Sustainability in the Beer Brewing Industry
The process of brewing beer is complex and often results in wasted resources. Ross discusses ways that breweries have found to reduce their environmental impact.
All manufacturing requires the processing of raw materials into a product. For beer brewing, these raw materials include grains (barley, wheat, oats), hops, water, and yeast. Each of these ingredients has its own journey even before it gets to the brewery. Along the supply chain, there are ample opportunities to improve their sustainability, and therefore the sustainability of beer brewing in general.
Ingredients required to brew beer. Illustration by Nathalie Dickson.
Hops. Image from Peter Weemeeuw, Flickr.
Hops
Hops are used in brewing to add bitterness and a huge range of flavours and aromas from tropical fruit to spice and earthiness. Like with the grapes used for winemaking, hops can take on characteristics based on where they are grown, this is known as their terroir. The trouble here is that a brewer who is looking for a particular characteristic from a hop may not be able to buy local produce to get their desired flavour, meaning that large quantities of hops are transported across the globe. This is partly market-driven: for example, British varieties of hops tend not to have lots of fruity characteristics, at least not as much as American or Oceanic hops. However, there is still a large demand for fruity hop-forward beers in the UK. For British breweries to make these kinds of beers, they must often order their hops from abroad, resulting in an added carbon emission from transport. Hop farmers had recognised the move towards foreign hops as far back as 2012 but held out hope that certain varieties of British hops like East Kent Goldings and Bramling Cross could compete. Recent years have seen a resurgence in British hop farming alongside an increase in demand for lower ABV “sessionable” beers, with milder hop character, which aligns perfectly with the terroir in Britain. A move towards beer styles that can make good use of British hops will help to reduce the environmental impact of the British brewing industry by drastically reducing transport emissions.
Hydroponically growing hops is an effective way to reduce water loss during the crop growing process. Image from The Hopperdashery @hopperdashery
Water
A study conducted by SAB Miller in collaboration with the WWF found that it can take between 60 and 180 litres of water to produce one litre of beer. Some of the losses are due to water absorption by grain and hops during the brewing process and from water used for cleaning the brewery. However, the largest contributors to water usage in the wider brewing supply chain are the farms where ingredients are produced, where one acre can use up to 27,000 litres per day. It is unavoidable that crops require water to grow, so some water is essential. The problems arise when little effort is put into reducing the amount of water used, and water is not reused. Traditionally irrigated farms generally use drip irrigation, where water is sent along tubing at the base of the plants and is released through small holes in the tube. Once the water is out of the system and in the soil, there is no way of getting it back. A far more sustainable system is hydroponics, where water can be constantly recirculated through an irrigation system. Round Table Hops in Minnesota, is an example of a farm that uses hydroponics in hop farming, producing the same yield in 15 acres that traditional hops farms can in 450 acres while greatly reducing water losses. Another example is The Hopperdashery in Texas, where their automated system allows them to adjust how much water they provide to their plants. Although the initial investment to create large hydroponic systems can be quite high, the hops produced can be of higher quality and greater yield, meaning in the long run it is a sound economic strategy and it is likely that the method will see more widespread use in future.
GRAIN
Grain farming suffers from similar difficulties as hops, including water use, pesticides, and monoculture among other things. Unfortunately, most cereal crops do not respond well to being grown hydroponically. Currently, grain farming is generally done with traditional methods which have a higher risk of being damaging to the environment. However, there are ways for brewers to offset the impact of cereal farming by adopting good waste management strategies. The wonderful thing about the grains used in brewing is that after the brewers have taken what they need from the grains, they can still be useful elsewhere. In fact, many breweries donate their spent grain to livestock farms which reduces the demand for fodder and therefore reduces the amount of grain that needs to be produced. Spent grains can also be composted to provide agriculture with natural fertilizer, or even used in recipes to make food for people. Another way to mitigate the impact of grains is to source them as waste from other industries. Toast Ale makes use of surplus bread in some of their recipes, which replaces some of the barley they would use otherwise and helps to reduce their carbon footprint. Both donating grain and finding a use for surplus are a good step towards a circular economy, where businesses can greatly improve their sustainability through the commonly cited tenets of reduce, reuse and recycle, especially in a resource-heavy industry like beer brewing.
Barley, wheat and oats are all grains used in beer brewing. Barley image by Charlie Marshall, Flickr.
Fermenting tanks at a brewery. Image from Jessica Petersen, Flickr.
At the brewery
Through various innovative processes, every year Alaska brewery reclaims over 400,000 kilograms of CO2 from their beer production which would normally be released into the atmosphere. They have also cut down their water usage by over 4.5 million litres and their fuel consumption by over 272 thousand litres. The brewery invests in novel technologies that allow them to produce beer with a far smaller environmental impact than most big breweries, and they have become a model for large scale sustainable craft brewing.
New Belgium Brewery is another example of a sustainability-focused company, and they were even recognised in 2014 as one of Forbes’ 11 companies best for the environment. The brewery highlights the numerous ways in which a resource-intensive industry can greatly reduce its environmental impact. In 1998, New Belgium staff gave up a profit-sharing scheme to free up funding for the brewery to build wind turbines to help power the site. At their bottling and canning facility, there are enough solar panels to run the entire packaging line.
Sustainability in the brewing industry is a hurdle. However, there are lots of great examples of how brewers and suppliers are rising to meet the challenge of producing beer while reducing their impact on the environment. There seems to be a growing interest, among brewers and beer drinkers alike, in changing the industry to make beer brewing more sustainable. These changes make sense economically and environmentally, and therefore are likely to persist and improve into the future.
Thank you to Nathalie Dickson for her brilliant illustration. You can find more of her work on her Instagram @nathalied_art. And thank you to The Hopperdashery, who allowed us to use photos of their Hydroponic Hop farm. You can find more out about their work on their website and Instagram.
Ross Clifton
Ross is an MSc and BSc (Hons) Conservation graduate from the University of Exeter, and is currently based in Cornwall. He is an avid homebrewer and cook and enjoys making new things as it is an opportunity for him to learn and share with others. He is a firm believer in pragmatic sustainability and has a strong interest in wildlife conservation, aspiring to work in this field in future.