At Moksa Brewing in Rocklin, water conservation isn’t just good practice, it’s built into the business.

“We are making it a priority and doing what we can to use water wisely,” says co-founder Scott Williams. “Little things like recapturing water we use for cooling, using a high-efficiency dishwasher, and having most of our irrigation on a drip system, and only a minimal amount of turf all help us.”

A hobby beer maker with a business background, Williams launched Moksa Brewing with his business partner, Nu Boonkham in 2017. They opened their taproom in 2018.

With an international reputation, the award-winning brewery makes more than 24 different beers with catchy names such as “Light the Beam” (a hazy double IPA nod to the Sacramento Kings) and “Angry Grandpa” (a West Coast classic IPA, named for Williams’ father-in-law).

The main ingredient in every bottle: Water.

On average, it takes about six gallons of water to produce one gallon of beer. Moksa produces 1,600 barrels - about 50,000 gallons of beer - a year. “It’s enough to fill a couple of swimming pools,” Williams says.

Saving water became a natural part of Moksa’s business plan; saving money ultimately, but also minimizing impact on our resources, including water, labor, and energy.

Outdoor landscaping was converted from overhead sprinklers to drip. A high-efficiency washer can clean hundreds of bottles with less than 10 gallons of water. Cooling water from the bottling process is reused for cleaning.

“We also try and be efficient with how we clean and rinse the brew area,” Williams says. “Instead of cleaning multiple times per day, we opt for doing one big clean-up at the end of the day, saving us both on water and labor whenever possible.”

Cleaning Moksa’s 5,000-square-foot space takes a lot of time as well as water, he adds. “I originally made the switch to a walk-behind floor scrubber because it took so much time to mop the floor. But it saves a lot of water, too. Instead of filling mop buckets over and over, we can get the floor done with just two loads in the floor scrubber. It’s way more efficient.”

“We do what we can to get the maximum efficiency out of everything,” Williams says. “The rest takes care of itself.”