Biogas: What You Get From Bad Beer
Regular readers of Fermenting Revolution know that bad-mouthing corporate mega brewers is a favorite pastime of the Beer Activist. Be that as it may, there are some good things to say about them. Namely, they are helping to find new ways of saving water (even if their products taste too much like it).

To begin with, the efforts of big brewers to conserve water can have a major impact simply due to their scale. They also have a great motivation: money. Water, and wastewater disposal are significant expenses for these guys. Industrial breweries place large demands on municipal wastewater treatment systems and therefore they pay substantial fees to local utilities. That helps explain why one major brewery replaced its drinking fountains with water coolers and yielded almost $45,000 a year in savings.

Brewers can reduce treatment fees by operating their own wastewater treatment plants. In fact, Coors designed and built the first modern wastewater treatment plant in Colorado in 1952, adding a secondary treatment process decades before it was required to do so. But treatment still requires large amounts of electricity and energy. It may save the tax-payer a little bit of money (or it might not) but either way it doesn’t do much to reduce water usage. However, some breweries are using anaerobic digesters to clean their water and reduce the need for conventional treatment options. As a result, they also recover energy through the generation of biogas.

Don’t let the big terminology scare you. Anaerobic digestion is the process of using living bacteria to ‘digest’ or break down waste products without the use of oxygen. Facilities using this process are sometimes called ‘living machines,’ and that’s describes them perfectly.

BERS and Beers
Anheuser-Busch, the world’s biggest brewing company, is also the world’s largest operator of “Bio-Energy Recovery Systems” (BERS). BERS is a method of anaerobically pre-treating wastewater and capturing biogas (methane). The biogas recovered is then burned as fuel at the brewery providing more than ten percent of A-B’s on-site fuel needs. Anheuser-Busch uses BERS to treat wastewater at eight of its twelve breweries in the United States and at two international breweries in the UK and China.

BERS systems have important environmental benefits: Pre-treating wastewater reduces its organic load by up to ninety percent, reducing the demand on community treatment facilities, and the use of biogas to supplement boiler fuel purchases reduces the use of fossil fuels. In the past five years A-B averaged more than 1500 billion btus of energy production from biogas, and credits BERS operations with eliminating an estimated 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.

At the A-B brewery in Baldwinsville, New York, wastewater is treated with the BERS system and then a final aerobic polishing treatment process. This secondary process allows recovered biosolids to be used in landscaping and agricultural applications instead of being disposed of in a landfill. In 2003, the facility composted 21.2 million pounds of biosolids in this way. Critics of composting and spreading of "biosolids", or "sludge" from water treatment plants point out that if the sludge contains heavy metals or other hazardous materials it can contaminate soil and groundwater. This seems to be a greater problem for municipal facilities than for breweries, but a rigorous testing program to ensure its safety is advisable in both cases.

The Anheuser-Busch Fort Collins Brewery in Colorado recorded the best water use efficiency of all domestic A-B breweries at the end of 2003, reducing water use per barrel by almost 12 percent from the previous year. One key conservation measure was installing a system for recirculating water rather than using it only once for things like cleaning.

By the year 2000, the BERS system was producing about 15% of each brewery’s fuel needs. By then the system was expected to be saving A-B $40 million per year, while reducing community electricity usage by 75% and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 80%. At the end of 2003, Anheuser-Busch had reduced its water use by 10% since 1999, even while increasing its overall beer production.

FACT: A leaky pipe dripping just one drop of water
a second wastes almost 1600L of water in a year.

In 1979, the A-B Jacksonville brewery implemented a different kind of wastewater treatment facility. Brewery wastewater is piped to farms to grow turf for stadiums, golf courses and real estate. Runoff from the turf farms is drained off and collected in retention ponds where aquatic vegetation eats up the water’s remaining nutrients. These ponds control the flow of water into wetland habitat where native and migratory birds thrive. This land-use application system was certified as Corporate Wildlife Habitat in 1997 by the Wildlife Habitat Council. This system recycles 600 million gallons of water annually, and saves the local wastewater treatment plant 90% of the energy –70,000,000 kilowatt-hours per year - that would have been required to treat the wastewater.

