Brewing Beer, Preserving the Planet

Tiago Darocha, senior resident engineer and a brewmaster, oversees all the brewery operations. He is responsible for all the projects in the brewery, the utilities, powerhouse facilities, and the IT department. Darocha explained how the company’s beer is made; Rich Guindon, environment, health, safety and security manager, outlined the brewery’s sustainability initiatives at each of the steps.

The Newark brewery is one of 12 Anheuser-Busch breweries operating and brewing beer in the U.S. It produced 7.8 million barrels of beer last year. One barrel is roughly equal to 31 gallons. One gallon fills about 11, 12 oz. bottles or cans. You do the math.

The voluminous output offers enormous potential for either environmental damage or environmental good. Anheuser-Busch InBev chooses the latter, for the better.

At nearly every stage of the seven-step brewing beer process, the brewery takes advantage of a recycling, recovery, or reuse opportunity.

Step 1. Grind Grain, Add Water. “First you basically grind the grain—barley malt, corn, rice, mostly—in the mash cooker, and then you add water. It sits there at a predetermined temperature at which the enzymes in the malt start the process of converting the starches to sugar.

“So if you taste the mixture in the beginning, you’re basically not going to taste any sweetness, but the end of the process you’re going to taste quite a bit of sweetness. That’s when the sugars are present. That’s the sugar the yeast is going to need,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative: Water Conservation. “One of the things we’re most proud of is our water conservation. It takes one unit of water to make one unit of beer, and we’ve been able to reduce the amount of water we use by 40 percent over the last five years,” Guindon said.

“The product is basically 97 percent water. Additional water is used for cooling towers, for the boilers, and to produce steam, because all the brew kettles and mash cookers are energy-intensive.

“One of the ways we’ve been able to cut back on water is we have condensate collection systems for the steam. We’ve been able to raise the percentages of condensate collection and reuse through better efficiencies and steam trap maintenance.

“We’ve gotten more efficient with how we clean vessels. Obviously, with a food-grade plant and a food product, we have to do a lot of cleaning and sanitation to make sure we have clean vessels and the like, but we’ve been able to reduce the amount of water we use and still maintain the same high-quality sanitation standards as well. Instead of using a once-through, drain process, like a dishwasher, we use more of a continuous process, like a washing machine,” Guindon said.

Step 2. Segregate the Grains and Wort. “From that vessel, the wort—what the beer is called before it contains alcohol, while it’s sweet—goes to another vessel where we extract the grains. You just have a mass with a lot of grain in there, so you have to get the grain out and put the wort into another vessel without the grain,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative: Grain Repurpose. After the wort is segregated from the grain, the brewery sells the grain as cattle feed. Anheuser-Busch has been doing this since the late 1800s. “It’s very nutritious. It’s malt; it’s cereal. I don’t know the exact statistic, but I know that a significant percentage of the feed that American cattle eat comes from breweries. And it brings revenue. It’s a win-win,” Guindon said.

Step 3. Boil; Add Hops. “Next the wort goes to another vessel, called a brew kettle, where we boil it. And this is where we add hops. They’re considered the spice of beer. They’re very bitter, but that’s what balances the sweetness. We have exact recipes for every brand that we make. We dump the hops in there and then we literally boil it. That sterilizes the wort and helps ensure that the flavor of the hops is really ingrained into the beer,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative:Energy Reduction, Recovery. The brewery has set a goal to shrink its carbon footprint through energy usage reductions. “We’ve been able to reduce our electrical usage by over 25 percent over the last five years and our fuel consumption on a unit production basis by 30 percent,” Guindon said.

One approach to conserving energy, as well as water, is the company’s Bio-Energy Recovery System (BERS), a technology that uses nutrient-rich wastewater generated throughout the brewing process to create and capture a renewable fuel. It is the pioneer and world’s largest user of BERS technology, the company says.

“BERS takes the water that’s left over in our process and sends it to a very large, above-ground anaerobic system that converts the carbohydrates in that discharge to methane. Then we dehydrate it, compress it, and send it to use in our powerhouse. That allows us to offset our natural gas purchases by 15 percent. So that’s been a very important initiative for us that reduces our carbon footprint as well.

