SOLUTIONS BY INDUSTRY

Brewery wastewater is generally polluted with two different classes of pollutants. In the direct brewing process, biological substances such as yeasts, starch or sugar compounds are increasingly introduced into the wastewater. By cleaning brewery plants (boilers, pipelines, etc.) and washing empties, large quantities of chemical cleaning detergents are also discharged into the wastewater of breweries. Some large breweries use special wastewater treatment processes to recycle substances such as diatomaceous earth and return them to the production process. Wastewater treatment plants that significantly reduce the environmental impact of discharging wastewater into municipal wastewater systems (indirect discharge) are also becoming important in this context. This is often required by the operator of the municipal wastewater treatment plant. 

In addition, this method is often very cost-effective, as breweries with their own wastewater treatment plants often save on very high discharge fees. Important parameters for brewery wastewater are nitrogen and biochemical oxygen demand (BOD).
 

You can get a first impression of our wide range of possible applications in the field of purification technology in our practical report on our guest brewery. We are also guaranteed to find the right solution for your requirements.

How a small pub brewery mastered its wastewater production in a virtuoso way.

Griese Gegend (grey country), that’s what they call the area around Vielank, a small community in the rural district of Ludwigslust in the southwest of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Germany. “Griese” means “grey” and one suspects that it is the mainly sandy, grey soil, which the ice age left here, which led to this description. But thousands of summer holidaymakers and day trippers appear not to find the tiny village, which is only ca. 15 kilometres from the River Elbe near Dömitz, so grey. Even bus companies in the meantime plan the some 800 inhabitant village, which looks back on almost 600 years of history, firmly into their tours through the country of Gerhart Hauptmann, Ernst Reuter and Otto Liliental. Object of the visitor appetite is, however, not art, history or culture but plain and simply the Vielanker brewery. Already in the 18th century today’s brewery, which lies in the Lindenplatz in the centre of the village and directly next to the voluntary fire brigade, is a place of conviviality and a central meeting place for the villagers. However, over recent decades, the pub has more or less pottered along, until the
Düsseldorf businessman Kai Hagen plucked up courage and purchased the tumbled down property in his father’s home village, rehabilitated it completely and, in 2000, made it again into a hospitable meeting place. The Vielanker brewery, within a radius of several hundred kilometres,
is today a real insider’s tip. There is outstanding food, for example a metre length of loin ribs and, since 2002, even fresh beer from its own house brewery. 

Now, daily, busloads of visitors arrive, to view the brewery, eat, drink and then drive on to the next attraction. And nearly every evening the 180 places in the restaurant are booked out. The brewery has, within good six months, become a firm celebrity in the region. Still, it is not only the brewery itself which enjoys increasing popularity, the five beers also, which are brewed by two masters brewers, – naturally according to the German purity law of 1516 –are responsible for the unlimited growth in this otherwise poorgrowth region. In addition to own requirements the good relationships with local commerce, contracts with other caterers and its own sales vehicles it enjoys an impressive annual production of some 10,000 hectolitres, which are produced in two brewing room and are filled into oak barrels, party cans and bottles.

Due to the enormous variations in the catering area the heavy utilisation due to the brewery operation as well as the widely differing composition of the wastewater to be dealt with, ATB has installed system engineering which, even in extreme periods offers a very high operating safety: AQUAMAX ^® XLS5 for up to 850 PT – with two coarse screen tanks, two buffer tanks, five SBR tanks with integrated sludge liquor return. The complete control was installed in a former equipment hut directly alongside the plant. Following the SBR process the treated wastewater, in peak periods still up to 125 cubic metres per day, runs into the neighbouring stream and is fed back again into the environment. In the meantime, almost two years after commissioning the plant, the Vielanker brewery is no longer regarded as exemplary only in the matter of beer, gastronomy and the hotel business but also for wastewater treatment: specialists enthuse over firstclass effluent values and authorities call the AQUAMAX ^® plant as ideal reference project. With this project Kai Hagen once again gets his money’s-worth.