The beer brewing process generates high volumes of wastewater containing dissolved sugars, suspended solids, fatty acids, high biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and more. Treating and reusing this wastewater efficiently allows breweries to reduce freshwater usage, lower utility costs, meet sustainability goals, and satisfy regulatory requirements.
As an industry-leading expert in specialized high-strength wastewater treatment solutions, Specialty Treatment Solutions (STS) provides state-of-the-art brewery wastewater systems. With over 10 years of experience and dozens of systems installed, STS offers fully automated, compact treatment solutions that minimize on-site needs while maximizing results.
What Is Brewery Wastewater Treatment?
Brewery wastewater treatment involves processing the uniquely challenging wastewater generated from intricate brewing operations to remove organics, solids, nutrients, and other contaminants. Highly effective and specialized treatment plants purify the extraordinarily difficult water composition to meet strict regulatory standards so it can be safely, beneficially reused, or discharged after proper processing. This improves sustainability, protects the environment, and provides substantial cost savings.
Optimized treatment processes that specifically target the complex contaminants in volatile brewery wastewater flow rates are absolutely necessary. STS possesses immense expertise in leveraging the latest technologies to develop innovative solutions tailored to the most difficult brewery-influent scenarios.
Related: Advanced Wastewater Technologies for Effective Brewing Treatment Systems
Related: A Guide to Brewery Wastewater Treatment Systems
How Does Wastewater Treatment Work in the Brewing Industry?
STS leverages customized multi-stage biological treatment trains to target the organic material, solids, nutrients, and more found in brewery wastewater. Key components and steps include:
- Equalization: Balances widely fluctuating flows and concentrations
- Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR) Treatment: Removes organics using proprietary biofilm carriers with immense surface area
- Clarification: Settles remaining solids and particulates through laminar flow
- Membrane Filtration: Further polishes liquid stream through tight membrane filtration
- UV Disinfection: Inactivates microorganisms before compliant discharge/reuse
Fully automated controls and remote monitoring enable round-the-clock optimization and minimal staff oversight. Treated effluent can be safely reused or discharged per any requirements. Residuals are further dewatered or processed through aerobic digestion on-site.
Why Invest in Our Wastewater Treatment Systems?
Installing an STS wastewater treatment system offers compelling and multifactorial financial, operational, and sustainability incentives to satisfy corporate responsibilities while protecting your bottom line.
Financial Benefits of Investing in Reliable Treatment Systems
The uniquely challenging conditions of high seasonal variability and high levels of contamination in brewery wastewater require specialized treatment solutions to manage energy, chemical, water, and compliance costs over time. Simply adding biological treatment stages or tweaking oxidation parameters alone often fails against high organic loads.
Instead, purpose-built technical configurations featuring proprietary equipment and remote analytics specifically targets brewing waste streams. This specialized approach provides advantages over conventional infrastructure by transforming high expenditure line items from uncontrollable overhead into optimized assets. Wastewater is converted from a liability into resource efficiency to deliver value. The systems accomplish this by:
- Dramatically lowering freshwater supply and sewer discharge costs
- Substantially reducing chemical/additive expenses through balanced biological treatment
- Enabling beneficial reuse for multiple applications, improving water efficiency
- Qualifying for exclusive tax credits and incentives for sustainability infrastructure
With the proper treatment system optimized for brewery wastewater applications, companies can redirect cost savings into growth areas. Ongoing consultations ensure configurations adapt to future needs.
Related: Explore our wastewater treatment applications page
Increasing Your Bottom Line Through Cost-Effective Solutions
After extensive value engineering and advanced biological process refinements across a decade of real-world installations, STS strives to provide the highest-performing water treatment innovations at competitive prices. These proprietary optimizations translate into substantially lower operating costs over time. We understand key cost drivers, which allows us to engineer systems with maximum efficiency to deliver the lowest total cost of ownership.
Leveraging immense real-world learning, we have innovated treatment methods that balance capital costs with power reductions and longevity to remove price barriers. This enables even small or midsize craft brewing businesses to future-proof operations via sustainability upgrades. Careful analysis ensures investments generate a strong ROI.
Contributing to Long-Term Business Growth
Proper wastewater management solutions mitigate excessive contamination while achieving regulatory compliance, improving water efficiency, and enhancing brand reputation. This directly impacts the long-term success and operational viability of breweries. STS empowers businesses to:
- Sustainably increase production capacity without proportional environmental impact
- Maintain positive community relationships through good stewardship
- Build consumer loyalty through visible eco-friendly initiatives
Effective water treatment directly enables sustainable business expansion aligned with environmental commitments. Trusted partners like STS make achieving growth simple through purpose-built solutions and attentive support.
