Next time you pour yourself a homebrew, consider what went into it. That glass of beer likely represents a little more than a quarter pound of malt plus a tenth of an ounce of hops. But it’s mind-blowing how much water was used along the way. It can easily take ten or more pints of water to yield that single pint of beer, even though most of the water never makes it into the brew pot or fermentor.
Where Does It All Go?
Some of the water gets tied up in the course of brewing and there’s not much you can do. The mash soaks up some. There’s dead space in your mash tun, in the area under a false bottom or below the level of the drain. Sparge water often remains in the transfer lines. A gallon or more is lost to evaporation. Then at the end, wort gets left behind in the dead space in your kettle, absorbed by the hops, and some might be left in your transfer lines or counterflow chiller. All of this together might add up to 5 or 6 gallons.
That’s a small part of the water bill, though. The lion’s share goes to chilling and cleaning. A wort chiller can use 15–30 gallons, depending on the temperature differential and use mode. Similarly, sanitizing your carboy and other gear and then cleaning up the brewery afterward can run through a tremendous amount of water. The good news is that you have a lot more control over these areas, so you can work to minimize what you need and reuse what you can.
Reducing Usage
Every drop that you conserve makes a difference, but you can likely save gallons.
Cleaning and Sanitizing
Cleaning is a step that people rarely think of optimizing. Early on, I would clean equipment when I was done with it, which meant that each piece got its own fresh water bath and could be put away. Now I try to clean everything at once, or at least hold off on the final rinse until the end, so the same wash water can clean the kettle and mash tun. It’s even better if you use just enough to wet the inside of the equipment and keep a scrubbing pad damp.
For heavier cleaning, I used to mix up five gallons of PBW solution to run through my counterflow chiller, my pump, and the transfer lines. Then I’d rack it into a carboy. After I built a carboy washer, I realized that I could use it to clean that other equipment, too. So, now instead of filling up at least one carboy, I use only about a gallon of solution to clean everything, including my mash tun and brew pots. I still have to rinse it all, but it’s a decent savings. I also usually save my empty, dirty kegs for brew day, just so I can get the most of out of that gallon of PBW.
If you use a contact sanitizer such as Star San, another savings is to stop making five-gallon solutions every time you need to prepare a fermentor. Instead, use a spray bottle to coat the surface of your carboy and other equipment. It needs only a minute of contact time and the spray works as well as the bulk solution.
Chilling
There are a couple of easy steps to improve your chiller efficiency. First of all, you want to slow the water flow so the water coming out the far end is as hot as possible. At the same time, you want to reduce the amount of time that it runs. For immersion chilllers, the simplest trick is to whirlpool the wort while it cools, which breaks up the cool zone around the chiller coils. For counterflow or plate chillers, pushing the hot wort through with a pump will cut the time. You will need to turn up the water pressure a little to keep up, but in practice, it seems to use less water.
Another improvement is to use a pre-chiller ice bath to reduce the temperature of the water entering the chiller. It’s basically a two-stage heat exchanger. A coiled immersion chiller sits in a bucket full of ice and salt water, which then feeds into the second one, which can be any type of chiller. A more extreme variation on this is to recirculate the water through the system, where the heated water runs back through the ice bath to cool it for another round. That definitely uses minimal water, but does require extra equipment, such as a pump—and a lot of ice or frozen gel packs.
Putting the Water to Good Use
Unless you go for the sealed recirculated chiller setup, you’re going to end up with extra water. With a little effort, you can give it another round of use. As a start, you should collect what you need to clean and rinse your gear. Beyond that, you can use it to fill your clothes washer or water your garden. If you’re up for making a second batch, you can also reuse the chiller water as mash liquor or sparge water.
It’s likely, though, that you’ll end up with more water than you can use immediately. Rather than just running it all out into the yard, I’ve acquired a couple of 15-gallon malt extract buckets to collect the water in, so I can use it later.
Our intent is always to make the best beer we can, but reducing water use is a worthwhile side goal. Aside from the environmental benefits, you’ll save money on your utilities bill if you can get a greater percentage of that water into your glass.
PHOTO: JAMIE BOGNER