Low impact brewing

I Just visited the website of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co and it struck me that they have such a 'green' profile. While their primary mission is to make beer, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.’s also has a strong environmental conscience and applies resource conservation and reusing or recycling the raw materials as guiding operating principles.

Nine ways to brew low-impact and high-tech beer:

1. Fuel Cells
2. Recycling
3. Heat Recovery
4. C0² Recovery
5. Energy Efficiency
6. Water Conservation
7. Waste water
   
8. By-product Recycling
9. Solar energy
   

According to the founder and owner Ken Grossman the brewery continues to operate the brewery in as ecologically clean and efficient a manner as possible. In the coming weeks the Sierra Nevada Brewery has announced that they will be operating almost entirely off solar energy and the existing fuel cells at the brewery's facility in California.

The brewery is already generating up to 75% of its electrical needs using the fuel cell technology. Right now here is still a small portion of their electricity that comes from PG&E. With the recent addition of solar energy the brewery tries to reach 100% self sufficiency when the sun is shining during peak operational hours.

These efforts are not only great for the environment, but also great marketing tools for the brewery. It's a win-win situation, I guess.

All-grain brew machine

This years Ølfesival in Copenhagen has left so many impressions that I do not know where to start.

Getting right on track with a craft brew story: Housebrewer, an all grain beer brewing machine

I met Morten Steen Pedersen from Housebrewer a company so new that they do not even have a website yet (will probably be www.housebrewer.com). Morten who is the software delveloper for the project, showed me the machine. It is supposed to be aimed at cafés, restaurants etc. Housebrewer brews all-grain beer and therefore is able to brew the full range of beers out there. It measures 60x60x100 cm and has a batch size of 25 liters. The materials are stainless steel and glass, so that you actually can watch the brewing process, and all the ingredients while it brews. Unlike my set-up Homebrewer has very little manual work involved. Just add the ingredients in the different compartments and turn it on - out comes the chilled wort ready for fermentation.

Morten promised that a future version of the software would support BeerXML.

The price is approximately 1.600€ so this machine is not to be confused with anything you can buy on TV-shop (or that crappy beermachine.

Beer pint served in two seconds due to impressive engineering

The turbo tap poors a complete pint of beer in just under 2 seconds with just the right amount of head. It's unique, patented system taps in to a bars existing beer lines and pulls the beer out in record time.

Though they sell mostly systems for pro they also offer home systems for sale.

Video1 – the inventor tells about being an entrepreneur.



Video2 – speed test of a normal faucet compared to TurboTap.



This is an amazing device that attaches to any normal beer faucet. It can pour a beer four times faster than the common faucet. You also yield more beers off every keg, with less beer going to be foam. It pays for itself, this thing is revolutionary in the world of beer drinking and sales. For more info go to TurboTap.com