BREWING IN A POST-WATER CITY
Hello and welcome,
In stark contrast to last week’s epic memepost, but totally on brand vis a vis my bleak environmentalist doomism, and in the wake of having just brewed our first bread-laced ale, I figured we’d rehash an old topic, water use in brewing, and really dig deep on what I think brewers in water-parched, drought-stricken cities like LA will have to do in order to maintain some semblance of beer quality and stylistic diversity, as well as, in a lighter tone, review the options available right now to address and minimize water use in city-bound breweries.
Why go bleak? Two reasons, in my mind: first, if anyone reading this opens a brewery in the next 30 years, well, let this serve as a virtual manual on how to minimize your inevitably massive water bill, and dodge the ire of the water-strapped masses; and, again, there’s plenty we can do right now to reduce our water impact as an industry, like, for example, brewing with otherwise trash-doomed bread. Sound familiar?
Equipment
Unitanks
Among a sea of small improvements and efficient upgrades, the single largest change that the brewing industry could make right now to address water waste, the beers themselves aside, is the transition from a multi-vessel brewhouse to a unitank brewhouse.
There are two big reasons for this: first, creating stainless steel vessels takes a considerable amount of water and energy, so by simply using fewer, we lower the planet’s water and power use. But more locally, and perhaps somewhat subtly to those who don’t homebrew or work in breweries, each vessel needs to be chemically cleaned and rinsed after each use, and certain vessels additionally need to be sanitized (like Fermenters). That’s a lot of water, and only some of it can be re-used (for example, our tanks don’t all get emptied and cleaned at once).
The easiest solution to this is the most obvious: use fewer tanks, preferably one. By mashing, boiling, fermenting, carbonating, and possibly even serving from a single unitank (like these, that we’ve discussed before), we eliminate not only the need to clean and rinse all of those tanks, but even the need to sanitize our fermenters and brite tanks (that looks weird uncapitalized, but I don’t want to have to always capitalize “fermenter,” so…), since the heat of the boil does that for us.
Why aren’t we already doing that, collectively? And why hasn’t MacLeod make the switch? The answer is as obvious as it is unfortunate: once you decide on another system, it makes absolutely no sense to then add these unitanks. You might be able to argue that we could, without too significant an amount of “deadspace,” install a few of these instead of more standard fermenters, but the idea of running two entirely different mashing procedures, with two sets of efficiencies and quirks, is beyond unviable.
Further, the big invisible bummer vis a vis these unitanks is the need for a big overhead crane for raising and lowering the big grain basket that sits in these fermenters. The good news is that it’s not, you know, people that have to physically lift these, and it makes graining out (removing spent grain from the mash tun - that’s a real term, right beer people?) super easy, but it does require the installation of some pretty heavy kit.
Finally, as far as these go, there is one twist, which is that your mashes won’t be 100% efficient, which means you’ll be leaving some sugar and water in the grain, so I’m open to the concept that, in theory, you might actually be able to beat the water efficiency of a purely unitank brewhouse with a mash tun, mash filter, and unitank combo, but the expense of this system would make it impractical as general advice to new breweries.
Hop Loss
Beyond this source of water loss, you have a similarly substantial source of loss, which may actually cause the state as a whole more water pain if you’re using locally-grown Barley, namely: yield loss. Obviously, if you line up 100 glasses and try to pour the water from a half-full glass into each successive glass, the last glass will hold significantly less than a half glass of water (a consequence, largely, of entropy if we consider the glasses as boxes in which to hold our discrete water molecules), and breweries are no different.
However, more than just the film of beer that you’d expect to find on the inside of a tank once you keg a given beer, there are sources of yield loss that are profound - we’re talking several kegs’ worth for a 30-keg batch. In particular, two additions cause noticeable yield hits: the use of hops in general, the use of dry hops in particular, and the use of large amounts of fruit.
The common sin of these additions, particularly of hops which are almost always bone-dry and which contain basically no fermentable (useful) sugar, is that their contents almost always hold less sugar than wort (even fruit a lot of the time!), which means that they absorb and effectively destroy useful, water-rich beer.
Hoppy beers are particularly nefarious, since hops in the boil sponge up wort and are then thrown out in most cases, while dry hops that are often used in these same beers absorb honest to goodness finished beer, and then form a sludge that we have to pull off of the fermenters and dump. Fruit, which is most often used these days post-boil, absorb some quantity of beer as well, but possibly less since they start fully hydrated (which is to say, it’s a matter of time scale - at equilibrium they’re no better), though I don’t know if they’re better or worse for yield on a per-lb or -kg basis.
There is kind of a solution to this, in that you could theoretically centrifuge these beers, and indeed, some large breweries report using centrifuges to produce Hazy IPAs with a pretty insane yield around 90%, but for poorer breweries, that option isn’t there (which is as all of this is for the general movement towards sustainability - a luxury for the rich, for rich nations with enough surplus GDP to be able to throw at the problem).
