‘We can definitely be more efficient at using water for washing…’

Greg talks about the huge amount of water used in water casks. Cleaning draws on a number of resources, including water. As an intermediate size brewery, Greg feels they fall into a technological twilight zone in terms of available, affordable cleaning kit. The brewery captures water from the roof which is used for flushing toilets in the bar. Greg is aware of the local river as a potential, future source of brewery water, particularly water for cleaning.

So actually, in the brew, for a 3500 litre batch of beer, in the process, we use 5000 litres of water and that’s for the actual brewing, the rest of it is washing down. Washing casks uses a huge amount and that’s somewhere where we can definitely be more efficient at using water. Is not necessarily, just drought, but in terms of our resource use, our cask washing consumption for is very high on our list to resolve. We know we can save water and electricity there but it requires capital Investment to change our cask washing system. We’re a tricky size, you know, we’re not too big to have something fully automated – it still requires a lot of manual labor – but too small to have nothing and people don’t really make kit for the sort of intermediate size and intermediate budget. It uses fresh water on every cycle. And we’re basically throwing away about 50 to 75 litres of water every single cycle that we heat it up to about 70 degrees. So not only are we throwing away the water every time but we’ve heated it from ambient to about 70 degrees and thrown it down the drain. I mean, we’re right next door to a canal, but they want all the water they can get.

We’re also right next door to a river. I’m sure we could get an abstraction license. I don’t think there’s anybody really abstracting below us that we’d affect. There is some interest in hydro power in the future, so they might not like us removing flow but the river wouldn’t require that much. I don’t know about the quality of the river. Certainly, it would need some intervention but that would be the case if there’s a borehole as well. It would still need filtering, and sterilizing and all that sort of thing. Certainly for pre-rinsing and washing floors and stuff we could do that, you know, that’s the river. What we do have – we’ve got a very large roof, and we have got some rainwater capture. I worked out that we capture 144,000 litres a year. We’ve got a 14,000 litre rainwater butt and we use that for flushing our toilets in our bar.