Four Quarters Brewing fined for wastewater mismanagement, company complies

Four Quarters Brewing in downtown Winooski

The state Department of Environmental Conservation fined Four Quarters Brewing in Winooski $5,035 for violations regarding the discharge of wastewater in its brewing process. 

According to a late May press release from the state, the brewery failed to timely submit a discharge management plan and monthly monitoring reports as required by a permit. Additionally, the state said, between September 2021 and June 2022, Four Quarters released 33,000 gallons of unsampled water down its drains. 

The popular Winooski brewery agreed to pay the fine and is now in compliance with its permit, according to the state.

Five days after the Department of Environmental Conservation press release, Four Quarters management emailed their supporters to address the fine. 

The brewery’s management is “choosing not to” rebut the allegations from the state. Instead, brewery leadership explained that the brewing process involves using water to cool unfermented beers, water that accounts for the 33,000 gallons released over the months in 2021 and 2022.

“We were supposed to sample this and send it off to a lab and then report the findings,” wrote owner Brain Eckert in the email. “Never did I think we would be required to sample and test straight water, but I was wrong. Either way, I and the past and current production staff know that that was just water being sent down the drain.”

Eckert said the business faced technical issues with the conservation department’s online systems for filing monitoring reports.

Eckert wrote that in the past, state officials said they couldn’t accept PDF versions of the forms, but when the online system was down in November, they asked for the documents in that format. 

“The same pdfs I sent a year and three months before that that they wouldn’t accept. Needless to say this has been an extremely frustrating adventure.”