SUSTAINABLE BREWING, PT. 2 - WATER
Hi there ho there,
If Malt’s the soul of beer, then water’s the...water. We may be about 70% water, but beer’s closer to 95% water; it is hardly a stretch to say that water is the most important element of beer, by a mile. This doesn’t just make the cleanliness and availability of water of singular importance to a brewer, but it also means that its use (and often, inefficient use) is near the top of the list of brewing elements that will have to be completely rethought as breweries make moves towards sustainability.
Beyond being a central ingredient in beer, It’s used everywhere in the brew house, because it’s an incredible material - it’s the means of growing malt, hops, and even yeast to some degree; it’s the solvent in which sanitizing and cleaning solutions are made; it’s a massive heat sink, capable of delivering or absorbing staggering amounts of heat quickly; and it’s, as we’ll talk about later, even a method of sterilization in its hotter forms.
Given its massive role, you’d reasonably suspect that we do quite a bit to use water efficiently, if for no other reason than because to market forces (read: the desire to have a small water and electricity/gas bill), and while we at MacLeod have optimized parts of our water-heavy process, due in part to financial restrictions and in part due to the potential hassles of some fixes, virtually no brewery is perfect.
The Changing Planet
The fear used to be simple: the planet’s warming as a result of CO2 emissions, and that’s dangerous for a number of reasons, like biodiversity loss, a rising sea level, and more lethal heat waves. But we’re starting to realize as a populace that one of the more immediate consequences of a warming environment is a general increase in the frequency and intensity of a variety of adverse weather events, like heat waves, cold fronts, and tropical storms. One of these consequences is of acute concern to brewers: drought.
How serious is this problem? To us Angelenos, pretty serious. We experienced a drought firsthand from 2012 to 2016, and it looks like this coming year might push us closer to another one. On a national scale, a blog post from my Alma Mater contains this line: “A recent study from Harvard projects that by 2071, nearly half of the 204 fresh water basins in the United States may not be able to meet their monthly water demand.“ And Americans seem to be broadly aware of this; here are some statistics from a survey by Circle of Blue, which can be found in the Brewers’ Association's veritable bible on water use in breweries:
“96% agree that it is important for all people to have adequate, affordable drinking water.
88% worry that fresh water shortages will become an increasingly severe problem worldwide.
Who should be responsible?
41% the government
39% large companies (Note: 79% think that companies need to be a part of the solution)”
Which is all to say, when water becomes scarce, which seems like a foregone conclusion, what are the odds that people will tolerate dumping six gallons down the drain to produce a single gallon of Hazy Fruit Loop IPA? Like Mark Baum said: zero.
And don’t let the “7” in that 2071 figure fool you: breweries are already dealing with the consequences of drought. Bear Republic had to stop distributing to 27 retail markets in the US as a result of that drought, and even bigger companies are feeling the heat. Coca Cola’s stated goal is to replenish as much water as it uses, and the reason’s obvious: their main ingredient, which has historically been free and unlimited, may soon become expensive, rare, and highly regulated if companies of their size and climate impact don’t slam on the brakes.
Though those larger companies are, interestingly enough, generally more efficient than craft breweries. Indeed, there’s an insidious side to the normally joyous tale of Craft Beer’s rise: since craft breweries are generally less efficient, the movement away from large, industrial, oligopolous breweries has resulted in a somewhat to significantly less water- and energy-efficient system of ethanol production. Without efforts to radically improve craft beer efficiency, we may just be stuck with 3% Budweiser when the wartime-like restrictions really start to hit.
Before talking about the consequences of the coming water shortages, however, we should cover the ways in which water is used, and disposed of, in a brewery.
Water in the Modern Brewery
As mentioned above, beer is mostly water, and I’ll take it as a given that if it took a pint of water to make a pint of beer, nobody would gripe, so we should focus entirely on the water that doesn’t end up in your glass. And interestingly, brewing of yore was, as far as I can tell, significantly more water efficient, for a few reasons.
