How Your Local Brewery Is Saving The World
If you’re like me, the explosion of local breweries of late means your weekends are booked. You’re on a first name basis with more than one master brewer and maybe you’ve even used that guidance to start your own home brew enterprise to join the community. My wife and I once planned an entire day around which breweries were closest to what diners so that we could eat and drink our way on foot across Asheville, North Carolina. (Highly recommend it, if you get the chance.)
These small breweries continue to impress me with the care that is poured into every barrel. From the creative names and flavors to the competitively friendly pride in the local label, (I love bragging to friends about Generations,) the one constant that every brewer will claim is that brewing is a labor of love. The more tours you take the more that love becomes apparent not only for the beverages brewed, but for the community these small businesses exist in. It almost seems a compulsive drive by some brewers to give back and be a productive part of their environments and it often starts with simply cleaning up after themselves.
Water is one of the only four ingredients that goes into the purest beers. Water actually can count for nearly 95% of beer’s content and that’s just the stuff that makes it through. Some estimates claim that for a single barrel of beer, three to five barrels of wastewater is created. Being of the self-driven lot, brewers saw all of this excess water and started putting it to work for their communities.
A quick batch of science. Biogas, specifically methane, is produced when the organic materials in brewing start to break down. This process continues in the wastewater after the beer is made. That biogas can be harnessed and turned into energy that can be put right back into the electrical grid.
Everywhere from Sonoma County, California to Boston are using this biogas wastewater to power their breweries making them closer to self-sustaining. Purpose Energy is a company that specializes in cleaning the wastewater from breweries to not only harness that biogas energy, but also clean the water to be used for more beer radically decreasing the utility bills and carbon footprint of the entire process.
Instead of the electricity, Boulder, Colorado is using brewing leftovers to treat its water. There is a liquid involved in the brewing process called wort that contains the sugars that are fermented to give us alcohol. Boulder has been testing leftover wort in their water treatment plants as an energy source for the bacteria they use to purify the public’s water. The tests have been so successful they are expanding the operation so even more people in Colorado have beer to thank for that clean glass of water at night.
Some brewers are keeping it scientifically simple and instead of recycling the water, they’re focusing on the grain (another of the key four ingredients,) involved in brewing. Using that leftover spent grain, bakers are making some of the most authentic beer bread you’ve ever had. From a roadside outlet in Portland to Hewn in Chicago, spent grain is being used to make everything from bread and granola bars, to dog treats. Some are even taking leftover bread from bakeries and truing it back into beer. A quick Google search and you can find an abundance of spent grain bread recipes which are reportedly perfect for pastrami.
Breweries can be an all-purpose member of any community. We have food, drink, treats for man’s best friend, and clean energy. Breweries are going to save the world.
