It's Summertime and the Beer is Green

We go green in a lot of places: our offices, our data centers, our homes, our garages and even on our highways. But it’s summertime now, and don’t be surprised if you start to see green in places you didn’t expect.

In your beer, for starters.

Turns out, beloved as the beverage is, it’s an energy hog. Beer making requires a lot of boiling, steaming and other high temperature processes, then uses a lot of energy to cool everything down and keep it cool. In fact, the brewing of beer has some of the highest demands for energy of any other food product you can buy.

To try and find a solution for more guilt-free beer enjoyment, brewing engineers (yes, that’s a real job) from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) in Munich have found a way to reduce the heat and energy needs of the brewing process. While many scientists have looked for ways to improve on the heating process for brewing beer by using a co-generation process of combined heat and power (CHP, which captures the heat generated by the use of electricity and sends it back into the beer-making process rather than releasing it), those researchers were only able to attain a maximum of 90 degrees Celsius through this CHP process, and beer-making requires temperatures up to 110 degrees Celsius. 

So researchers at TUM started to look for another way to make up the 20 degree shortfall. They initiated a thermo-chemical process using small pellets of zeolite – a silicate mineral – to create a “zeolite storage system” that, once water is added, can emit temperatures of up to 250 degrees Celsius, making up the temperature shortfall and then some.

The result is far less energy-intensive beer, even – dare we say? – “green” beer (though not literally, we hope).

But it’s not only the beer production that can be green. There’s the potential for energy recycling in beer-making, as well. Researchers at the German biomass company BMP Biomasse Projekt, have reportedly figured out a way to make energy from the spent biomass left over from the brewing process. Wolfgang Bengel, technical director at the BMP Biomasse Proelk, figured out that by taking the leftover muck, including spent grains and yeast, he could make a biogas that would create enough energy to offset about 50 percent of the energy used to brew beer, also resulting in less energy-intensive beer.

It’s probably no accident that the forefront of green beer brewing technology is in Germany. While the Germans may not have invented beer (the Egyptians probably get the medal for that one), they certainly contributed to turning beer into an art form. And coming soon, it might even be a green art form.

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