This month on the Sustainability Solved Podcast, our hosts Will Richardson and Charlie Luxton delve into the world of sustainable brewing. Joining them from Berlin is Roland Pahl-Dobrick, the Beer Market Manager from Pall Filtration, to shed light on the intricacies and challenges of sustainability in brewing.

Brewing Process and Impact:

-       Unlike wine filtration, beer filtration faces unique challenges due to its scale, volume, and sensitivity as a product.

-       The conversation highlights the staggering waste generated by filtration processes in the brewing industry, estimated to reach tens of millions of tonnes.

-       Traditional beer filtration using Diatomaceous Earth (DE), a fossilised algae, produces substantial waste, rendering it unfit for recycling or reuse, particularly problematic for large breweries.

Sustainability Challenges and Progress in Brewing:

-       Roland discusses the industry’s movement away from DE filtration toward membrane-based filtration, which significantly curbs waste production by over 90%, leading to substantial water savings and reductions in carbon footprint.

-       Advancements in brewing technology have notably slashed water usage by up to 80% from previous decades.

Future of Sustainable Brewing:

-       Brewing companies are increasingly adopting robust sustainability programmes aimed at minimising waste, enhancing operational efficiency, and prioritising environmentally friendly production processes.

-       Consumer preferences, particular amongst the younger demographic, are driving companies to embrace eco-friendly technologies, aligning with evolving market demands.

-       Roland explains how attention is also being directed toward addressing the environmental impact of packaging, including efforts to lightweight materials, explore reusable packaging options, and consider more sustainable transportation methods.

This episode of Sustainability Solved is sponsored by Business Declares, a not-for-profit business network who inspire, encourage, and accelerate action within businesses to address the climate, ecological, and social emergency.

They are an active network of 100+ businesses who back our commitments to reach net-zero, restore and protect nature, and advocate for regulatory change.

Join Business Declares as a member to get help accelerating your action on net-zero targets and on nature targets for your business from the network. Find out more here: Business Declares

Mentioned in this episode:

Climate Transition that Works

Don't stop at carbon measurement. Go from insight to action with 51toCarbonZero. Measure & Report Effortlessly gauge your impact: swift and precise carbon footprint and ESG measurement. Transition Navigate towards net-zero and your impact goals: set accountable plans and governance. Engagement Inspire your stakeholders: the board, colleagues, suppliers, clients and investors More Than a Platform: Your Strategic Sustainability Partner Embark on your net-zero and sustainability journey with confidence with 51toCarbonZero. We go beyond providing a platform; with Climate Unlimited™, our expert advisory service, we ensure simplicity every step of the way. See us as an extension to your team; guiding you through the measurement process, charting your net-zero path, obtaining disclosures, engaging your stakeholders, consulting on complex climate subjects as well as addressing any questions that arise.

51-0

And I’m Charlie Luxton and I run a sustainable architecture practice. In today’s episode we are talking about Beer and in today we’ll be finding out in particular why fossilized algae plays a big part in producing beer and how we can move away from it in the future.

We're joined today from Berlin by Dr Rowland Pahl-Dobrick, from Pall Filtration. Welcome to the podcast Roland.

Good morning. Welcome. Thanks for having me.

So Roland, you spent your whole career working in the brewing industry. Now, can you tell us what the fundamental sustainability issues are that the industry is facing because I assume water usage is a big one, production of crops is a big one, transportation is a big one. But are there other elements that, that and areas that you're tackling?

You are very right. I mean you named a few of the very important ones already water. Obviously when you produce a liquid beverage, but it's basically all of those challenges that the industry today has, it's electricity consumption, it's heat energy consumption. It's also being efficient with the raw materials that we are using. I think. That means modern day production equipment is something that helps Brewers a huge deal to be more efficient on all of those things where water consumption in the past decades has dropped by factors like four or five to make it very efficient these days that’s where the circle comes back to me where a modern filtration solution, that is more efficient than the conventional technology is, for example, able to add another saving of 30/40% in the water consumption just by changing the technology that you are using to fill the beer. Just as an example.

