Brew Smarter, Not Harder

Chris Lewington from Brew Resourceful on Environmental Impact and Cost Savings

How can I reduce my environmental impact? How can I cut costs while maintaining quality? These questions are in the minds of many brewers. But where should you start? The journey toward greater brewing efficiency can be seen as overwhelming.

At Lallemand Brewing, our philosophy is We Brew With You, so these questions are top of mind for us as well. In this article, Eric Abbott, Technical Support Manager for Lallemand Brewing, sits down with Chris Lewington, Founder of Brew Resourceful, to chat about brewing efficiency and how brewers can save money and reduce the environmental impact of the brewery.

What does brewing efficiency mean to you?

Brewing efficiency is defined by how many resources are consumed to produce your beer. I focus on five main factors:

It is best to think of these factors in terms of intensity, in other words, how much is consumed per volume of packaged beer produced.

What are some of the benefits of focusing on brewing efficiency?

Most brewers want to have less of an impact on the environment. Focusing on efficiency has both a financial and environmental impact. You will spend less on raw materials, utilities, and energy and also lessen your impact on the environment. One of the best ways of becoming more sustainable as a planet is for businesses and individuals to consume less. That’s exactly what efficiency means. 

It seems like a simple concept, but the reality is that many breweries are not focused enough on brewing efficiency. Why is that?

 I understand why breweries, especially craft breweries, don’t always focus on efficiency. As a craft brewer, your unique selling point is the quality of your product, so this becomes your sole focus. As a result, many brewers get stuck with inefficient processes, such as sub-optimal CIP routines, boiling for longer than 60 minutes, or mashing brewhouse efficiencies below 90%.

I prefer to frame the question differently. Instead of asking “Why aren’t you brewing efficiently?” I turn it around and ask: “Would you like to spend less money on raw materials and utilities every month?” Brewers might not have a good answer to the first question, but the answer to the second question is always, “Well, yeah, of course I would!”.

What would you say to breweries that have not really considered brewing efficiency? 

You might be late to the party, but you’re never too late. To be blunt, there needs to be an attitude change, efficiency isn’t some new concept, it’s been a standard of every business since the Industrial Revolution, so stop looking for reasons to not do it and start finding ways to start.

What is the first thing a brewer should do when they decide to focus on brewing efficiency?

The first step is just data collection. Look at your meter readings and your utility bills. Enter those values into a spreadsheet along with the packaged volume for that period. With this information, you to calculate the intensity of each utility/resource — how much is consumed to produce a volume of packaged beer. This allows you to establish your internal baseline so that you can track progress over time. For brewhouse efficiency, you are probably already collecting the necessary gravity and volume data on your daily brew sheets.

Free OpenAI tools such as Chat GPT can help you analyze your data more quickly and provide insights on what factors are causing X, Y, or Z.

It may seem simple, but from my experience, I would say that at least 80% of craft breweries are not measuring these basic sustainability metrics. 

I have built free spreadsheets, calculators, and tools to get you started measuring all of the key metrics. Check them out for free here.

Do you have some templates available to help people get started tracking these metrics? 

Yes, I absolutely do. I have simple templates to track utilities and slightly more complicated templates for brewhouse efficiency. I have built tools that demystify and standardize the way you calculate brewhouse efficiency. Just add the data from your malt certificate of analysis (COA) along with your wort gravity and volume and the calculator will determine your brewhouse efficiency. For the utility calculator, you enter your meter readings and packaged volume in that same period, and it will calculate your consumption intensities. The data from these calculations can be logged and tracked over time.

These templates are quite useful if you have a tap room, which will usually share utilities with the brewery and complicate the calculations a bit. For this, I’ve built an offset calculator to take into account consumption from the tap room that is separate from the brewery. You just need to enter the square footage, and it will calculate how much water, electricity, and gas it will consume based on industry-standard metrics. Even if this is not perfect, it’ll make your metrics more accurate and, therefore, better for benchmarking.

And all these tools are completely free to use. Just go on my website, www.brewresourceful.com and log into the members area. It’s free membership and you can download all of those tools and check them out. 

Ok, so let’s say I’ve collected some basic data as a starting point. What do I do next?

This is exactly where many people get stuck. And this is what I wanted to help to address two years ago when I started Brew Resourceful. It can feel like shooting in the dark. You might go around changing multiple things in different parts of the brewing process and maybe you see your energy usage go down over a few months. But was that the right change? How much did it impact? Was my time worth it? How much did it save? If you can’t answer these questions, it’s inefficient and demotivating over time.

So, I’ve always worked on the principles of Measure, Benchmark, and Reduce and always following that order. This is how you can maximize your time and maximize your savings, both your cost and the environment. Once you’ve started measuring the five basic metrics (brewhouse efficiency, water, electricity, gas, and CO₂) then you should benchmark to industry standards. I’ve created a free benchmarking tool that includes data from over 80 breweries now. The Brewer’s Association has something similar in America. The benchmarking tool I created for Brew Resourceful is free of charge and is based on UK and EU breweries. Comparing your results to the industry benchmark will help guide your action plan to improve efficiency. 

Can you elaborate on the importance of benchmarking?

Let’s say that you determine that you use ten liters of water to make one liter of beer. Is that good or bad? Let’s say you take action to reduce it down to nine, so a 10% reduction in water use, and everyone is happy. Seems like you’ve done really well, but how good is it really? If the industry standard is five liters of water per liter of beer produced, then you’re still wasting more water than most other breweries, and there is much more room for improvement. Comparison to the industry standard will allow you to see the most important problem areas, and also the best opportunities for improvement. This will really help narrow down the focus of where you need to spend your time and resources. I have written some guides on the ten best areas to focus on for each efficiency metric.

