Nothing says summer heat like a few friends and a few beers on your backyard deck or in seats at your favourite patio. But while you buy local for your produce and promote organic living, cooling off with your brew actually is the complete opposite of keeping it eco-friendly.

Brewing engineers from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) are exploring a new technique that will allow for energy savings of up to 20% during brewing.

A requirement of beer brewing is wort processing, done with a kettle, which needs to generate temperatures of 110 to 160 degrees centigrade. This energy-draining process takes up about 45% of the whole beer-making process.

These engineers, then, are trying to develop ideas to shrink the wort-processing time to nil; thereby, reducing heat and electricity consumption.

Approaches include using combined heat and power stations, which are energy efficient but do not generate enough heat. Reaching only 90 degrees centigrade, they are shy of the 110 needed for wort processing.

Researchers have taken this method, and combined it with what they call a “zeolite storage system”. This system has high heat storage properties, allowing the additional degrees to be tacked onto the previous method.

This new technology is outlined and displayed at the  drinktec 2009 trade fair, on now, from September 14 to 19 September, where the Weihenstephan researchers from the TU Muenchen will exhibit a model of the zeolite storage system.

Read the full detailed outline of the extraction process.

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