Could you just do us a favor Roland and just very briefly run through the process. I mean, I've been to a couple of brewery tours, but I think if you haven't, it's really worth understanding just the very basics of the process and where the key environmental challenges are within that sort of linear, that linear chain.

Right. I mean, beer brewing starts by choosing raw materials that can be made fermentable. That means they need to be rich in starch. And those that are rich in starch are typically necessary of being broken down to fermentable sugars. That's something that the Brewer does in the brewhouse. That means those raw materials are going to be mixed with water and then natural enzymes. Some people also add enzymes, are breaking down the large molecules to smaller ones, for example, the starch into sugars. And then later on the process will involve, for example, a boiling step where hop is added and later on then when you cool that down it's going to be fermented. Yeast is going to ferment the sugars to produce alcohol in CO2, and a lot of aroma substances at the site. And then after that in by far the most volume shares out there like more than 90% of the beer is going be filled to make it stable to be sold in retail. And after the filtration, which is something that I specialize in these days, it's going to be packaged and then brought into retail. And of course, it starts with the production of the raw materials to be brewed with and later on fermented, that needs to be efficient. The Brewer then has the responsibility to extract efficiently. The processes will always be accompanied with a lot of cleaning since we're producing a foodstuff, of course, and in every step you're for, for example, also facing the challenge of loss, we call that beer a loss and you can improve that of course, also when you go for modern day production equipment.

This goes through and through and one of the challenges that is specifically interesting to me these days is that the conventional technology that dominates beer filtration these days produces a lot of waste. When we are using something that we call diatomaceous earth, often abbreviated as DE. In other countries, it's called kieselgur. It's exactly the same. And that's being used for filtration. This adds up a lot of waste to the beer production when Brewers use, for example, and that's already a good number, a 100 grams of DE powder on 100 liters of beer. You know that Brewers calculate in hectoliters, so we always reference everything to a hectolitre, and if you use 100 gram of that as dry, pure powder, it's going to produce around 300 grams of waste. On every hectolitre, large breweries produce millions of hectolitres per year. That means these are hundreds of tonnes of solid waste that are produced by the brewery. And that's, of course, something where you can also, if you're able to get rid of that waste stream, you can make a significant impact on the sustainability of the brewing process.

So you're stirring this DE, this diatomaceous earth into the beer and that sort of stops the fermentation process and I assume it sort of sucks up some of the various proteins and stuff that's in the beer to stop that process and make it stable. And then you strain that out and that produces an enormous amount of bio waste I'm assuming. So you've got lots of different kinds of different kinds of waste product mixed in with that DE and that's basically waste at that point you there's no other use for that material?

Hardly any. I mean, when you start to look at the DE itself, it's fossil algae. Those are dismantled from the ground. They are then purified and heat treated, and then they are brought into the brewery to be used. Chemically seen its sand like its silicon oxide basically, but since it is fossil algae, it has a huge inner surface due to bizarre shapes that it has. And that's what makes it applicable for filtration. And then you are very right, it adds a lot of organic material to it that is filtered away from the beer like yeast, like proteins. Very much as you said it. And that makes it very difficult to reuse it. You would have to wash it, you would have to remove all the organics completely and then if you did that technically possible of course. But then you have a mixture of all the sizes of the DE particles, which makes it basically impossible for the Brewer to reuse it again, because the technology of course being relatively complex, needs to have different particle sizes of the DE to properly run. And that's why almost nobody in the world out there really reuses their DE. It has been in trial status and there might be the one or the other Prototype but in large scale it's not economically possible to really reuse the DE powder for the filtration.

So this is a fossilized algae. Sort of in a sort of limestone-esque type form.

Correct, correct, yes. And it’s almost pure silica oxide, but it can of course contain its natural developing process. It can contain metal for example, which poses another challenge for the Brewer. Because that can leach into the product and have certain impacts.

With that waste, you hear about other, I guess food or beverage production facilities, your able to use the waste as kind of slurry or others. That's absolutely not possible in this situation?

