Sustainable Brewing
We take our role as a desert brewery very seriously. Water is precious everywhere, but especially so in the desert Southwest. One of the ways we save water around here is by recapturing cooling water.
After we brew a batch of beer, we need to cool it down quickly, so that we can add the yeast to it and begin fermentation. To cool down the near-boiling pre-beer, we run it through what looks like a stainless-steel, food-grade radiator.
It’s called a heat exchanger, and it’s nothing more than a bunch of stainless steel plates. The beer runs through every other plate, and water runs between the rest to pick up the heat. The pre-beer comes out cold, and the water comes out hot.
If we lived in a more water-rich area of the world, we might just run tap water through the heat exchanger and down the drain. But that seems like a near-criminal waste of water in the desert. So we bought another tank, another big tank.
We always keep this tank full of cold water. We use it to run through the heat exchanger, and then we recapture the water in a rain harvesting tank outside.
The cold desert night takes care of most of the cooling, bringing the water temperature down from about 200 degrees to about 70 degrees the next morning. We then pump the water back inside, and use our chiller to take the tank back down to 40 degrees. We save about 2,000 gallons of water weekly by reusing our supply. We also save quite a bit of energy, since we’re only cooling the water down from 70 to 40, not from near-boiling to 40.
Voila! Cold beer!