Enhancing Efficiency Through Treated Wastewater Reuse
Once properly treated to exacting standards by STS specialized systems, safely reusing brewery wastewater significantly improves water use efficiency. Breweries can now reuse treated water to:
- Clean tanks, floors, and other hard surfaces
- Recycle through cooling towers or boiler feed makeup
- Sustainably irrigate gardens, lawns, or agricultural areas
Internally reusing properly processed wastewater streams for suitable applications decreases usage from wells or municipal connections. This provides cost control benefits and protection from rising water utility rates over decades of operation.
Sustainability Benefits of Treating Wastewater
In addition to compelling financial incentives, investing in an STS treatment system generates measurable sustainability results. With climate action rising as an urgent corporate priority across industries, finding an expert partner to actualize net-zero aspirations allows leadership teams to set aggressive goals confidently.
The STS technical team understands how to translate lofty carbon reduction pledges into on-site infrastructure, delivering tangible community and ecological protection. Our treatment equipment not only ensures compliance adherence but also future-proofs breweries against tightened regulation changes while solidifying a reputational commitment to sustainability that increasingly attracts environmentally conscious consumers. While competitors may promise change, STS’s proven real-world installations drive progress through data and science-based custom configurations validated to solve complex challenges.
Reducing Your Environmental Impact
Effectively treating wastewater with seasonal variability that can overwhelm typical systems decreases pollution discharged to critical waterways and sensitive ecosystems. Without proper controls and biological balancing, high organic loads and brewery contaminants could negatively impact the local watershed. Implementing STS-specialized treatment solutions creates a strong defensive layer to protect the environment.
This enables breweries to demonstrate genuine environmental awareness that tangibly protects local communities from harmful discharges exceeding legal limits. Properly engineered systems consistently maintain effluent quality despite influent variability, directly preventing detrimental ecological impacts through technology investments.
Meeting Regulatory Requirements
Navigating the complex, overlapping regulatory requirements from EPA, state authorities, and local jurisdictions can be extraordinarily difficult for small to midsize breweries seeking to maintain compliance while balancing production demands. Monitoring discharge water quality parameters along with rigorous, consistent sampling adds more layers of challenges. Missteps could quickly lead to notices of violation, fines, or even forced temporary shutdowns to revise treatment strategies or loss of discharge permits.
STS treatment solutions incorporate the specialized process components and advanced automation needed to satisfy all federal, state, and local wastewater regulations for compliant discharge or safe, permitted reuse. This allows breweries to avoid the disastrous operational and financial consequences tied to non-compliance through spilled product, paperwork errors, or ineffective treatment technologies not purpose-built for the application.
Working diligently to engineer adequate solutions that sustainably avoid compliance pitfalls through 24/7 remote monitoring and early warnings demonstrates positive community stewardship and environmental awareness. This further protects natural resources shared collectively while preventing unintended outcomes from process upsets.
Improving Your Brand Image Through Eco-Friendly Efforts
Environmentally conscious consumers actively gravitate toward breweries implementing visible “green” initiatives like water recycling through demonstrated commitments across business operations. When sustainability features prominently through messaging aligned with action in areas like eco-friendly wastewater management, a company can significantly improve brand image and consumer loyalty for patrons highly focused on business ethics and ecological stewardship.
Installing advanced wastewater treatment technology like STS systems, largely powered by renewables, demonstrates devotion to ambitious climate action plans by minimizing resource consumption and preventing pollution. A brewery maximizing water recycling internally makes positive public perception more likely, earning community goodwill by tackling waste production proactively before external pressures build.
Effective collaboration with specialized treatment providers like STS converts ambitious corporate sustainability pledges into actualized reality through turnkey execution. This allows breweries to achieve public relations wins and meet key environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals while focusing their expertise on crafting beloved products rather than wrestling with compliance issues or inadequate infrastructure. Relationship building fosters growth.
Our Offerings: Unmatched in Efficiency and Impact
STS has installed dozens of successful wastewater treatment systems. We’ve leveraged extensive patented technologies and processes perfected from immense real-world operational data to provide uniquely effective, customized brewery wastewater system capabilities.
Specialty Brewery Treatment Solutions
Our versatile water treatment solutions offer rapid processing of widely fluctuating organic loads under challenging seasonal conditions with minimal operator input required. Fully automated functionality maximizes efficiency and discharge/reuse water quality through advanced process control strategies.
