Improved monitoring helps Bath Ales reduce consumption
Bath Ales brewed its first beer in 1995 at a small brewery in Somerset. As demand grew, the company bought its own pub and moved production to Bristol before being acquired by Cornwall’s St Austell Brewery. In 2018, a new multi-million-pound operation, Hare Brewery, was opened at Bath Ales’ existing headquarters, doubling the available brewing capacity to 50,000 barrels a year.
The challenge
As a key ingredient in beer and an essential component in a range of production processes, water is the lifeblood of breweries. Reducing the volume of water used in production along with any resulting wastewater is an important concern for all brewers, both to save money and to reduce the environmental impact of the business. Bath Ales approached Endress+Hauser for help after realising that their water usage at the Hare Brewery was too high. Without any means of monitoring where the water was being lost, there was no way to make efficiency improvements. “It was one of the key focuses when I joined the company,” explains Engineering Manager Matt Newman. “We’re on mains water and we’re charged for the trade effluent going out as well, so any wastage is quite significant in terms of cost.”
The solution
As part of a site-wide assessment, Endress+Hauser determined which water lines would benefit from monitoring and recommended a cost-effective solution: a high-accuracy Promag W400 flowmeter to be installed at the mains water inlet to the brewery as well as 12 lower-cost flowmeters for submetering. In addition, Endress+Hauser supplied data collection panels that capture the information from the flowmeters and automatically upload into the data management and reporting platform eSight, which provides continuous monitoring of performance to baseline targets. The data is presented in user-defined pie charts and graphs, making it easy to monitor how much water is being used in each part of the brewery.
The solution has resulted in impressive savings, bringing the ratio of water used as a proportion of the end product down from 8:1 to 5:1, meaning that five pints of water instead of eight are now needed for every pint of beer produced. “As well as giving us better visibility of the overall water usage, it helped us to identify key bits of equipment that weren’t working to specification, which we wouldn’t have known about had we not monitored it,” says Matt Newman. “By working with us to achieve our vision within budget, Endress+Hauser was certainly key to the understanding of the overall project and making sure that at the end of it we could deliver the reductions that we were hoping to see.”
The benefits
As well as the obvious cost savings from reducing the volume of water used and subsequent wastewater produced, accurate monitoring has given Bath Ales a better overview of its process, as Matt Newman confirms: “The cost savings are great, and the project quite clearly paid for itself, but for me the continual monitoring is the biggest benefit because you’re able to react quickly to small changes that would normally go unnoticed. Being able to pinpoint very accurately using this system is a great benefit.”
Impressed with the results achieved so far, Bath Ales is looking to make further improvements, targeting a 4:1 water ratio in future, as well as considering adding new metering for steam, electricity and compressed air as part of the business’s sustainability planning. “We’re at the point where we’re monitoring water to quite a specific and accurate level, we know where the baselines and trends are, and we can identify any spikes that need to be addressed,” says Matt Newman. “As we make continuous improvements to the brewery, it would be nice to drive down that water usage even further and monitor other services using the same software.”
Optimise your processes with Endress+Hauser
Endress+Hauser has helped thousands of companies like Bath Ales to optimise their processes, save money and reduce their environmental impact. Active for over 70 years, the company is helping to shape the digital transformation of industries including oil & gas, chemical, food & beverage, life sciences, power & energy and water & wastewater.
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