Drinking responsibly: The most sustainable brewing companies
· 17 min read
📊 Download the report & dataset (300+ KPIs) on the sustainability of brewing firms
Beer is older than the wheel, older than writing, older than even the plough. Traces of fermented grain found in a cave in modern-day Israel date back some 13,000 years, predating agriculture itself. The beverage that outlasted Babylon and Rome is one of the few human practices that has never gone out of fashion.
That practice now runs at 1.9 billion hectolitres a year, roughly eight times the volume of wine, produced by a handful of groups whose combined revenues exceed the GDP of most countries on earth. But the arithmetic has changed.
Brewing has always been an extractive process; as it draws at industrial scale on water, land and energy to make the beer, the extractive strain on the planet is finally taking its toll on the very resources the industry needs to keep brewing. As the planet faces warming temperatures and shifting weather patterns, the yields of beer's two foundational ingredients, hop and barley, are projected to fall by up to 18% and 15% by 2050, respectively. The water table is dropping in the regions brewing depends on most. An industry that for 13 millennia operated on the assumption that water, crops and energy would stay abundant and cheap is now, in part, the reason they no longer are.
After NATURE100™, the first-ever global ranking of the best companies in nature impact, overseen by leading scientists and practitioners and celebrated by companies from Kering to Wise, illuminem now draws again on the Sustainability Data Hub™, tracking over 300 environmental and nature-related KPIs across more than 12,000 companies, and on the world's largest community of sustainability experts. What follows is the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the sustainability of the brewing industry.
A pint's true cost is paid long before it reaches a glass. Every stage of brewing draws on a resource now running short: water to brew and clean, energy to heat and ferment, packaging to carry the finished product to market.
One of the most critical shortfalls of the beer industry is its water usage. A critical component of beer, water represents not only the industry's greatest sustainability hurdle, but also one of its most acute operational risks as global water scarcity worsens. According to the University of Vermont, it takes between 3 and 7 barrels of water to create a single barrel of beer. What makes it into the beverage is only a small fraction of the total used in the production process; cleaning, cooling, and packaging can lead to the water-to-beer ratio rocketing to 10:1 in the worst cases.
As freshwater shortages and ecosystem degradation become more frequent realities, leading brewers are turning to new measures to protect water security and supply chain resilience. From Carlsberg's "dry floor" policies that eliminate the need for heavy hosing to Molson Coors' use of purified municipal wastewater in California, minimising usage is increasingly becoming a "license to operate" in a water-stressed age.
The brewing process also involves heavy energy usage of roughly 50-60 kWh per barrel, enough to power an average European home for about a week. From high-temperature boiling to refrigeration required for fermentation and storage, electrical usage is massive. While many have successfully shifted their electrical grids to renewable sources, the transition of industrial heat, traditionally powered by natural gas, to green alternatives remains capex intensive. With the EU's Carbon Border Adjustment tax having kicked in at the beginning of 2026, breweries face rising pressure to cut back the carbon intensity of their production processes.
The data shows a sector splitting in two. Diageo, Heineken, Carlsberg and AB InBev all now draw between 84% and 88% of their electricity from renewable sources; ThaiBev reports around 9% and Constellation Brands none at all. Yet that divide does not map onto the ranking. Two of the four electricity leaders finish in the bottom half, and the company at the top is mid-table on renewables. A combination of validated targets, near-term movement and the absence of material controversy splits the ranking. One further pattern cuts across all ten: no company draws more than 52% of its total energy from renewables, against electricity figures approaching 90%.
That gap is industrial heat, and it remains the sector's unsolved problem.
Heat and water are not the only problems the industry is trying to solve. Brewing is attempting a transition it has never had to make before, and the progress is uneven.
Much of the recent progress across the industry traces back to a less visible source: the yeast itself. "Improved yeasts enable brewers to produce more beer in smaller factories and within shorter production timeframes, thereby significantly reducing energy and water consumption," says Professor Kevin Verstrepen, Harvard University emeritus Fellow and Director of the Laboratory for Systems Biology at KU Leuven, contributing to this report.
Other work in the field is pushing toward upcycling waste streams and producing flavour compounds through precision fermentation rather than costlier extraction methods. "These innovations have already had a very large impact on the sustainability of beverages," Verstrepen says, "and a next generation of improved microbes is underway."
Glass accounts for a substantial share of bottled beer's footprint, and the industry is finally testing alternatives at scale. Heineken and Carlsberg have both trialled fibre-based bottles, while lightweighting, higher recycled content, and refill schemes are being pushed further than the sector has previously attempted. The constraint is less technical than commercial: consumer acceptance and retail logistics still lag the engineering.
Spent grain, the sector's largest waste stream by mass, is being pushed toward higher-value uses. AB InBev'sEverGrain unit extracts protein isolate from spent barley, though it processes only around 20% of its own St Louis brewery's output. ThaiBev goes further on the energy side, running biomass boilers on rice husks and tea-leaf residue and recovering fermentation CO2 to carbonate its own beer. The pattern across the sector: a shift from using less to using again.
