Beer Greener All the Time
Thursday June 25, 2009
It bothers me a little to love beer as much as I do. The modern beer infrastructure is very hard on the planet with conventional brewing techniques leaving behind huge carbon footprints. Fortunately, environmental - as well as economic - concerns have many breweries turning to greener brewing methods.
Two examples caught my attention this week. The first is the Anheuser-Busch Inbev Houston brewery in Texas. In May the brewery was hooked up to a trash heap. It’s better than it sounds. A six mile pipe-line transports biogas from a landfill to the brewery where it uses steam energy to help run the brewery. I don’t pretend to completely understand how the technology works but smarter people than me say that this will greatly reduce A-B’s fossil fuel usage. The impact will be almost as much as removing 100,000 cars from the road each year. Sounds good to me.
The second example is a new Bluetongue brewery in Australia. Two things about brewing beer in Australia – it takes a heck of a lot of water to make beer, lot’s more than actually winds up in the bottle, and Australia hasn’t had a lot of water to spare in recent years. This new brewery will conserve both water and energy by using the waste water in anaerobic reactors. The result will be cleaner water that can be reused in the brewery and energy from captured methane gas.
Neither of these examples are new ideas. They have been used in brewing and other industries before but it’s nice to see more brewers all the time employing them.
Two examples caught my attention this week. The first is the Anheuser-Busch Inbev Houston brewery in Texas. In May the brewery was hooked up to a trash heap. It’s better than it sounds. A six mile pipe-line transports biogas from a landfill to the brewery where it uses steam energy to help run the brewery. I don’t pretend to completely understand how the technology works but smarter people than me say that this will greatly reduce A-B’s fossil fuel usage. The impact will be almost as much as removing 100,000 cars from the road each year. Sounds good to me.
The second example is a new Bluetongue brewery in Australia. Two things about brewing beer in Australia – it takes a heck of a lot of water to make beer, lot’s more than actually winds up in the bottle, and Australia hasn’t had a lot of water to spare in recent years. This new brewery will conserve both water and energy by using the waste water in anaerobic reactors. The result will be cleaner water that can be reused in the brewery and energy from captured methane gas.
Neither of these examples are new ideas. They have been used in brewing and other industries before but it’s nice to see more brewers all the time employing them.
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