SUSTAINABLE BREWING, PT. 3 - POWER
‘Ello poppets,
If you’re just tuning in, we’ve been exploring sustainability in craft beer now and in the future, one element at a time. How wasteful is beer making I hear you ask? According to Joe Bolick, a director at the Iowa Waste Reduction Center, “Beer is about as wasteful a product you can imagine.” But I wouldn’t be writing this post on what’s normally a whimsical and optimistic brewery-owned beer blog if I didn’t think there were plenty the industry could do to mitigate this reality significantly.
So, after having tackled the King of Kings last week, water, we turn now to the other non-agricultural “ingredient” in beer making: power. And indeed, given the massive role of water in making, heating, and cooling wort and beer, it may come as no surprise that heating, cooling, and moving water, wort, and beer constitute the vast majority of a brewery’s energy expenditures.
Power Use in Breweries
Given the steps of brewing we talked about last time, you might expect, as I did, that heating and cooling water would be quite high on the list of power drains in breweries, but you’d be surprisingly wrong (you fool!). This news comes from a singular, fantastically written industry article which I’ll be referencing heavily throughout this piece, which provides the statistic that running pumps, motors, and compressors eats up a truly shocking 46% of brewery power use, followed by process cooling/refrigeration at 32%. Heating, which, again, I’d expected to clear 50% no problem, is a stunningly low 2%. If this weren’t such a solid paper, I’d be nearly certain that I’d read that wrong, or that someone had made an egregious error. You can see the full breakdown below.
There are two further things worth noting. First of all, as of 1994 (so, the data’s a bit old, but probably isn’t absurd), 60% of the energy that US breweries were using was derived from coal and natural gas. Further, according to that paper, energy use in big breweries may be a touch over half that of small breweries, which is...not exactly great news for small breweries who had hoped to not go 100% green in the near future. The stakes are real, in other words, and for small breweries to survive a surge in energy prices will take some adaptation.
And second, there is a ton of energy used outside of breweries which we’ll largely touch on later, be that in transportation, malt and hop farming and processing, and refrigeration and bars, bottle shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. Is this energy illusory? Given that water has been a viable alternative to beer for some time now, these factors must be considered as “extra,” as extraneous, especially if belts are tightened in the future.
What are Breweries doing Now?
There are two approaches to minimizing energy use, namely: minimizing use, and drawing from cleaner sources. Both avenues are currently being explored, and more interesting and innovative technologies pop up each day.
The simplest approach is to draw your power from a cleaner source, such as solar panels. Indeed, as this technology has gotten much cheaper in recent years as demand increases and the efficiencies of scale start to kick in, ever more breweries are adopting the tech. According to Solar United Neighbors, over 140 breweries were using solar energy as of 2019. And as our electric grids start to draw more power from solar panels (those in California and Texas made the news due to their significance last year if memory serves), merely plugging in will accomplish this goal. Even if your motives are purely financial, though, solar may still be the best route. Point in case: Maui Brewing has gone the solar route due simply to both high electricity costs, and a less reliable grid than they’d like.
Beyond that “obvious” source of energy, you have some crafty solutions, like the use of spent grain as a source of fuel for a boiler at Alaskan Brewing Co. which, amusingly, will then be used to dry more spent grain, etc.. And last time, we talked about EcoVolt, a wastewater processing system that produces biogas which, while perhaps not the cleanest solution, is better than coal.
Then, there’s the second route. You can check out the article (need another link?) for a pretty extensive list of options, but they all accomplish the same two goals: using less energy to accomplish the same set of brewing tasks. A lot of these are both boring and only really applicable to larger breweries, or topics we’ll cover later (like malting technology), but one worth mentioning is the idea of a “CHP” or Combined Heat and Power generator. The idea is that in, say, a turbine generator, you push hot steam through a turbine which generates electricity, but the steam that comes out the other end is still pretty hot, and it may be more efficient to capture some of that heat for, you know, heating stuff. This tech is way outside of my purview, so I’ll leave the notion there.
Here’s a very cool one though: passive refrigeration. If you’re in a NYC bar that’s 65˚ inside, and it’s 20˚ outside, why in the heck would you run a compressor to keep your beer fridge at 38˚? The smart move would be to have some sort of duct system or heat sink that basically connects your fridge to the cold, harsh NYC winter wind (o sweet mistress) in order to get free, perfectly efficient cooling. It’s a thing!