The sector's fastest-growing category is however not, as often assumed, its greenest. The dominant industrial route, thermal de-alcoholisation, means brewing a full-strength beer and then heating it to strip the alcohol out, adding an energy-hungry step to an already resource-intensive process. Biological alternatives using specialised yeasts skip that step entirely, saving roughly between 8% and 20% on total water footprint. Although none of the ten has brought this to market, Asahi has spent years testing yeast strains capable of producing a genuine 0.0% beer through fermentation alone. Overall, the category's growth looks to add an additional layer of challenge for the sustainability targets of the industry.
Solar arrays, biogas recovery from wastewater treatment, and heat pumps are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Major brewers including Heineken and AB InBev have public net-zero commitments for their own operations, but the harder problem remains industrial heat: the high-temperature boiling at the core of brewing is still largely gas-fired, and electrifying it is capital-intensive in a way that renewable electricity procurement is not.
Among the ten global giants, each armed with its own net-zero pledge and no shortage of ambition, illuminem's ranking, the most comprehensive-ever in the industry, crowns Kirin, Diageo and Heineken as the true leaders of sustainability in the brewing world.
No less notable is the national pattern: three of the top five greenest large breweries are Japanese. Leadership in this sector is claimed most loudly from Europe and North America, yet the index suggests it is practised most consistently in Tokyo.
1️⃣ Kirin (58% sustainability maturity) tops the table on the back of a genuine world first. In 2022 it became the only food and beverage company on earth with a value-chain net-zero target certified by the Science Based Targets initiative, having joined RE100 two years earlier with a commitment to run entirely on renewable electricity by 2040. It has extended upstream into regenerative agriculture, brewing an Australian lager with 70% certified sustainable malt. With buy-in worth 30% of the score, its density of third-party certification and absence of significant environmental litigation make it the cleanest record in the table. Looking deeper into the Data Hub™ numbers, however, Kirin's scope 3 emissions have risen across the most recent three years, a gap that it will want to close should it remain on track to achieve net-zero.
2️⃣ Diageo (56%) comes closest to leading on the raw data: nearly 88% renewable electricity, a 52% total renewable energy share that is the highest here, and water withdrawal falling in each of the last three reporting years to the lowest intensity in the table. It is also the most efficient company here on both energy and water consumed per unit of revenue.
The Guinness owner has scaled back several climate goals, moving net zero in direct operations from 2030 to 2040 and cutting its recycled-packaging target from 60% to 50%, joining Unilever, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola in a wider wave of scalebacks. CSO Ewan Andrew called the changes "important adjustments to give us a stronger, more credible path forward." The lengthened carbon horizon is what cost it first place.
3️⃣ Heineken (55%) performs comparably, at 88% renewable electricity and 47% total renewable energy, and pioneered water balancing while remaining the industry's most visible mover on circular packaging. But campaigners note that in 2022, during a severe drought in Nuevo León, Mexico, where Heineken brews at scale, dams ran dry and household supply failed while production continued: an uncomfortable context for a company that launched a global water vision in support of UN SDG 6. It was also among the slower majors to leave Russia. Strong numbers, complicated by where it makes them.
4️⃣ Suntory (54%) has the sector's most developed water programme, and the data supports it: water withdrawal among the lowest per unit of revenue, falling year on year. Its Natural Water Sanctuary initiative, running since 2003, spans over 12,000 hectares across 27 Japanese sites and replenishes roughly twice the groundwater its domestic plants extract, a model since extended to Kentucky, India, Mexico, France and a Scottish peatland project. CEO Tak Niinami has warned that around 40% of the global population will face water shortages by 2050 and that "unless we take action today, our not-so-distant future will be threatened." It sits fourth because its energy transition lags its water record, with total renewable energy at around 25%, roughly half Diageo's share.
5️⃣ Asahi (51%) shows why ambition alone does not lift a score. Its "Carbon Zero" plan targets net zero by 2040, a decade ahead of its original pledge, but renewable electricity has been flat at 41% across consecutive years and independent trackers place it roughly 17% of the way toward that goal. A ransomware attack in late 2025 exposed the data of almost 2 million customers and forced the company to postpone its full-year results. The consequence is visible in the data itself: Asahi's most recent reporting year is largely blank, an expensive gap for a company asking to be judged on its disclosure.
6️⃣ ThaiBev (43%) is the clearest divergence between this index and conventional ESG scoring. It holds CDP "A" ratings in climate and water and led the beverage sector on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for several years. But the gap is in the electricity: its renewable electricity share stands at roughly 9%, up from about 5% the previous year and by a wide margin the lowest of any company here that reports it, against 88% at Diageo and Carlsberg. It is also the most water-intensive company in the table by consumption per unit of revenue. Biomass lifts total renewable energy to 37%, but excellent disclosure cannot offset a largely fossil-fuelled supply.
7️⃣ Molson Coors (42%) has been unusually candid, including about the capital constraints and pandemic delays that slowed its initiatives. The data explains why that candour was necessary: renewable electricity stands at 33% and total renewable energy at just 8%, the weakest energy mix here apart from Constellation. For a company that has made water and climate central to its "Our Imprint" strategy, thin progress on its own reported figures sits uneasily with the ambition of the messaging, and falls squarely within the 60% of the score where movement matters most.