For the rest of us, an increasingly water-parched west means that even if we get our hops from Kokomo, the low yield of hoppy beers makes them an unacceptable offering at our breweries - or, an incredibly expensive rare offering, more likely.
Packaging
Beyond the production of future beers, it’s worth considering packaging, which may be a smaller issue, but would nonetheless be an important consideration for a truly water-parched Los Angeles.
The idea is simple: you want to maximize the surface area-to-volume area of your vessels in order to minimize water use. Since pretty much all containers in brewing are cylinders, this simply means that bigger is better. Cans are fairly wasteful, with kegs offering a much more water-friendly alternative, and finally with serving tanks as the king of the castle. Serving tanks, in case you don’t know (which, fair) are just big metal tanks that hold maybe 10-15 kegs’ worth. You certainly save some water with these, but honestly the jump from cans to kegs is far more important, so in essence I’m warning you, beer fans, that to-go offerings might diminish in variety over time in California. Sorry!
Recipe Formulation
We’ve talked about this several times by now, but to summarize my thoughts on low-water beers:
Cask is better
No filtration step
Low ABV is better
Less grain use, less water lost to grain and hops
You’d be right to assume that the best case scenario would be 0%, or just water
No hops is better
Hops are, above a low level, a needless water thief
If not hops, think dark malt and acidity
Where water treatment is used, maybe pull the neat trick of blending some city water into your RO water where applicable
RO, Reverse Osmosis, basically takes an input stream that has some level of minerals in it (say, 100L), and splits that into two streams, one that’s whistle clean (say, 60L, but that varies widely), and a waste stream (say, 40L).
For beers that aren’t super light lagers, like Porters, you probably could brew with a blend of tap water and RO water instead of adding a bunch of salts “by hand,” since city water isn’t too far from the salt bill for a dark beer
What do I mean by salt? RO? Any of this? It’s a whole different post
Granted, the Chloramine content of modern municipal water supplies limits the viability of this approach, from a flavor perspective, though if need be, people will certainly find a way to make it work
In fairness, there’s a very potent concept that I’ve not yet put to print, and whose potency as I concept I deemed strong enough and worthy enough of sharing that I typed up this whole post, which is to say: water theft. The concept, while not as criminal as the name implies, is quite simple and, potentially, not at all nefarious: crops carry water in them (think of the juice from a California wine grape), and by selling these crops to other states, we’re exporting our water in a literal sense. So, if we don’t have enough water to grow hops and barley at some point, we should just flip the script and import those crops outright, particularly from wetter states.
While this is largely already the case for hops, this logic extends to fruit, a ton of which is grown in California, which currently supplies a quarter of the nation’s food, and the long play, given the huge quantities of fruit needed for fruited beers, is to purchase purees and whole fruit from other states. (Barley’s almost universally imported, Admiral aside.)
Naturally, though, we buy our fruit purees through a big puree company, so “should” isn’t perhaps the correct word - I suspect that puree suppliers will have to source puree from out of state, which will raise prices, so I’m in effect saying: brace for higher fruit prices long term, which is probably true even if california keeps growing stuff for a while, because higher and more frequent temperature spikes will lead to lower yields.
But there is one way that we could, to a degree, have our cake and eat it too, and that’s where our partner for a new collaboration beer, Toast Ale, comes in. Their concept is very straightforward: if bakeries, which all cities need and will have until the end, can’t sell or even give away all of the bread that they bake, why not send that bread off to breweries, who could then use it as a portion of their grain bills?
And indeed, they’ve teamed up with a score of breweries to accomplish just that (a miracle, I should add, that they perform regularly at their brewery in the UK), and from a water perspective, this amounts to deleting the water use from whatever grain you replace, with the relatively low, sole cost being transportation from bakery to brewery. Insane!
And while there are limits to the quantity you can use in a beer, and while I strongly suspect that tighter water will mean fewer SKUs from bakeries, meaning less waste, this seemingly small efficiency bump could be profound in the aggregate, if adopted as a battle cry by the many breweries of California.
A similar idea, the rerouting of fruit in a similar way, would also be nice as a source of free fermentable sugars, and there are groups in LA that have done just that.
Which is to say that, hey, we may not be able to get a Unitank system in place, but we’re trying what we can! And if the masses start buying our non-Hazy beers, we’ll be happy as punch to brew them less frequently.
Conclusion
While the most extreme of these options are only really viable for yet-to-be-built breweries, the large animal comprised of breweries and their customers can and should begin to start reconsidering which beers are worth “voting for with our dollars,” as they say, pushing us towards lower-ABV, lower-hopped beers made with a portion of reclaimed sources of fermentables, because the alternative is to commit to the ultimate water theft strategy: importing all of our hoochahol from out of state.
Cheers,
Adrian “Wait, who signed off on this one? Don’t worry about it, we’ll just do another memepost next week” Febre