“Over the last 10-15 years, we’ve been converting a lot of our equipment to use variable-frequency drives. We use a lot of compressed air here. We’re reducing pressures. A lot of our valves that open and close are air-actuated, and if you just reduce a pound or two on your compressed-air system, that saves a boatload of energy.

“Another way we’ve been able to cut back on our electrical usage is we’ve upgraded our lighting to more energy-efficient lighting and we’ve put in motion sensors,” Guindon said.

Step 4. Cool; Add Yeast. In the primary fermentation process, the wort is cooled to around 50 degrees. Different brands are cooled at different temperatures.

“The main reason we cool the wort is because the yeast only works at certain temperatures. Yeast is a living organism, so if you put it in boiling wort, it’s going to die. We add a little air to help the yeast metabolize and put it in the fermenter. It stays in the fermenter an average of five days, depending on the brand. That’s where the yeast converts the sugars to alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO₂). That’s mainly where the taste of our beers, the flavor profile, is created. At this point, it’s no longer wort; it’s considered beer,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative:CO₂ Capture and Recirculation. A byproduct of fermentation is CO₂. “At that point, we collect all the CO₂, clean it up, send it through scrubbers and deodorizers, dry it, and then we pressurize it to about 240 lbs., at negative 12 degrees, and then it’s liquid. We store it in our tanks to reuse it later in our packaging operation.

“We used to purchase carbon dioxide and now we’re actually selling it. So that’s down 97 percent over the last five years.

“It wasn’t that long ago that we used to get one railcar a day. The railcar holds about 80 tons. And then we went to several truckloads a day. And then one truckload a day. Then, this summer, we had a stretch of a few months when we didn’t buy any CO₂ at all. It’s just a matter of the timing between the brewing operations and the packaging operations, because it takes 30 days for the beer to be made, and the CO₂ is made upfront, five days into the process, and most of the CO₂ is used 30 days into the process.”

Step 5. Beechwood Aging.. Next the beer goes into a maturation tank to be aged in Anheuser-Busch’s exclusive beechwood-aging process, where the beer steeps and matures for 21 days in its lagering cellars. The beechwood bark acts as a place for the yeast to proliferate. “So what happens between the primary fermentation and secondary fermentation, during this 21-day process, is that a little bit of the yeast that carries over is fermented. So the primary fermentation does the bulk of the work, and that secondary fermentation imparts the final touch to the Budweiser, finishes the beer. So we’re really tweaking the profile of the beer,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative: Reuse, Recycle Beechwood. The beechwood chips are reused and recycled. “When we empty those tanks, we wash the beechwood chips and reuse them about six times. When they start to disintegrate a little bit and get small, we’ll collect them and then send them out to a landscaper who blends them with other materials to make
landscape mulch,” Guindon said.

Step 6. Filter. “After that, we filter it and adjust the gravity. So we add the right amount of water to make sure it has the right percentage of alcohol before we send it to the packaging group.

“We have great brewers that have worked here for a long time and know the tradition and know how to make Budweiser. On top of that, we have a control system that manages all the automation. There are a lot of valves and sensors and timers to indicate where things are in the process. It’s a batch process, so we’ll make one brand and go on to make the next brand. It’s very organized,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative: Yeast Recycling. “The yeast that we need for the fermentation multiplies and grows, so we have excess yeast that we need to get rid of. We sell it to a soup company for their use,” Guindon said.

Step 7. Bottle. Finally, the beer is packaged into bottles or cans. “The packaging department has a schedule that says they want this beer at this time, so a lot goes into making sure that the right beer is ready at the right time for the right line. It’s a complex system, as you would expect, but it’s well-managed, and we’ve been doing it for a long time,” Darocha said.

Green Initiative: Solid Waste Recycling. The brewery claims to recycle more than 99 percent of its production solid waste. Subsidiary company Anheuser-Busch Recycling Corp. recycles the aluminum cans. “They actually collect and recycle more cans than the number of cans of beer we produce. We also recycle cardboard, glass, plastic and other scrap metals,” Guindon said.

“What is pretty cool about this whole process is that what we make is so natural. So a lot of the waste we generate becomes somebody else’s input,” Darocha said. “We need to be responsible both to the environment and to our company. That’s our ultimate goal.”