Where there are opportunities to reuse it, for example as a soil improvement, I hope that's the right word. You can use it in farming. It's not actually a fertilizer because it doesn't meet all the criteria. Fertilizer needs to have. But it can be used as a soil improvement, but only to very small rates. And that means that typically the Brewer is not able to find somebody being able to use up all the DE waste they produce. So, most of it typically goes into landfill and there in some countries of the world, it's actually considered hazardous waste because the dry powder is hazardous when inhaled. So, operators working with the DE need to wear personal protection equipment or you need air suction infiltration and some stuff. It's absolutely not harmful if swallowed and ingested, so even if trace particles would reach to the final customer no problem. But if it could be inhaled, then it poses a health risk and that makes it not possible to simply throw it out there into the environment because it might be a powder that's been blown away with the wind again, and also this high concentration of organic load also makes it something you need to control when you're getting rid of it.

Do all breweries use DE?

Very good question. Not all of them. I just said it's the dominating technology and it still is, but there is a trend these days for the brewing industry to move away from that not only because of sustainability issues, but this is one of the biggest impacts really and the alternative to that is something that for example the company I work for, power filtration is bringing into the market, which is membrane based filtration, where the membranes can be reused, that means you wash the membranes. And then you can reuse them for the next filtration again and that, of course has a big impact on the waste accumulation. You can find literature values of more than 50% waste reduction actually is much more if you follow the process as Pall is running it, it's way above 90% waste reduction. And this kind of filtration is also able or filtration technology is also able to. Generate advantages in water savings. As I just said in the range of 30 to 40% relatively easily of course will always depend on the conventional filtration process. You compare it with. But also things like the CO2 footprint that have cause has been calculated and there you find values of between 20 and 40% improvement. For the CO2 footprint of the beer filtration, when you change away from DE into membrane filtration so. This modern type of technology, as many modern technologies of course, goes and tackles those challenges and tries to bring an improvement on these specific points of interest.

And when you've got your big membrane and you've scooped out all the biomatter and all of this organic matter that you want to get out of the beer, does that then become a more usable product because one assumes that has uses it again, as you say, soil improvement. Or bio gas as well I imagine you could use that for energy generation.

Yes, you're right. I mean when you use membranes instead of DE, you don't have the DE waste as such anymore, but the only waste that then occurs is basically the organic matter that you're filtering away and you are right, there are certain ways of reusing the biogas being one of them. And there are also technologies that try and regain as much as possible beer from this solid matter that you're not using in the final beer. For example, there are also filtration technologies to filter the spent yeast. Huge numbers of beer actually in the waste yeast. If the Brewers don't do anything about it, it can be like two to three and even more percent of the total output of a brewery that is beer in the waste yeast if you don't do anything about it and there are filtration technologies that enable you to recapture like 80 to 90% of that. And that's also something that Brewers gladly hop on these days, because that improves the efficiency largely, and that that in terms of sustainability, is of course raw materials efficiency and that makes the whole process more sustainable.

It seems to me that cost wise DE Must be more expensive than this membrane technology, forgetting about the sustainability. So, it sounds like it's a bit of a no brainer why aren't people going down the membrane route? Full stop. It's better for the environment. It's cheaper. It's easier. It's got, you know, you can get rid of the waste more easily. Everything. Everything is in its favour.

You are right. Actually it is like that, only that of course we have to acknowledge that modern type technology, sophisticated technology is of course something that costs its price to invest in. Everybody in the industry always separates CAPEX from OPEX, that means investment cost from running cost. And the running costs according to everything you just summed up are very much in favour of the membrane filtration. The investment cost is something where the more modern technology, of course, is slightly more expensive and that needs to be paid back over the time followed by the OPEX advantage you're generating. And the other thing is that we're talking about solid steel production machines. That means Brewers that did buy DE filters say 10 years ago or something, they still look into using them for another 10 or 15 years and that is of course investment where investment planning is necessary and everything so that it's not something where you really switch from one to the other. It's like if you have a car that uses up a lot of petrol, you're not going to change the next day to another car because you want to save on petrol because the car is expensive. So these are the kinds of considerations that of course slow the process down, but your summary was very right and that is why many Brewers are following that technology and it's not a secret that many of the large Brewers out there already made strategic decisions to move away from certain production technologies where the E filtration is one, for example, where they've made plans to not go investing into that kind of technology in the future anymore, but go for alternatives where membrane filtration is pretty much the only viable out there.

