Breweries require significant volumes of water for beer production, generating problematic wastewater contaminants in the process. Proper treatment systems must be implemented to meet environmental regulations and practice sustainability. In the following material, we will introduce craft and commercial brewers to brewery wastewater management treatments.
What is Brewery Wastewater?
Brewery wastewater refers to the water used during beer production. Depending on the ingredients and methods used, brewing generates high-strength effluents containing concentrated organic matter, solids, nutrients, and more.
Typical contaminants in untreated discharges include:
- Organic substances: sugars, starches, alcohols, acids, fats, yeast extracts
- Suspended solids: grain husks, hop particles, finings, precipitates
- Nutrients: nitrogen, phosphorus, proteins
- Cleaning agents: acidic and alkaline solution residues
- Other: coloring agents, foam suppressants, process water additives
If discharged untreated without proper treatment, this complex and variable wastewater can severely impact sewer infrastructure, aquatic ecosystems, and public health. Upgrading on-site systems to meet modern regulations represents significant but necessary investments for compliant, sustainable brewery growth.
Imperative Reasons for Brewery Water Treatment
With the craft brewing industry expanding, properly managing resultant wastewater flows represents an increasing environmental challenge. Both sanitary wastewater from cleaning operations and organic-laden process effluents with elevated biochemical oxygen demand can disrupt municipal infrastructure and water bodies lacking appropriate onsite treatment.
Effective brewery wastewater management is necessary for several key reasons:
- Prevent Pollution & Demonstrate Environmental Stewardship: Discharging untreated or inadequately treated high-strength wastewater from brewing industry activities risks severely depleting dissolved oxygen levels in receiving waters and damaging aquatic ecosystems.
- Maintain Regulatory Compliance: Allowable contaminant concentrations in brewery effluents discharged to sewers or the environment are governed by strict federal, state, and local policies under the Clean Water Act and sanitary codes. Violations incur major fines.
- Protect Public Health: In addition to biological oxygen demand from organic substances, improperly processed brewery wastewater may contain high levels of nutrients, solid wastes, and other contaminants that can encourage algal blooms and bacterial growth, affecting water potability, recreation safety, and supply reservoirs if released.
- Enable Water Recycling/Reuse Opportunities: With appropriate processing, a brewery’s treated wastewater can be recycled for select utility operations, such as cooling and saving fresh water.
With conscientious treatment infrastructure planning and operation, brewers can implement the preemptive measures necessary to meet increasingly stringent discharge regulations while upholding corporate responsibility commitments surrounding water use and conservation.
Overview of a Brewery Wastewater System
Proper treatment of high-volume and high-organic content wastewater from brewing processes before reuse or permitted environmental discharge involves a multi-phase cleaning train.
After generation and consolidated collection in buffer tanks, key sequential treatment stages include:
- Screening: Coarse filtering using static grids or rotating drums removes larger suspended solids, production residuals, and floatable debris.
- Primary Clarification: Gravity-settling chambers allow additional sludge and solids from the brewing process to sink for collection and removal. As a preliminary purification step, simple sedimentation significantly reduces downstream secondary treatment loading.
- Cooling Water Removal: Any once-through cooling water often gets diverted at this intermediate point to avoid unnecessary biological treatment.
- Secondary Biological Treatment: Aerobic and/or anaerobic microorganisms metabolize soluble and colloidal organic matter from ingredients, sanitizers, and yeasts remaining in the wastewater stream after prior physicochemical simplification. Activated sludge is a common secondary processing method.
- Tertiary Polishing: Advanced filtration, contaminant-targeting chemical dosing, clarifier sediment scrubbing, and disinfection using UV irradiation, ozone, or chlorine oxidizers finish treated effluent to stringent reuse/discharge standards.
Understanding this standard multi-phase purification progression aids breweries in working with specialists on custom system planning, design, and optimization unique to their production waste profiles and treatment objectives.
Read about our brewing treatment system.
Key Treatment Methods for Breweries
While the multi-stage treatment train follows a standard progression, optimizing the biological digestion and contaminant extraction processes for high-strength brewery effluent requires specialized design considerations and advanced technologies.
Key methods include:
- pH Control: Upfront acid/alkali metering neutralizes out-of-range wastewater before microbial systems are sensitive to extreme pH.