8️⃣ Carlsberg (41%) is the most counter-intuitive placement. On energy it performs at podium level: 88% renewable electricity and 47% total renewable energy, matching Heineken. What holds it back is everything around those numbers. Its disclosure is the thinnest of the European majors, with substantial gaps across reporting years, and its flagship innovations remain persistently unfinished. The Green Fibre Bottle, projected to cut emissions by up to 80% against single-use glass, began development in 2015 and remains in trial more than a decade on, with specialists questioning whether a polymer-lined paper bottle is the break from plastic the branding suggests. Sustainability director Simon Boas Hoffmeyer has acknowledged that "something this radical is not easy." The Snap Pack proves Carlsberg can ship an innovation; the index rewards the ones that arrive.
9️⃣ AB InBev (34%) is the ranking's central paradox. The world's largest brewer is a genuine operational decarboniser: renewable electricity up steadily to nearly 84%, absolute Scope 1 and 2 emissions down 42% against a 2017 baseline, and an SBTi-validated 1.5°C target secured among the first hundred companies globally. But that 84% sits alongside a public claim to have contracted the equivalent of 100% of its purchased electricity from renewables, and the distance between those figures is exactly what the index penalises. It is not a new pattern. Patagonia sued Anheuser-Busch in 2019 over its "Patagonia" cerveza brand and associated tree-planting claims, a case the two companies settled in 2022, and its "100% renewable" Budweiser marketing covered only brewing energy rather than the wider business, a distinction not obvious to the consumer holding the bottle. At this scale, the gap between the billboard and the balance sheet is the exposure.
🔟 Constellation Brands (31%) ranks last, and is the only company in the table moving backwards: water withdrawal has risen in each of the last three reporting years, from 23.7 million units to 27.6 million, while every other major held flat or fell. Total renewable energy stands at 6.5%, with no renewable electricity reported at all. Against that backdrop, its planned mega-brewery in Mexicali, in the semi-arid and already over-drawn north of Mexico, became a national controversy: opposition grew into marches and the occupation of a government building, and in a referendum more than 70% of voting residents rejected the project, with campaigners describing it as ecocide. Company president Daniel Baima wrote to the Mexican government objecting that Constellation had no time for a consultation questioning its future in the country, maintaining the plant posed no risk to local water. Academic analysis later identified inconsistencies in its water-consumption data. For a company whose flagship brands are Corona and Modelo, sold on imagery of sun, sea and nature, being voted out of a desert city over water is a difficult contradiction to set aside.
This ranking offers the most comprehensive study yet conducted of the brewing industry's sustainability transition, built on more than 300 environmental and nature-related KPIs across the world's ten largest brewers. It arrives at a critical moment when water management, energy transition and carbon intensity are no longer corporate social responsibility targets but survival metrics. It points to a shift already under way in brewing, where the value of a pint is increasingly measured not just by taste or brand, but by the health of the watershed it drew from, the crops it depended on, and the energy that went into making it.
As water scarcity intensifies and the crops brewing relies on come under growing strain, we hope this ranking serves as both a roadmap and a challenge: prompting the world's largest brewing groups to accelerate their circularity pivots and prove that industrial growth can be decoupled from environmental extraction.
In the words of John Scanlon, leading illuminem contributor and former head of the international convention governing trade in endangered species, capturing the urgency of this precious transition: "It's time to rethink the path we are on to protect our biodiversity, climate, and land, and our planet's overall health."
Beer has survived 13,000 years of empires, ice ages and reinvention. Whether it survives the next fifty depends less on tradition than on decisions being made in boardrooms right now: about water, about heat, about what a pint is actually allowed to cost the planet that grew it.
📊 Download the report & dataset (300+ KPIs) on the sustainability of brewing firms
illuminem ranks companies by sustainability maturity using a weighted mix of criteria:
Environmental performance (60%): carbon emissions intensity and renewable energy use, normalised by industry. Companies lacking transparency are placed in the bottom quartile.
Organisational buy-in (30%): verification by bodies such as SBTi, the UN Global Compact and B Corp, alongside the breadth and depth of reporting.
Targets (10%): the breadth, depth and ambition of publicly committed targets and pledges.
Controversies (up to -15%): penalties for active lawsuits, including greenwashing, labour violations, environmental harm and safety failures, drawn from illuminem's media coverage.
All financial and sustainability data reflect the latest figures publicly reported by the companies ranked. The approach is deliberately both backward- and forward-looking, identifying companies that are leading or rising fast. By normalising for industry and geography, the score offers the most universal measure of how far a company has travelled on its sustainability journey.
illuminem's Sustainability Data Hub is the most comprehensive dataset of its kind, with over 300 environmental and nature-related KPIs for over 12,000 companies, assembled into a single, structured view of corporate environmental performance. With a view that spans sectors, geographies, and years of disclosure history, and insights from the greatest experts and executives in the field, illuminem is uniquely positioned in the industry to create the most comprehensive report the brewing industry has ever seen.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders , their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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