# Brewing with recycled water



## kalbarluke (1/11/17)

This is a question for all brewers but I'm particularly interested in the thoughts and opinions of any commercial brewers. I was reading an article on breweries in the US that have used recycled sewage water to brew with (Stone Beer of San Diego was one but there are quite a few others).
My questions are:
Would any commercial brewers here ever brew with recycled sewage water?
Do you think Australian drinkers are ready to try/buy beer made from recycled sewage water?
I'm pretty sure there are no regions in Australia that rely on recycled sewage water but that may change in the future - many countries already do. 

Link for your interest below:

https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/amp...ornia-brewery-makes-beer-from-wastewater.html


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## manticle (1/11/17)

Presumably involves adjusting both legislation and mindsets, so a while off.

Balance being a drought ridden nation with one of the most ohs conscious/obsessed around.

Personally, if the water is clean, I don’t care where it comes from but clean needs to be real, not a marketing term (clean coal) and there needs to be no pictures of turds on the label.


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## crowmanz (2/11/17)

Toowoomba almost had recycled water which would have entered near the top of the catchment and would have been cleaner than the existing water entering. Although the local community couldn't get over fact is was once in the toilet.

I recently did the xxxx brewery tour and they mentioned that they recycle water and use under 5L of water (think it was around 3L) per 1L of beer and they could probably go lower except for the public perception of using recycled water.


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## MHB (2/11/17)

There are two types of water in a brewery, lets call them product and process water (its been a long time I might not have the terms right). Product water would have to be guaranteed potable (safe to drink) this makes up a very small portion of the water used in a brewery, this is the water used to mash in, sparge, rinse fermenters, bottles... water that ends up in the beer.
Water used elsewhere which is most of the water can be cleaned and reused and is being so more and more. Go back a couple of decades and a brewery would have been happy to make 1L of beer for every 10 they brought. These days in a modern brewery that can be down to 1:2.5
Strangely it isn't the cost of the water (water is still cheap) that has pushed the change, it's the cost of getting rid of the waste - that's gone through the roof.

No one in their right mind would use recycled waste water for production, the risks are just too high for no gain, you would be battling public perception, the law, and liability if someone stuffed up, there would be no one to blame except the brewery. Both perception or stuffed up batch could do irreparable harm to a brewery, easily send a small operation broke and in a world with plenty of beers to choose from cost you a hunk of your customer base.

Good to see what was waste being cleaned up and reused in the plant - just not in the beer.
Mark


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## Lyrebird_Cycles (2/11/17)

I don't think Australia will ever need to use recycled water for domestic supply.

The gobsmackingly obvious answer to our water problems is wave powered desalination:

Almost all the power required for desal is running the pumps
Wave power relies on hydraulic conversion (pumping), when used for desal the generation stage isn't needed.
Waves and salt water tend to occur in the same places
Storage of processed water gets around the intermittent supply problem.
Most of our population lives near the coast.
Decoupling desal from the present grid power requirement allows the deployment of smaller local desal plants.


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## pcqypcqy (2/11/17)

If recycled water did happen, it would need to be captured, treated and provided by the relevant water supply authority. It would then just be included in the normal water supply, so would therefore be potable. I can't imagine any one business would generate enough sewage to consider treating it for their own use, and the cost of this c.f. rainwater collection would be astronomical.

I suspect the US breweries like Stone who say they are doing this aren't using it for the product water, but rather for the process water as @MHB has described. And they aren't using recycled sewage, but other waste water such as their own process water.


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