Measure, benchmark, then reduce is an effective approach to improving efficiency, no matter the size of your brewery,

When you have breweries starting to track these metrics and comparing them to industry benchmarks, what areas do breweries tend to be furthest away from the benchmark? 

It depends a lot on the brewery’s size. I’ve noticed that smaller breweries (500 to 10,000 hectoliters per year) tend to have a brewhouse efficiency that is way lower than the industry standards. Many breweries are as much as 8-9% off from the industry benchmark. This means that they’re using 9% more malt to produce the same volume compared to other breweries. Usually, this difference is related to their brewing process, not different equipment. I’ve seen breweries with very basic equipment being able to push their brewhouse efficiency up to 90-93% by focusing on it and making specific process changes. So, I’d say at the smaller craft scale, brewhouse efficiency is the factor that has the greatest potential to reduce your costs as well as your environmental impact.

What are some specific actions a brewer can take to improve brewing efficiency?

I strongly believe that enzymes and process aids are really good tools for increasing brewhouse efficiency, increasing tank capacity, decreasing tank residency time, decreasing the amount of cooling required, etc. Using these products can be a great way of reducing consumption of raw materials and therefore reducing your environmental impact. For a long time, I know that craft brewers felt quite strongly against enzymes and process aids because these products were associated with larger production breweries, which craft brewers were rebelling against. Actually, it just makes financial sense and sustainability sense to use them. In reality, the majority have no negative flavour impact.

I get if there’s a philosophical point against them, but I believe that there is a strong business case for process aids and enzymes. 

Can you speak to just the choice of raw materials in general? It’s easy to focus on the metrics that you can actually measure in your own brewery. But when you start to expand and think about the carbon footprint and resources involved in producing all types of materials, utilizing locally produced ingredients over imported ingredients, organic versus non-organic, how do you propose that breweries assess these types of decisions related to raw materials? 

Raw material selection is important. At least 80% of a brewery’s emissions come from its supply chain. It’s impossible to reach even close to net zero as a brewery without decarbonizing your supply chain. That can be quite challenging. The key is that you need to find the suppliers who are measuring, reporting, and reducing their emissions. One way to look at it is that you’re buying into someone else’s sustainability pledge. When a supplier reduces their emissions, you are now purchasing less emissions from them.

There are some very simple things that every brewer can do. The easiest one is to purchase green energy. Another big one is using organic malt or malt produced through regenerative agriculture. Buying locally produced ingredients is also a good choice. But this is not always straightforward, and there are cases where purchasing from abroad is more sustainable than purchasing local. 

I actually wrote an article on this where it was shown that buying American hops in the U.K. may be more sustainable than purchasing U.K.-grown hops. The reason for this is that U.K. hop yields are much lower so it’s way more energy intensive per kilogram of hops produced. Even when considering refrigerated shipping across the ocean, purchasing American hops in the U.K. still had a lower environmental impact.

It is important to assess each company and their processes. Then, if all other things are equal, of course buying local makes a lot more sense. 

Making good supply chain decisions is important, but it is more important to focus on what you do to improve your own efficiency in your own business. Ultimately, a combination of both is the essential strategy for net zero emissions.

Is there a difference in brewing efficiency for specific beer styles, like non-alcohol, high gravity brewing, etc.? 

Low alcohol is really interesting from a brewing efficiency perspective. Depending on the process, it can be more sustainable to make non-alcoholic beer. It very much depends on how you do it though. De-alcholizing a brewed beer, which is quite common in some big plants, is definitely less efficient that a standard beer because there is an additional process after the fermentation. However, if using a limited fermentation approach (maltose-negative yeast or arrested fermentation), which is more common for craft brewers, then this could be more efficient because the fermentation is shorter, you’re producing less CO₂, and it requires less energy. Generally, malt bills are also much lower using a limited fermentation approach. I think low alcohol and non-alcohol definitely have some good potential benefits from a brewing efficiency perspective.

High-gravity brewing is also very interesting. I’m referring here to brewing a stronger beer that would be diluted to regular strength after fermentation. Using this approach there is less volume lost, and you maximize your resources. It makes a lot of sense, and this is why they’ve been doing it for many years at big breweries.

Are hop extract products more sustainable than using hop pellets or cones? 

Without a doubt, yes, for three reasons: First, the extraction of hop oils is more efficient when making hop extracts compared to the extraction of these oils in the brewing process. For the same amount of hops, you can make a greater volume of beer in the form of a hop extract compared to raw pellets or cones. Second, hop extracts reduce losses in the kettle and fermenter. Hop pellets absorb a volume of wort or beer, which results in between 5-20% volume loss depending on the brewing equipment and beer recipe. Hop extracts have almost zero volume loss because they are pure oils with no plant material. Third, they are easier and cheaper to transport and store. Hop extracts may not be able to fully replace hops in your brew (yet), but if I was to open a brewery tomorrow, I’d be trialing those products without a shadow of a doubt. 

What role does yeast play in sustainability?

For yeast, re-pitching the yeast is key. Too many brewers are pitching and ditching, and that has to stop. Most breweries should have the ability to re-pitch at least once or twice. Starting with a quality source of yeast is important to ensuring good re-pitching performance. I also host a brewing podcast, The Modern Brewer Podcast, where I (Chris Lewington) and Alix Blease (from Lallemand) go over how to start re-pitching your yeast!

Chris Lewington bio

Chris Lewington has been working for over a decade in the brewing departments of some of the industry’s most exciting and respected breweries. Managing breweries ranging from 2,000hl p/a to 250,000hl p/a his range of experience and knowledge in craft brewing is unique. His business, Brew Resourceful, utilizes that experience and knowledge to make the brewing industry more resourceful, increasing breweries’ profitability and reducing carbon emissions with process-based solutions.