The Brewing Process, in Short
In short, brewing goes as follows:
Heat some water
Add this to your grains, and wait
Heat more water
Drain your wort to the boil kettle (the original water/grain mixture is now partially “spent” grains and sugary water, i.e. wort)
Sparge (add that second batch of water to the partially-spent grains, then transfer it to the boil kettle)
Then, boil your wort (you may lose 6%-8% of your volume here)
Chill it somehow
Move it into a sanitized or sterile fermenter
Finally, you’d typically remove the yeast, move it into yet another vessel (a Brite Tank) for carbonation and for the solid to settle out, and then
Package it into kegs or cans, or some other intermediate vessel
From a water perspective, nothing stands out except perhaps that boil-off figure (in the future, we may need to capture that). What may stand out, though, is the sheer variety and magnitude of intermediate vessels, and this carries with it a subtle, but hugely significant, issue: you have to clean every single one of those vessels, including spraying out each and every can or bottle, and you have to sanitize the fermenters, brite tanks, and packaging vessels. Which brings us to a particularly guilty culprit in this story: cleaning and sanitizing.
Cleaning and Sanitizing
The most frequent item on that BA document’s list of “Main Areas of Wastewater Generation” is “Rinsing,” and that certainly seems obvious when thinking about a brewery’s wastewater. As mentioned above, there are about a thousand tanks that need to be cleaned and then sanitized, and water happens to be a perfect solvent for cleaning and sanitizing agents.
And while we don’t typically dump any water that might be used for brewing, we also don’t typically keep caustic solution (read: the dish soap of modern brewing), sanitizing solution, or hop and yeast slurry, though we do repitch yeast several times and use caustic to clean several things at once, of course. In any case, what happens to this water is fairly important, since “Most breweries discharge 70% of their incoming water as effluent” [BA p6].
If you have unlimited money, pretty much everyone, from us to Budweiser, could blindly dump all of this wastewater down the drain, though we’d pay a pretty massive bill for the privilege. This is because brewery wastewater can be pretty gnarly stuff, laced not with anything nefariously poisonous (this is beer after all, not rocket fuel), but having high organic loads which can lead to low levels of dissolved oxygen in surface water [BA p9], low pH, and “solids that easily turn into sludge.” Yikes. So generally, big breweries thoroughly pre-treat their water (which is the ideal scenario), small breweries do little or nothing, and medium-sized breweries lie somewhere in between, depending on size (and thus access to capital/size of the impact of these unclean water bills).
Heat Exchange, Etc.
Finally, you have the miscellaneous uses which, as long as there aren’t significant leaks in your system (which could totally happen), shouldn’t be big players in the waste game. In particular, the chilling agent of choice in breweries where temperatures below that of ground water are needed (so, sub-40˚F, say) is a solution of water and propylene glycol which, due largely to thermodynamics, has a low freezing point. Once you make this solution, you shouldn’t need to replenish your reservoir all that often as far as I’m aware.
As for the other water-based chilling operation, wort chilling, the usual move is to use a plate chiller (read: heat exchanger utilizing a massive surface area in a small space) to chill boiling wort to pitching temp using groundwater or chilled brewing water as the heat sink. This is actually perfectly efficient as long as you use the heated chill water for brewing, and particularly if you keep it hot and either use it soon, or keep it in a well-insulated vessel. The waterless alternative is old-timey and growing in popularity among producers of funky beers (since it’s super risky from an infection standpoint): coolships, which word has it are used at Anchor.
There is one last, indirect use of brewing water: water used to grow barley, hops, etc.. Remember that figure from the first post, that it takes about seven pints to brew one? Well that’s not including all of the water it takes to conjure those cereal grains from the ground - indeed, yet another layer of the water and food insecurity-meets-alcohol story is the prioritization of rice and potatoes for ethanol production over food. Granted, barley isn’t a super-common food source, and hops bines are hardly a staple, but this competition for arable land, essentially, will eventually boil over. Oh, and lest I forget to mention the full figure: “One 500ml bottle of beer uses 148 litres of water – and a single 125ml glass of wine, 110 litres.”
What Are Breweries Doing Now?
