What our brewery customers use us for.
- Spent-grain bulk bins. Doublewall 40"×48"×40" gaylords for hauling spent grain to dairy operations and feed consolidators. Picked up on our Tuesday and Friday Front Range routes.
- Hop bag dunnage. Smaller singlewall corrugated boxes and pads for staging and shipping hop product between brewers and contract packagers.
- Empty malt supersacks. We don’t handle the supersacks themselves, but we do consolidate the corrugated lids and slip sheets that come with bulk malt deliveries.
- Tasting-room storage cubes. Upcycled gaylords cut into open cubes for behind-the-bar storage of glassware, swag and cleaning supplies.
Why this sector pencils.
Brewery operations are predictable. Brew days are scheduled, spent grain timing is tight, and the volumes are consistent. That makes breweries a perfect anchor for our weekly milk runs — we can build routes around brewery pickups and offer competitive freight to everybody else on the route.
The Front Range brewery route.
Our standard brewery loop hits Denver, Lakewood, Golden, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland and Fort Collins on Tuesday, then circles back through Greeley, Wheat Ridge and Englewood on Friday. If you’re on the route and you want to be added, drop a note in the form above.
Pricing.
We pick up spent-grain bins for a per-bin fee and deliver clean, graded replacements at the same time. The exchange model usually ends up cheaper than buying new bins and renting separate trucking, especially when our routes pair the pickup with another nearby delivery.
The brew-day timeline, from a box perspective.
Most Front Range craft breweries run two to four brew days per week. Each brew day produces somewhere between 600 and 2,400 pounds of spent grain depending on batch size, plus a quantity of empty hop bags, malt sack residue and assorted dunnage. The grain has to leave the building within 24 to 48 hours or it sours and attracts flies. The empty packaging can wait a little longer but eats valuable dock space if it accumulates. Our standard rotation is built around this timeline: we drop empty grain bins on a Tuesday morning, the brewery fills them through the week, and we pick them up the following Tuesday. Empty packaging gets picked up at the same time so the dock area stays usable.
Specs we keep for breweries.
| Footprint (L×W×H) | Wall | Use case | Typical lifespan |
|---|---|---|---|
| 40×48×40 | Doublewall | Spent-grain hauling | 4–6 trips |
| 40×48×36 | Doublewall | Spent-grain hauling (smaller batches) | 4–6 trips |
| 40×48×40 | Triplewall | Wet-grain heavy use | 6–10 trips |
| 30×30×30 | Doublewall | Hop bag & specialty malt staging | 5–8 trips |
| 48×48×44 | Doublewall | Multi-batch consolidation | 4–6 trips |
What ends up in the bin.
The contents we see in inbound brewery bins, in rough order of frequency: spent grain (the obvious one), empty hop bags and the vacuum-sealed inner liners, used filter pads from clarifying operations, scraps of stretch wrap from inbound malt deliveries, the occasional broken keg part, and once a complete brewing spreadsheet from 2014 that was apparently being used as an improvised liner. We do not bale the spreadsheets; we mail them back.
Why we like brewery accounts.
- Predictable schedules — brew days do not move around.
- Consistent volumes that build a reliable route.
- Brewers are usually thoughtful about waste and like working with us for the sustainability story.
- The math pencils because spent grain has secondary value to feed operations.
- Most are clustered in walkable downtowns, which makes routing easy.
Brewery FAQ.
How quickly do you need to pick up spent grain?
Within 48 hours of brew day if it is summer, within 72 hours if it is winter. Beyond that the grain ferments inside the container and starts to smell, attract flies and corrupt the feed value for the dairy or livestock operation that ultimately receives it.
Can the same gaylord hold both spent grain and other contents?
In theory yes, in practice no. We dedicate spent-grain bins to spent grain only, because the residual moisture and yeast activity make them unsuitable for other uses. Once a gaylord enters the spent-grain pool, it stays there until it retires.
What is the minimum brewery size you serve?
We have served breweries as small as 800 barrels per year, although the freight math gets tight at that scale. The sweet spot is breweries between 5,000 and 100,000 barrels per year where the volumes justify a recurring weekly pickup.
Do you take the spent grain to a farm yourself?
We aggregate to a regional consolidator who runs the farm-side relationships. The grain leaves the brewery in our bins, gets weighed at our yard or a transfer facility, and continues to whichever feed operation has the next allocation. The brewery never has to coordinate with a farmer directly.
What about non-grain brewery materials?
Empty malt supersacks, hop bag scrap, filter pads, stretch wrap, and spent yeast — we’ll quote pickup for any of it, separately from the grain stream.