Please plan on joining us for a meeting of the Rocky Mountain States Section of A&MWA in Ft. Collins, on Thursday, May 15, 2014 from 4:00 – 6:00 pm. The meeting will be held at New Belgium Brewery in Ft. Collins, and will feature a tour of the brewery and discussion of their air quality and green technology efforts. The tour will begin at 4 pm with beer tasting to follow. Food is available by outside food-cart vendor at the brewery for those interested.
We are limited to 25 attendees on the tour, A&WMA members have precedence, and otherwise first come, first served.
Please RSVP via email to [email protected] by Friday May 9th.
No open toed shoes allowed on brewery tour.
New Belgium Brewery
Please check the directions below to find New Belgium Brewery, aka ‘the Mothership’.
http://www.newbelgium.com/Brewery/tasting-room/visit-us.aspx
New Belgium Brewery was started in Fort Collins in 1989. Phenomenal success relied not only on brewing great beer, but doing so using an approach always seeking to be more sustainable. A few of these efforts are highlighted below, and more information is available at http://www.newbelgium.com/
1. Increased efficiencies in the brewing process
Our brew kettle, Steinecker’s Merlin, was the second of its kind installed in the U.S. and is considered more efficient than standard brew kettles because it heats thin sheets of wort rather than the whole kettle at once. During wort boil, the steam exits the kettle through a stack and into a heat exchanger which continually extracts heat from the steam vapor and holds it in our energy storage tank. During the next batch, the stored heat helps the wort to boil very quickly, allowing us to use very little primary energy.
2. Utilized green design throughout our building.
* Lighting. We take full advantage of the more than 360 days of sunshine in Fort Collins by using UV blocking windows, sun-tubes, and light shelves.
* HVAC. Using evaporative coolers, we can condition our 55,000 square foot packaging hall with no compressors, using much less energy.
* Materials. In our new packaging hall, the interior wood is beetle kill pine. Summit County, CO, anticipates that mountain pine beetles will kill 98% of their lodgepole pines. So, we’re giving these fallen trees another life.
3. Implemented a process for treating our wastewater:
The Clean Water Act of 1973 requires business to clean their water to domestic treatment standards before discharging, but we go above and beyond to reduce the load on our municipal plant. And we get two valuable by-products from this treatment—methane and nutrient-rich sludge. The company Oberon has installed a small treatment plant next to our own that will use our process wastewater to harvest sludge to create a high protein fish food for aqua-farms. If successful, we can learn how to turn our waste stream (that currently becomes an amendment to compost) into an income stream and a source of global nutrition.
4. On-site energy production
The methane produced by process water treatment is used to fuel a combined heat and power engine—or co-gen—which creates electricity and heat for the brewery. The co-gen allows us to offset those critical—and expensive—peak loads by creating electricity on-site from a renewable source—our process wastewater. When the co-gen is running full-time, it can supply 15% of our electrical needs.
5. Wind-powered electricity since 1999
In 1999, New Belgium became the largest private consumer of wind-power electricity at that time and the first wind-powered brewery. In 1998, when we were researching ways to lower our environmental impact, Fort Collins was launching the first city-sponsored wind program in Colorado. We made a 10-year commitment to buy all of our electricity through the program, which allowed them to install an additional turbine, in Medicine Bow, WY. Since the wind premium increased our total cost per kilowatt-hour by 57%, it impacted employee’s profit sharing pool. So, we asked employees: wind-power or not? They unanimously voted for clean energy, and the decision is a fabled moment in New Belgium history.
Web Site and Contact Info
http://www.newbelgium.com/
New Belgium Brewing Company
500 Linden
Fort Collins, Colorado 80524 USA
(970) 221-0524