We brewed a perfectly safe and great-tasting beer using recycled brewery water
Humans wouldn’t get very far without water – and neither would beer.
That’s why our brewery is observing the United Nations’ World Water Day 2020, on Sunday 22 March, which highlights the importance of fresh drinking water for people and wildlife.
This year’s theme is ‘Water and Climate Change’ in a way to promote more efficient global water use and raise awareness about how climate change will impact our water sources.
Beer isn’t possible without its main ingredient; from the water used to grow and malt the grain, to the water used to make the wort that yeast will convert into beer – this is an invaluable natural resource.
With our home in the Northern Rivers, we’re fortunate to have access to high quality drinking water from the ancient caldera of the Wollumbin Volcano (aka Mt Warning), which we manage and conserve through our Green Feet program as one of three focus areas: water, energy and waste.
Our waste-water beer is ready for drinking
As part of our participation in World Water Day, we’re excited to announce our Beer-Water Beer, a 4.6% summer ale brewed using purified wastewater from our Murwillumbah brewery (that is, the excess water used in the brewing process that wasn’t turned into beer) that has been processed through our ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis (UFRO) system.
Installed early 2018, the UFRO system turns brewery wastewater into perfectly usable water by stripping out all impurities, turning the hazy beige wastewater into crystal clear H20. At the moment, we only use this reclaimed water for utilities and cleaning, but there’s no reason other than stigma that we couldn’t brew with it – so, we did!
Come and taste Beer-Water Beer at our brewery in Byron
Our Beer-Water Beer will be tapped at our Byron Tasting Room from Sunday 22 March for a limited time only, so we’d love to have people come for a taste!
We think the proof is in the pudding: while we don’t have any plans to use recycled brewery water in any other beers at this stage, Beer-Water Beer points to the possibility for innovation that emerge when we strive to tread lightly on the Earth.
See you Sunday!
Some of the other ways we conserve water
- We used 3.8 litres of water per litre of beer, while the industry average is 4.6 litres/litre
- We capture and recycle water from our bottle rinser and pipe it through our refrigeration system
- We re-use cleaning chemicals recovered through a CIP system
- We collect rainwater onsite to water our lawn and fruit trees
- We send some of our treated wastewater for re-use for local farm irrigation
