Brewery News!
Exciting news at the brewery this week as we install our new malt silo! For us this is a huge step in making our brewing process more efficient as well as more environmentally friendly.
As a company it is important for us to continually look into ways that we can reduce the environmental impact of our brewing processes. Malt is one of the main ingredients of beer but it can also be one of the most wasteful. Previously our malt has been delivered in 25kg polypropylene sacks which are difficult to recycle or reuse so regrettably we have to dispose of these. At our current capacity we are running four brews a day and typically use 16 sacks of malt per brew, creating an uncomfortable amount of waste. The installation of our 30 tonne silo will allow us to have our malt delivered in bulk, without being pre-packaged, and it is estimated that we will save approximately 15,000 polypropylene sacks from being thrown away each year.
The new malt silo will also reduce the manual handling of malt in the brewhouse. Up until now the brewery team have been feeding in excess of 1.5 tonnes of malt into the grain mill per day but now the system will be programmed to transfer malt from the silo directly to the grain mill. Something that won’t change is how we recycle our spent grains. At the end of each brew we transfer the finished malt from mashing to a grain bin which is regularly collected by a local famer for animal feed.
Being able to store our malt in the external silo will free up space within the brewery that was previously used to store pallets of grain sacks. This allows us to create a safer environment for our team in the brewhouse as well as frees up some space for future expansion plans that are coming up in the next few months.
At the end of this summer we will be accepting delivery of four new fermentation tanks which will increase our current capacity of 20,000 hectolitres by an extra 7500HL of beer per year, helping us to reach our goal of producing more than 5 million pints per annum. Then from January 2023 we will be able to start reducing our CO2 emissions with a new energy recovery system. Following a successful application for a Green Business Grant from the West of England Combined Authority we are able to move forward with plans to install a Vapour Condenser. This will allow us to capture excess heat from the boiling process, using it to heat water for the next brew of the day, and overall decreasing our CO2 output.
Watch this space for more news as we grow and expand the brewery!
Love,
Team Lost and Grounded x