- Dissolved Air Flotation: Injecting air forms floating flocs, making small particulates easier to skim off and removing higher amounts of total suspended solids upfront in the treatment process ahead of biological methods.
- Anaerobic Reactors: Facultative lagoons or up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket reactors leverage anaerobic bacteria that break down organic solid wastes, fats, and sugars without oxygen while generating methane-rich biogas.
- Membrane Bioreactors: Integrating ultrafiltration membrane modules with biologically activated sludge tanks produces a treated effluent cleaner than conventional methods while occupying a compact footprint.
Applying these advanced methods and emerging technologies, like electrocoagulation and reverse osmosis, facilitates reliable permit compliance for even the most challenging brewery wastewater treatment applications.
For more information, read our guide on Wastewater Treatment Application Methods.
Wastewater Regulations and Permits for Breweries
Under the U.S. Clean Water Act, brewery facilities are classified as industrial producers subject to permitting and strict wastewater effluent standards overseen on the federal level by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and delegated state agencies.
The National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) program regulates contaminant thresholds in brewery discharges to receiving municipal wastewater treatment plants or directly into navigable waterways, along with imposing extensive monitoring, recordkeeping, and reporting duties. Permit allowances account for beer production volumes and are subject to regular renewal and updating.
Typical regulated brewery effluent quality parameters under NPDES include:
- Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD)
- Total Suspended Solids (TSS)
- pH
- Nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus compounds)
- Toxic Pollutants
- Fats, Oils and Grease (FOG)
Exceeding permit discharge limits or evading compliance via dilution or improper monitoring can incur severe financial penalties. Thus, brewers must factor treatment capacities, system process controls, and testing needs into infrastructure plans for reliable contaminated wastewater management over the long term.
Specialized Brewery Wastewater Management from STS
Specialty Treatment Solutions (STS) is an expert provider of specialized, high-performance wastewater treatment systems for commercial and craft breweries. For over 15 years, our experienced engineering teams have enabled facilities to manage problematic effluents sustainably through advanced prepackaged or custom-engineered biological treatment solutions.
STS solves core wastewater treatment issues facing brewers striving to scale operations. We provide reliable packaged or custom EPA and state Water Board-approved water purification systems to overcome organic load challenges while enabling remote monitoring for proactive regulatory compliance.
STS Services
Treatment Technologies
- Moving Bed Biofilm Reactors
- Membrane Bioreactors
- Aerobic/Anaerobic Digestion
System Offerings
- Packaged Plants
- Custom Builds
- Underground Options
Process Controls
- Remote Monitoring
- Automated Operation
- Smart Data Analytics
STS strives to provide reliable, highly efficient brewery wastewater purification with minimal operational demands. We facilitate compliance with strict BOD, TSS, FOG, and nutrient discharge limits.
Why Clients Choose ST
- Regulatory Approval: Our proven membrane bioreactor (MBR) and moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) solutions meet stringent federal and local effluent quality standards for parameters like BOD and TSS.
- Remote System Oversight: Save on compliance headaches via STS control platforms that continuously gather operating data and enable issue correction before permitted deviations occur. Avoid forced shutdowns or major fines from agencies.
- Cost-Efficient Solutions: Our specialized process expertise provides breweries with uniquely tailored, high-efficiency treatment trains at competitive prices compared to alternative providers.
Whether launching a new microbrewery or upgrading infrastructure across a network of regional facilities, leverage STS’s expertise in assessing your unique organic and hydraulic loading conditions to implement the right solutions.
Contact STS to discuss your specific brewery wastewater treatment needs today!
Explore top-tier brewery wastewater treatment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s in brewery wastewater?
High organic contents include sugars, starches, alcohols, acids, oils, cleaning chemicals, suspended solids from grain particulates and yeast, and more. If discharged untreated, the elevated contaminants challenge treatment.
What do wastewater systems remove?
Properly designed treatment trains leverage screening, skimming, clarification, biological digestion, filtration, and disinfection to substantially lower organic matter, solids, oils, grease, nutrients, and potentially harmful residues.
Why adjust pH?
Incoming effluent pH outside neutral seven can reduce the biological process efficiency key for lowering organics and solids. Regulated pH correction optimizes these digestion systems.