Finally, why do any of these things, beyond a love for the planet? Given the tight pursestrings of young breweries (those breweries with the greatest ability to make sustainable and impactful choices), why are these presumably more expensive steps being taken in the real world? Again from that paper: “Breweries in the United States spend annually over $200 Million on energy. Energy consumption is equal to 3 – 8% of the production costs of beer.” Which is to say, there’s strong financial incentive to cut energy bills early, especially since you pretty much bake in your efficiencies once you start purchasing equipment.
What Breweries will Have to do
Here’s where we get to dive into our (just my?) wildest electricity scarcity fantasies, and examine the choices breweries will have to make if electricity gets decidedly more expensive.
Again, there are two approaches: mitigating use and using alternative energy sources. For the former, I’ll mention that the utilization of solar-, wind-, and hydroelectric-power will all be smart moves, and certainly the clever tricks mentioned above (grain-fueled boilers, biofuel-generating water treatment plants) will start proliferating, which is to say that I suspect there will be heavy use of the renewable sources we can all readily imagine. The former issue is where dire craftiness becomes interesting.
For example, it turns out that pasteurization of bottles, kegs, and beer takes quite a bit of energy (you can find the number in that article; it’s somewhat meaningless out of context). And while craft breweries usually don’t flash pasteurize their beers, MacLeod certainly uses diatomaceous earth to perform what amounts to a mechanical sterilization of our beer. Well, flavor advantages aside, the joke’s on us: that may take as much energy as flash pasteurization, making the practice an early candidate for axing.
To that end, you can safely assume that any time a beer is moved or processed in any way, you’re wasting energy. What’s the solution? Cask ale! (See ma, the whole thing was an ad!) Yes, cask ale has a wide array of advantages over filtered lager, say: it’s merely fined, not filtered, which saves energy; because of this, you don’t actually need to rack it into a bright tank (the tank in which beer sits to carbonate and clarify, more or less), since casks and finings accomplish this goal reasonably well. Using yeast to generate CO2 is yet another savings, which amusingly brings us to the alternative: traditional lagers. Indeed, to make a traditional lager (cherry picking the epoch somewhat), you might use cold and time to naturally clarify your beer, while also utilizing spunding valves to capture the CO2 that yeast produces. However, cask has one angle: it’s served less cold (not warmer!), which requires less energy, let alone the energy required to keep lager cold for, say, three months without a cave. Check mate!
Beyond this, there are a few esoteric energy-saving options that are largely the purview of larger breweries, like steam recapture, and high-gravity brewing (ferment a beer at 6%, water it down into 1.5 times as much 4% beer). One small change I don’t hear about much, though, is the use of instant water heaters as opposed to hot water tanks, which are more efficient (three times more or so, if the dollar amounts in this report are to be loosely trusted), so use of one seems like a no-brainer.
Finally, you get the spicy angle: brewing different things. We mentioned cask ales above, but raw beers, for example, require no boiling (and thus less energy, and pumping), and can be chilled in coolships to minimize water and energy usage (though the gain here is small, I think).
You could also, technically, brew with the lightest-colored malts, since these take the least energy to make, and we’ll talk about that (have I mentioned that we’ll talk about malt?), but given the insane import of specific malting schedules in beer flavor (see Pils vs Vienna vs Munich - I didn’t specify malts because it was implied, emphasizing the cultural stakes - or Crystal 90˚ vs DRC or Special B), I just don’t see much choice in changing the processing of malt. It is the soul of beer, after all.
Conclusion
While water shortages are a very real possibility in the US, and a fact of life already to some degree for Angelenos, I personally suspect that renewable energy, and in particular the cheapening of solar panels, will make energy efficiency perhaps an entire non-issue in the future, so while, for now, it’s important to consider ways through which we can minimize our withdrawals from the bank of coal-powered energy, it’s perhaps the smaller short-term fixes we should consider, rather than the grandiose and elaborate, massively efficient systems of our dreams. A well-insulated Hot Liquor Tun now may well be worth more to the planet than a pumpless brewery in 2100.
Cheers,
Adrian “these are supposed to take, like, two hours to write” Febre