Brewery improves monitoring and cuts water usage by over a third

Bath Ales approached Endress+Hauser for help after realising that their water usage at the Hare Brewery near Bristol was too high. Without any means of monitoring where the water was being lost, there was no way to make efficiency improvements. A solution involving flowmeters, data collection panels and eSight software has resulted in impressive savings, bringing the ratio of water used as a proportion of the end product down from 8:1 to 5:1.

The benefits

• Cost savings from reducing the volume of water used.
• Environmental benefits of using less water.
• Better overview of the process.
• Potential to drive down the water usage even further and monitor other services using the same software.

The challenge

As a key ingredient in beer and an essential component in a range of production processes, water is the lifeblood of breweries. Reducing the volume of water used in production along with any resulting wastewater is an important concern for all brewers, both to save money and to reduce the environmental impact of the business. Bath Ales, owned by Cornwall’s St Austell Brewery, were keen to reduce water usage at their newest facility, Hare Brewery near Bristol.

The solution

Endress+Hauser recommended a cost-effective solution: a high-accuracy Promag W400 flowmeter to be installed at the mains water inlet to the brewery as well as 12 lower-cost flowmeters for submetering. In addition, data collection panels were installed to capture the information from the flowmeters and automatically upload into the cloud-based software program eSight, which provides continuous monitoring and reporting of performance to baseline targets.

The results 

The solution has brought the ratio of water used as a proportion of the end product down from 8:1 to 5:1, meaning that five pints of water instead of eight are now needed for every pint of beer produced. “By working with us to achieve our vision within budget, Endress+Hauser was certainly key to the understanding of the overall project and making sure that at the end of it we could deliver the reductions that we were hoping to see,” said Matt Newman, Engineering Manager, Bath Ales.

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