Making this heady product of fermented hops and malted barley is a thirsty process.
From start to finish, to make just one litre of beer takes on average, ninety litres of
water.
But that may be changing.
The industry is working towards reducing the amount of water it uses, focusing on every
stage of the beer supply chain.
We have to see what can we do in agriculture?
What can we do in packaging?
What can we do in transport, and how can we reuse or recycle the water that we use every
time?
The main package of the water we use is in the agriculture phase of our chain.
So we talk to the growers, and we say okay, how can we make this more sustainable?
One association member employing improved sustainability practices can be found in the
water scarce area of Eindhoven, in the south of Holland.
Here, the Swinkels Family Brewers are helping replenish groundwater levels using a purpose-built
sub-irrigation system to divert its treated wastewater that would usually end up in rivers.
By using the system of Swinkels, the spare water that we have that we cannot use anymore,
in our own process, we share it with the farmers that are next to the brewery.
Last year the system transported 800,000 cubic metres of purified brewery effluent back to
the soil, providing enough water for the 20 farmers surrounding the brewery.
The pump system can also top up groundwater levels by one metre, levels that can drop
by as much as two metres in the driest months.
We have to create new things to cope with the scarcity.
But there are more than 800 active breweries in the Netherlands, and they don’t all believe
water conservation is the key issue when it comes to improving beer’s overall environmental
footprint.
Energy use in areas such as brewing, packaging, transport and even refrigeration all feed
into the equation.
At Gulpener Breweries, near Maastricht, a major focus is the thermal energy used in
the brewing process.
Its new brewhouse is the first with two types of heat sources, steam and hot water, to gently
brew the beer.
They claim the energy savings of up to 75 per cent make it the most sustainable brewhouse
in Europe.
We want to be fossil free in 2030.
You only get one chance to make a new brewhouse.
It will last for another 30-40 years.
And so we said we got to make a big step now because the brewhouse is about 50 per cent
of the energy use of the brewery.
Here, reducing water consumption in the brewery isn’t a priority.
The water use in the brewery is only a very small part of the whole water usage throughout
the chain.
It doesn't really make a big difference if you use four or five or six litres for a litre
of beer.
I think big breweries, the big industry, they focus on water because it's easy to measure.
It's easy to get a sustainable programme on.
Water, it's an important issue, you should check it, you should look at it.
But it's not where you change the world.
Heineken, the world's second largest brewer has more than 160 breweries and aims to become
carbon neutral across its value chain by 2040.
Combatting water scarcity is an important part of its overall sustainability strategy.
The number of water-scarce regions in the world because of climate change is going up,
and it’s going up quickly.
So we had a handful years ago, today we have 30.
And tomorrow we’ll have more.
So we work with government and NGO to do things to replenish the watershed.
That can be reforestation projects where you also step up biodiversity through the nature
of the projects.
It can be addressing illegal logging that could be happening on some of those watersheds.
More than 95 per cent of Heinken’s wastewater is now treated before disposal and water consumption
in its breweries decreased by 33 per cent between 2008 and 2020.
It has set targets to reduce the water usage at its breweries in water-stressed areas to
2.6 litres per litre of beer produced.
But for the moment, the company sees that as the best it can do.
2.6 is about where we are with the threshold of what the technology is capable of.
So to get further than 2.6, we need to invent new technologies.
Until that new technology arrives, efficiency is the mantra.
So our teams essentially look at the end-to-end process.
And you're starting to take the brewing process step by step and re-engineering elements of
it, so that we're more efficient along the way.
Opinion within the beer industry may be divided on how much emphasis should be placed on reducing
its water consumption
But according to the UN, by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population may be facing
water shortages, so it’s likely the issue of curbing beer’s thirst is only going to
grow in importance.