The good news is that brewers are an inventive bunch, and a massive array of water-optimizing methods and devices are in use in at least one place. These generally fall into two categories: better use of water, and use of otherwise wasted water. Some examples of the former:
Why clean a mash tun, boil kettle, fermenter, and brite tank, when you could buy one “unitank” and do all of that in one? That’s a thing, and I’ve mentioned that I wouldn’t consider brewing commercially without one
Brewing with tap water is for rookies, and a lot of the pros use Reverse Osmosis devices that strip a lot of flavor noise out of tap water, at the expense of dumping 25%-50% of it. If you have infinite energy, you could just distill the water instead for 100% efficiency (0% waste), but a neat compromise is to build your brewing water out of mostly tap water and, say, a third RO water, knocking down your waste to 8%-17%
I don’t know how common this is, but instead of making up a huge batch of sanitizing solution, you could use steam to sterilize fermenters and brite tanks, say. This is one of those things that’s more dangerous, and thus not worth it now, but just you wait - homebrewers will be baking their fermenters some day
And examples of the latter:
This is one of the coolest: Half Moon Bay Brewing Company used NASA tech (you know how they recycle sweat for drinking water on the ISS? Yeah, that tech) to brew a beer from Greywater. Get ready, because that’s coming
Another fun fact: you can’t (well, shouldn’t) try to pull every last milligram of sugar from your grain, because you’ll extract unwanted things like silicates and tannins, so what might you do with that weak wort? If you’re Avery, you donate it to the city of Boulder’s wastewater treatment plant in order to help them break down Nitrogen in their water. This is probably the only thing where breweries actively add something in this context, so it’s very noteworthy
Finally, the obvious: some smaller breweries are purchasing shipping container-sized microbial water treatment units to pre-treat their wastewater, which not only reduces waste but also produces methane which can be used as a (not super clean) energy source
Putting some numbers to this, Lagunita’s 2nd unit was projected to lower their wastewater by 40%, and produce enough energy to knock down their electric bill by 20%. That’s pretty massive
And finally:
What Breweries will Have to Do
Out of hand, they’ll have to do as many as those things as possible, but are there even more extreme measures they’ll have to take?
I’ll save my comprehensive prediction for a later post, but in short I think that breweries are likely to face at first sharp financial pressure in the form of steep water use taxes or costs, and later legislation on things like ABV and grain and hop use, as noted, particularly as barley and wheat can be used for food and take a good deal of space (and they can’t really be grown in a hydroponics setting as a result, but we’ll talk about that shortly).
As a result, the first response will be the shift to lower-ABV beers, higher yield beers (see ya later Hazy IPAs), and unitank brewing vessels. Wastewater will have to be thoroughly processed, and RO water as a concept will probably fade fast, meaning light lagers will again be a luxury of those with insanely clean groundwater, like Plzeň. Finally, sanitizer may be kept in large tanks and somewhat endlessly reused, along with other small such tweaks.
Long-term, it’s hard to say. Pressure will be intense to cut out as many grown ingredients as possible (so, all fruit), and we may see something like what happened in the UK, namely a shift of part of the grain bill to some sort of sugar source, like beet sugar. The financial pressure to cut water will probably be so intense eventually that cans and bottles will be untenable, maybe even kegs, since their higher relative surface area means they take more water to clean, which means we’ll see a permanent shift to serving tanks. There may be more adjustments, but none strike me at the moment.
The homebrewing scene, as a result, is likely to blow up, especially if the recent social response in the US to the idea of masking to save lives during Covid is any indication. Black markets may crop up for barley and hops, and I bet you 100:1 that there’ll be 10%+ Barley Wines and Imperial Porters available to the wealthy. The hobby will eventually be confined to those who can actually grow the requisite ingredients, and have the desire to use their limited water to do so, like it used to be; they’ll assuredly sell to neighbors. And don’t even get me started on what meat consumption will look like (the short answer? The real animals for the super rich, and lab-grown steaks and Impossible Burgers for the rest).
But already, big breweries like Miller Coors are griping about their precious natural water sources (read: public image) being tampered with for the sake of conservation. Big companies are unlikely to want to use processed shower water in their beers, so there will be on the one hand a market opportunity for those brave enough to double down on green, and on the other hand a resistance even in the face of long-term pain to change with the planet. Hopefully, financial pressures force them to their knees, and until then, I leave you to ponder these quotes from the BA piece:
A few closing quotes
“Approximately 20% of all the energy used in the state of California is used to move, use, and treat water.”
And
“Experts believe that in 2013, more than 70% of the United States is experiencing or will experience some type of local, regional or statewide water shortage. By 2025, four billion people - about half of the world’s population - will live in ‘severe water stress’ conditions.”
Cheers,
Adrian “Bummer” Febre