Fully-Automated and Low-Intervention Treatment Systems
STS engineers leverage extensive system knowledge and data analysis to optimize biological configuration and sequencing for brewery applications. Proprietary biological process optimization supplemented by specialized automation and controls expertise minimizes human intervention.
Remote system access enables virtual management and performance optimization as needed. Regular maintenance and service supports long-term continuity. Control panel alarms alert staff immediately if any parameter falls outside normal bounds, allowing rapid response to prevent permit violations. Leveraging over a decade of data from installations under dynamic conditions allows STS engineers to continually enhance system reliability.
Customized Solutions for Breweries With High-Loaded Influent Challenges
Our technical experts thoroughly evaluate the specific needs of your brewing operations to professionally engineer a solution that sustainably tackles your wastewater challenges. No two breweries produce the exact same waste profile, so we tailor configurations to your unique needs. All systems incorporate safeguards to handle seasonal variations or sudden contamination spikes through built-in excess capacity and remote analytics. Our consultative approach welcomes feedback for continual improvements.
Achieve Your Efficiency and Sustainability Goals With Our Brewery Treatment Solutions
Let the STS team of veteran water treatment experts help revolutionize your water stewardship vision by deploying cutting-edge, data-driven technologies and attentive, professional support.
Our Data-Driven Approach to Wastewater Treatment
With over a decade of real-world experience, STS considers biological process data, industry expertise, and corporate sustainability science key factors when engineering maximally performing, ecologically focused systems sized for your growth.
Rooted in Expertise, Focused on Results
With our experienced staff and dozens of successful design and installation projects, we understand what it takes to meet and exceed expectations for technical, financial, and reputational outcomes through the consistent achievement of corporate sustainability key performance indicators. We pride ourselves on translating complex biological processes into tangible achievements by utilizing a solutions-focused approach based on trust and transparency with clients. This collaborative ethos allows us to innovate reliably.
Maximizing Your Return on Investment Through Strategic Planning
We perform detailed project lifecycle analyses to inform solution development. Additionally, collaborative goal-setting with clients allows us to create uniquely tailored systems. This comprehensive planning ensures that we position infrastructure investments to deliver maximum value for each brewery. It also enables us to provide sustainable solutions that offer strong business cases and minimize unintended consequences. We empower partners to confidently budget for ongoing savings.
Make the Sustainable Choice With STS
For breweries sincerely committed to doing right for the environment while still protecting profits, STS is the perfect ally. Our ecological objectives directly align with corporate goals to offer client-focused solutions adeptly balancing impact, growth, and regulation. This is achieved through service offerings flexibly designed, implemented, and supported using real data to safeguard the future.
Your Partner in Achieving Environmental and Financial Goals
The STS solutions portfolio empowers breweries to implement transformational sustainability measures. Our wastewater treatment systems enable a significant reduction in freshwater use, improved consumables efficiency, and proper eco-friendly waste processing. This proactive approach aligns with brand messaging focused on protecting profits, communities, and the planet.
Start Your Journey Toward Wastewater Management Excellence Today
The Specialty Treatment Solutions team of water treatment experts is more than happy to help you find the best water treatment system for your craft brewing business. Simply request a consultation, and we’ll discuss modernizing your water use efficiency and environmental stewardship through advanced, specialized biological treatment technologies to meet your growth plans.
Interested In a Brewery Wastewater Treatment System? Contact Us Today
Contact STS today to learn more about the treatment process or request a custom quote. Our water quality team understands key success factors to help drive your next wave of efficiency gains, infrastructure upgrades, and brand growth using technologies effectively sized to manage specific industry applications.
Related: See our winery wastewater treatment solutions page
FAQs
How is brewery wastewater treated?
Brewery wastewater treatment typically involves a combination of biological, physical, and chemical processes to remove organic materials, solids, and other contaminants. Solid waste is separated from the liquid, followed by the anaerobic and aerobic digestion processes, where microorganisms break down organic matter in the absence and presence of oxygen, respectively. This treatment can be augmented with additional steps such as filtration, flotation, and chemical treatment to further purify the water, making it suitable for discharge or reuse in accordance with environmental regulations.
How can the treated wastewater be reused?
Once sufficiently treated by an STS system, brewery wastewater can be safely reused for irrigation, vessel cleaning, floor washing, non-contact cooling tower makeup, or other acceptable purposes according to local regulatory guidelines to maximize sustainability.