Efficient use of energy and resource through conservation and recovery in breweries

Abstract

Breweries are relatively large scale plants and highly energy consuming industry. Basically, beer production is divided to three processes, Brewing, Fermentation and Packaging. Brewing requires high heat consumption, particularly the wort kettle consumes one third (1/3) of steam consumption of entire plant. Fermentation with maturation process consumes large cooling energy by refrigeration system. This process consumes 60 to 70% of entire cooling capacity. Packaging process also consumes a lot of heat energy (steam). In general, steam consumption of packaging process is 70 to 80% compared to brewing process for steam consumption. Efficient use of energy consist on conservation and recovery. Energy conservation, reduce the amount of pollution created in the production or use of energy (e.g., CO2, NOX, SO2, ash, etc.). From the other hand pollution prevention measures reduce the energy requirements for waste handling and treatment, as a result a reduction in energy consumption is an important consideration in lowering the operational cost. There are several methods of energy recovery that can be considered by breweries to reduce energy consumption; however, most are expensive and should only be considered once measures for reducing energy consumption have been made first. The recovery of vapors condensate represent a major saving in energy consumption for a brewery. Utilization of CO2 and NH3 energy during transformation from liquid in gaseous form, is also a well known procedure in water cooling for compressors towers.