And how much do you think that's been driven by reduced production costs and reduced waste issues and how much of that is being driven by the fact that? That they feel they can produce a more sustainable product and marketed as a more sustainable product, I mean, is that an element of of the beer industry that people are actually starting to to think about? Like I wanna get a beer that has as least impact on the planet as possible. I mean, are we seeing that on cans? I can't say that I necessarily have.

These are so many great questions in one and I need to pay attention that I don't start lecturing but.

Oh, go ahead. Go on.

No, it's great. Starting with the end of what you just asked actually I've seen. Examples in Sweden, for example, where people make beer festivals where they advertise their beers with the CO2 footprint from the beer production, and then you can actually choose your beer according to the CO2 footprint. Also, and that's where we really get the the the.

Connection back to what I'm doing. Also, most of the Brewers these days follow sustainability programs. The big ones vary strict, sustainable programs that they also publish regularly about because they of course.

Need to follow legislation. Legislation is getting more strict on industry being more sustainable. Smaller companies, of course need to follow up with the performance of the big ones and try to follow them also in the advantage in the examples that they are setting in becoming more sustainable. And the good thing is for the initial part of your question, is it more cost saving or is it sustainability? It's actually both. Of course it's cost saving as well, but the good thing is when you want to become more sustainable and you save on water, that saves money and you become more efficient if you save energy. That saves money and you become more efficient. So it very much goes hand in hand, but it's not only that people want to save money and then say, look how sustainable I am, but they really have very ambitious sustainability programs. Most the big ones, all and most of the small ones because they are driven by legislation and they understand that this is something that appeals to the customer. Specifically, the younger generation, they will be watching very closely who does what in terms of sustainability and production.

Because it's a very it's an interesting one, isn't it? Because you're talking about one section of this long production sort of system, I suppose. Where where are the other big challenges that the beer industry are facing? I mean, because climate change and drought is? Radically changing, radically impacting agriculture. Is this something that that the beer industry is tackling, and if so, how?

The brewing industry tackles that again. If you look for what the the big brewing groups are doing, they very often also have programs to support the farmers that produce their raw materials to make sustainable farming, organic farming possible and stuff like that. But it's also inside of the breweries where people have become much more aware of being raw materials efficient. That means where? You said it, I think in the very beginning, all my professional, almost all my adult life I spend in beer brewing and beer consumption. Of course at the site. But when when I started working in the brewery 32 years ago, of course there was not that much awareness about having product loss, but people were really. OK, that's that's beer that's running down the drain. But these days everybody is trying to cut on their losses very much, not only because it's more efficient, but it's also going to help them. Being more raw materials efficient and coming back to the examples I stand for these days when you are able to. Disrupt a technology and improve the beer losses in that step by say 40/50%. That's already helping a lot. Another thing that I did mention is that we have technologies with which you can recover almost all the beer that would go with the waste. These into whatever other application that helps to be raw materials efficient. So there is a lot of that mind change these days in breweries and that's. Of course, something. That we weave into the technologies that we're offering. Because we know that our customers are going to pay a lot of attention to that and we need to satisfy that need. That they have. To be more efficient, but also save on raw materials that they are using.

So if you were to say let's, here's the question, you might not have the answer. Let's say there's a a liter, and I'll use a litre because you know 2 pints or a litre of of beer. What would be like an old fashioned sort of CO2 emissions associated and water usage for that and a modern, efficient beer. Production, are we are we talking like a magnitude different of of of water and energy use or are we talking half and how how much progress have we?

There was a lot of progress being made. Please excuse me if I don't answer to the exact CO2 footprints that people have and that they publish not prepared for that, but.

That's fine. I think just gesturally is fine. I think we're good with that. I didn't prepare you for this question either, so that's totally fine.

