If you read much of the beer “blogosphere” for any length of time, you might get the impression that the so-called American “megabrewers” Miller, Coors, and especially Anheuser-Busch, are considered the “Evil Empire”. I have this vision of a giant interstellar quarter barrel manned by beer-bellied storm troopers cruising the universe in order to indoctrinate innocent people into the bland beer hegemony.

I, on the other hand, am trying not to be evil. For one thing, I am also personally trying to reduce the impact I have on our environment. I use a manual mower on my lawn and only organic lawn treatments. I take mass transit to work. I recycle.

So it made me glad to find out that Anheuser-Busch has been doing quite a bit to re-use the waste products they create to generate energy, treat waste water, create bio-mass to sell to other companies and, overall, reduce their organic waste output by 80 percent. And they’ve been doing this for over 10 years.

In St. Louis, the process starts when wastewater runs in pipes from the brewery to the BERS (bio-energy recovery systems) facility, which is wedged into a complex next to an old locomotive repair shop near the Mississippi River.

Screens snag large solids such as pieces of spent grain. The filtered water is collected in 1.2-million-gallon equalizer tanks, where temperature and acidity are kept within acceptable ranges.

The wastewater is then sent to airtight reactor tanks. There, anaerobic bacteria — microscopic “bugs” that live without oxygen — swarm around the small organic particles still in the water. The bacteria munch on the organic materials, forming millions of flakes of sludge — or biomass — a few millimeters wide.

Here’s some statistics:

• Reduce energy costs by millions of dollars (up to $5 million a year in fuel savings at the St. Louis brewery alone)
• Reduces emissions of carbon dioxide by an estimated 400 million pounds a year
• Produces between 10 and 15 percent of the energy needs for each of the breweries in which it has been installed

Bravo!

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via Treehugger)

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