelling

Direct bot­tling line (no bottle carousel)
Labelling before rinsing and filling
Air removal before capping
Max speed 1200 bottles per hour

Who drinks the beer, grows the forest

We want to be a small company that has an envi­ron­mental strategy that matters. We took one step forward to reduce our carbon foot­print and bought 3,5 hectares of forest to com­pensate carbon dioxide emis­sions from the brewery. 

The main idea in the approach is to use brewery’s own forest to com­pensate carbon dioxide emis­sions from the beer brewing and other company’s activ­ities, meaning mainly car­bon­ation, heating and use of vehicles and electricity.

The forest is approx­i­mately 20 years old mixed forest. The carbon balance of the forest was cal­cu­lated with Motti sim­u­lator and the uncer­tainty of various com­po­nents in the cal­cu­lation were min­imised. Cal­cu­la­tions were made by Ari Laurén from the Uni­versity of Eastern Finland. 

Carbon dioxide emis­sions from the brewery orig­i­nated from fer­men­tation (2.9 tons), bot­tling and car­bon­ation (4 tons), heating (3.4 tons) and from the use of the brewery van (2.8 tons), alto­gether 13.3 tons. Based on these cal­cu­la­tions we can say that the brewery is not only carbon neutral but rather carbon negative. 

Sustainable use of natural resources

Sus­tainable use of natural resources is also important for us. The elec­tricity for the brewing is pro­duced by wind power, cooling energy is min­imised by placing the coolers outside the building. In addition, cooling of the wort pro­duces hot water that is col­lected for washing of the beer tanks. The aim is also to select packing mate­rials from the renewable mate­rials, for example the beer boxes and labels are made of paper-based mate­rials rather than plastic.  Also, the clothes with the brewery’s logo are made of recycled cotton. 

With great beer comes great responsibility