Going Golfing With Coors
Coors, (now Molson-Coors, the world’s fifth largest brewing concern) owns a public golf course near their headquarters in Golden, Colorado that is one of only a handful in the country maintained organically, eliminating chemicals normally used to keep golf courses green. This is done to protect Coors' brewing water that lies beneath the course.

Coors was designated a Groundwater Guardian National Partner in 1998 by the Groundwater Foundation. Coors' Shenandoah facility received the 1998 Environmental Excellence Award from the Virginia Water Environment Association.

What’s a Brewery Doing In the Desert?
Another brewery is pioneering the very frontier of sustainable brewing. It’s called a zero-waste eco-industrial park. Tsumeb brewery located between the Kalari and Namib deserts in northeastern Namibia was the first facility to utilize the concept of zero-emissions in its design. The concept is simple: create no waste by utilizing everything. After all, brewing companies pay for malted barley, so why would they want to throw 92% of it out as waste if they could instead sell it as a usable product? Why pay for so much water if all you’re going to do is chuck it out the other end?

Algae ponds at Namibia Breweries' Tunweni zero-waste brewery in Tsumeb, Namibia.
(photo: Michael McBride, Storm Brewing)

At the time it was designed, the industry standard was about 10 gallons of water required to produce one gallon of beer. The Tsumeb brewery cut this in half. The solution included mixing wastewater from the offices with manure from pigs that are fed onsite with spent brewing grains, and treating this with the anaerobic digester and then using algae ponds to complete the cleaning process before the water finally ends up in a fish pond. Water from the fish pond is then headed for a neighboring orange and mango farm to be used for irrigation. The Tunweni brewery is a complete case study of zero-waste design and will be covered more thoroughly in a future edition of Fermenting Revolution.

Bad Beer Is Good for Wetting the Bed
One of the more innovative ways beer is helping to purify water is a scheme devised by University of Tulsa researchers. Oklahoma's Tar Creek is one of the nation's most metal-contaminated sites. Regional underground mining began in 1891 and ended in 1970, leaving 300 miles of tunnels, 165 tons of tailings, known as chat piles, and more than 1,300 mine shafts. Tulsa chemistry professor Tom Harris says iron, zinc, lead, and cadmium are leaching out of the mines and posing widespread health concerns.

Engineered wetlands are the conventional way of removing dangerous metals from this contaminated water. Brace yourself now, here comes the science – and the beer. Successful water treatment in this set up relies on two types of bacteria. One type, called sulfite-reducing bacteria (SRBs), convert sulfite ions to sulfide ions. The other kind is fermenting bacteria. The tiny one micro-long fermenting bacteria produce simple organic acids such as lactic acid. The SRBs feast on these acids in order to reproduce. As the SRBs thrive, they remove iron from the water and trap it in soil. The fermenting bacteria, as it happens, simply adore beer. The more of they drink, the more acids they produce, the more the SRBs thrive, the more efficiently iron is removed from water.

Harris said that when the beer is added, "it almost appears that we're giving the bacteria an appetizer. One organism's waste provides the other's food. Initially we were going to use molasses, but we learned that a beer distributor in Tulsa disposes of hundreds of gallons of waste beer each month, so we switched to beer."

In one study, simulated mine drainage was slowly pumped through gravel-based soil beds. By adding just 24 ounces of beer once a month, the researchers found approximately 60 percent of the sulfate and iron was removed over several months. By contrast, a control bed that received no beer was completely inactive after only one month of operation.

A Drop to Drink
These few stories of super-hero breweries helping to save water are inspiring, but unfortunately, they are not going to be enough. One in five developing countries are expected to be in a water shortage crisis by the year 2030. Access to clean water is almost certain to be a cause of major wars in coming decades. Even at their most efficient, breweries can only hope to reduce their water usage to about four or five gallons per gallon of beer produced. This is a great improvement over the once-standard ten gallons per gallon of beer, but breweries will have to follow the zero-waste model if they are to succeed in leading the way toward sustainable water usage. As a Beer Activist, you can do your part by choosing beers made by companies with a clear environmental commitment. Just browse the Beer Activist Guide to Beer and enjoy.