An article by: Barry Adams
The Wisconsin State Journal
Your 12-ounce bottle of beer will continue to have 12 ounces in it, but brewers from around the country will gather in Milwaukee this week to learn how to use less of beer’s main ingredient.
Jake Leinenkugel on Monday will tell how the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Co. has reduced the amount of water it uses to make a barrel of beer from 12 barrels to 5.5.
And on Tuesday, brewers will travel to New Glarus where Dan and Deb Carey will show off their 2-year-old Hilltop Brewery, where water and other utility costs have been reduced by 25 percent compared to production costs at their original New Glarus Brewing Co. site on the village’s north side.
The inaugural Great Lakes Craft Brewers & Water Conservation Conference comes in the midst of a recession when consumers are trying to stay loyal to their brands and their budgets and when brewers have been socked by steep increases in the price of raw materials. The price of hops, for instance, rose 100 percent in 2008.
"People are getting more and more interested in it," said Fred Scheer, a brewmaster from Nashville and chairman of the Global Emerging Issues committee for the Wisconsin-based Master Brewers Association of the Americas. "It’s an international, ongoing subject."
Others at the two-day conference, based at the Discovery World museum in downtown Milwaukee, will speak about balancing the role of water as both an economic and natural resource; the Great Lakes Compact; and how to work with utilities to reduce costs.
Some 100 representatives from about 30 large and small breweries are expected to attend along with representatives of groups including Clean Wisconsin, Milwaukee Riverkeepers and the National Wildlife Federation.
The conference is organized by Lucy Saunders, a writer who has chronicled the microbrewery industry since 1987. In 1996, she wrote "Cooking with Beer." She worries that without better efficiencies, some breweries could be forced out of the marketplace.
"This is a needed message," Saunders said of water conservation. "It’s not necessarily a wanted message, but it’s a needed message. It just takes a little more planning."
The nation has 1,525 breweries, the highest total in 100 years, according to the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colo., but beer sales were down 1.3 percent in the first six months of 2009. In 2008, almost 182 million barrels of beer were produced in the U.S. Wisconsin, with 66 breweries, ranks seventh in number and 10th in breweries per capita.
New technologies in use
Water is not only the basis of beer but it’s used to cool ingredients and to clean tanks, kegs and brewing equipment and floors. New technologies are reducing the waste, and the improvements are easy to find in Wisconsin.
Capital Brewery in Middleton spent $335,000 in 2007 to replace an antiquated and inefficient water-cooled refrigeration system and a boiler. The upgrades were part of a $1.3 million expansion project. The compressor for the old refrigeration system, for example, had to be water-cooled, and there was no way to reuse the water.
"It was plumbed very weird and we couldn’t recollect the water," said brewmaster Kirby Nelson. "It went down the drain and it was running a few gallons a minute. Do the math."
At New Glarus Brewing Co., the Hilltop Brewery has some of the newest technology on the market.
One of the shining stars is a wastewater treatment plant disguised as a barn that pumps water back to the village. The water doesn’t need much further treatment, saving the brewery about $200,000 a year, said brewmaster Dan Carey.
In the brewery, heat from the brewing process is recaptured. Steam is condensed and used to heat water, which is then used for cleaning or to heat another batch of beer. The equipment also allows the brewery to get the extract out of grains with less water.
The company needs about three barrels of water for each of the 80,000 barrels of beer it expects to produce this year. That’s one barrel less than at its old facility.
"If we want to become more efficient, we need to invest in more efficient machinery," Carey said of the brewing industry. "Water is always a benchmark."
Cutting down at Leinenkugel
Leinenkugel’s brewery in Chippewa Falls was built over natural springs in 1867 but now uses about 70 million gallons of water a year from the city. In the past eight years, the brewery has spent more than $12 million on improvements that, by the end of next month, will have reduced water use by 60 percent from 2001, said Jake Leinenkugel, the brewery’s president. The company is also donating $500,000 to help preserve wetlands in Chippewa County.
"It’s a big cost to us, but I totally believe in this," said Leinenkugel.
"Water preservation and quality is so essential to Wisconsin."
Projects inside the brewery have included reducing phosphorous levels of water sent back to the city’s sewage system; capturing, filtering and reusing water in cleaning processes; and installing more efficient aging tanks that keep 25,000 pounds of spent yeast a week out of the sewage system.
By the end of November, the brewery, which makes 500,000 barrels of beer a year, will complete the installation of a new pasteurizer designed to save 20 million gallons of water a year. The system will replace one from 1952.
"I’m really betting on the (investment), but to be honest, it’s the right thing to do," Leinenkugel said.
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