The CO₂ in your beer probably came from an ammonia plant. Or an ethanol refinery. Or — if you’re drinking Almanac Beer Company’s new “Flow – Clean Air Edition” — straight from the sky above a parking lot in Alameda, California.
Almanac just launched what appears to be the world’s first commercial beer carbonated entirely with CO₂ captured from ambient air via direct air capture. Their partner, Berkeley-based Aircapture, installed a modular DAC unit in the brewery’s parking lot — it looks like an oversized HVAC unit with a chimney — that pulls CO₂ from the air and liquefies it to beverage-grade purity (99.999%). The beer is already available at 800+ retailers across California, including Safeway, Whole Foods, Total Wine, and BevMo.
This is cute, sure. But the business logic is sharp.
The CO₂ supply chain is broken
In 2022, a nationwide CO₂ shortage hammered breweries across the country. Most commercial CO₂ is a byproduct of fossil fuel processes — ammonia production, ethanol refining. Ethanol plants alone supply about 35% of North American CO₂. But here’s the twist: those same ethanol plants are now sequestering their CO₂ underground to claim tax credits (thanks, 45Q) instead of selling it to beverage companies. The incentive structure is literally pulling CO₂ out of the commercial supply chain.
So breweries face a supply problem that DAC can solve. Not as a climate gesture — as a supply chain fix.
Why this matters beyond beer
Aircapture isn’t chasing DOE grants or carbon credit revenues. They’re targeting the $20 billion commercial CO₂ market — food-grade, medical-grade, industrial-grade CO₂ where customers already pay real prices for reliable supply. Their scaling strategy: “not by making it bigger, but by making more of it.” Modular units. Deploy everywhere.
While the big DOE-funded DAC hubs stall under political headwinds and funding freezes, this modular approach sidesteps the whole mess. No federal funding needed. No carbon credits required. Just a product people already buy, made from a feedstock that’s literally everywhere.
As Matthew Realff at Georgia Tech told the NYT: “DAC creates the option to not only address current and future emissions but also historical additions.”
A portion of Flow – CAE proceeds goes to Carbon180, which is a nice touch. But the real story is that DAC just found a business model that works without anyone in Washington lifting a finger. The $20B commercial CO₂ market might be the beachhead that makes the whole industry viable.
Sometimes the path to gigatonne scale starts in a parking lot.