About the author: Bob Crossen, Managing Editor, [email protected]
Bavaria adopted the Reinheitsgebot, more commonly known as the Germany Beer Purity Law, in 1516. This law is a collection of regulations that limited the ingredients used to brew beer in Germany to water, barley and hops. And while those regulations are not upheld today—they were created partly to prevent competition between the prices of rye and wheat—breweries in Germany, especially those that are centuries old, adhere to the practices out of tradition.
The cover story in this issue highlights Altstadt Brewing in Texas, which adheres to those principals, as well. The brewery hired a brewmaster from Germany and built its facility with the towering spires and steep roofs associated with Bavarian architecture. And inside that facility, it uses a biology-free system from ClearCove to clean its wastewater for permitted discharge, about which you can read more on page eight.
On page 16, Jim Meyers brings you into the operations of a much larger brewing company, Stone Brewing. Located in California, Stone Brewing is highly conscious of its water usage due to the state’s prolonged drought. Through use of a program from Inductive Automation, the brewery can minutely control processes in the facility to improve efficiency of operations and its water use.
When flipping through the rest of this issue, you may notice a running theme—food and beverage. People tend to think of the grime and grit of an industrial zone when they think of industrial water and wastewater, but we see a bigger picture. The technology for traditional industrial applications has been used to improve food and beverage operations, too, like an Ireland dairy co-op and cheese processing in Italy.
Shannon Grant from ADI Systems writes about low-rate anaerobic digesters used at that producer to treat products made from predominantly grass-fed cows. The make-up of the bovine diet in Ireland also puts a seasonal strain on operations, which you can learn more about on page six. And on page 14, Christian Carboni details the importance of ozone in cheese processing operations in Italy, notably in keeping work areas clean and sanitized while culturing the fungal development of cheese.
Those benefits were found in part by Italian University, much like the sand bioreactors at Whitewater Processing Inc. were developed through Ohio State University (OSU). OSU Professor Karen Mancl writes about the development of those reactors for turkey processing wastewater and how they have performed since operation began on page 12.
Do you know of a food and beverage operation that is using new water or wastewater technology to improve its operations? Send us an email at [email protected] or message us on Facebook or Twitter.