Brewery cuts water usage by over a third

As a key ingredient in beer and an essential component in a range of production processes, water is the lifeblood of breweries. Reducing the volume of water used in production along with any resulting wastewater is an important concern for all brewers, both to save money and to reduce the environmental impact of the business. Bath Ales, owned by Cornwall’s St Austell Brewery, were keen to reduce water usage at their newest facility, Hare Brewery near Bristol.

Endress+Hauser recommended a cost-effective solution: a high-accuracy Promag W400 flowmeter to be installed at the mains water inlet to the brewery as well as 12 lower-cost flowmeters for submetering. In addition, data collection panels were installed to capture the information from the flowmeters and automatically upload into the cloud-based software program eSight, which provides continuous monitoring and reporting of performance to baseline targets.

The solution has brought the ratio of water used as a proportion of the end product down from 8:1 to 5:1, meaning that five pints of water instead of eight are now needed for every pint of beer produced. “By working with us to achieve our vision within budget, Endress+Hauser was certainly key to the understanding of the overall project and making sure that at the end of it we could deliver the reductions that we were hoping to see,” says Matt Newman.