No, but but I I am I I can. Answer to some aspects of it. As I said, the de Free Filtration has been published to be 20 to 40% more CO2 efficient than conventional de filtration is. So that's the CO2 footprint reduction that is published and that is a measured. Factor out there. When it comes to water, it's a very, very good. Surveyed sort of KPI that means a factor that everybody is following. When I started working in the brewery, it was a solid 10 to 8 liters of water used per one litre of beer. That's three decades ago. These days, the best in class used two leaders water per litre of beer.

Wow.

So that is a huge saving. It's a huge saving and that. Is of course something where modern. Day production equipment comes in. I love to use the example of dishwashing because everybody can relate to that. At home, if you wash your dishes at home, if you wash your plates with a running tap of water, you're going to use a huge lot of more water per plate. Then you would use. If you use a modern dishwasher that even has an equal program where the water is recycled, where resting steps avoid high temperature steps and so on and so on and Here again If we stick with my example where de free technology saves around say 30 to 40% of the water. If you go a step further into the production where people these days look very much into trying to avoid pasteurization for the sake of avoiding heat usage, that is also something that you can replace with filtration technology. There, the savings can be up to 70 to 80%. With this modern technology as compared to the conventional technology.

Rather than boiling and pasteurizing the water to make it into liquor, you filter it and avoid that entire.

Excuse me, I need I need to be more precise about that, I guess. No, I was. I was speaking about pasteurizing the final product.

OK, fine. OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fine. Yeah.

And then you wouldn't boil it. You wouldn't boil it, but you would use temperatures in the range of 60 to 70° in something, and then you can make significant replacement by filtering the product instead of pasteurizing. The saving potential is huge, also very much as it is when you replace the DE technology with the membrane filtration technology.

With that statistic 1 to 2 and then one to eight, one to 10, you're almost getting to the point where you could drink beer instead of water like the Victorians. It's brilliant. I love it.

Small beer in in the morning, only small beer in the morning.

The Victorians did, isn't it? They drank, they drank beer instead of water because it was cheaper and better. Well, everyone would kill you.

And from from for for thousands of years we've done that. Yeah. Because it didn't kill you because it was it was. It was clean, wasn't it?

Correct. It was a source of water that was hardly spoiled. Yeah. That's the point. And that's by the way, why beer is also a very global phenomenon, right? I mean we as we speak here together, we come from those typical beer countries, right? Everybody has long beer cultures, but beer has been invented probably somewhere completely else like 10 thousands of years. Ago or something like that.

I think longer.

Totally global phenomenon.

There was a one of those memes that went around, or what I may not be called a meme, but there was the oldest pub in the world, was found somewhere in Arabia and they they found, you know, a place in the middle of the desert where people would have gone to, to drink beer together. And it was that, like literally 10s and 10s of thousands of years ago, they and and this archaeological site.

True and the beer production these days is split almost completely evenly all over the globe. It's it's really if you look into those larger sections of the of the world, if you split the world into three big sections, almost a perfect third of beer production is in each of those sections. And that is also where our customers are and all of them these days are thinking into replacing conventional technology with more modern technology to be able to yield those advantages and savings that we're speaking about here.

Well, so you've got you've got upstream food product, you know production of crops. So you've got, you know, regenerative agriculture, organic agriculture. So you can start to tackle barley production, hops production, yeast production. I know you've got challenges around climate change and shifting growing area. You've also, you're now talking about a a significant tackle on the reduction of waste during the actual production process, but you've still got that sort of slight elephant in the room of all of those beer bottles and beer cans and kegs and lorries driving that around. What's being done at that kind of that final third, which seems to me like probably a really the.

Almost the hardest thing to challenge or to tackle.

You are right, and that's one of the reasons why I skipped the question on the CO2 footprint of beer in total, because the biggest impact typically comes from that part of the product. And it's also not a secret that one of the ways that specifically the brewing industry is going there is lightweighting of packaging material down, gauging if you use hundreds of millions of crown corks per year, it makes a difference if you lose some bit of a material there. But again, if you allow me to come back with my center of work these days is. Into that final third of the production. We're also looking in, for example, replacing heat pasteurization, which can also make a lot of an impact. And using filtration technology there as well. So I I am totally with you, there is a lot. Upstream and downstream of what we as a company stand for, but of course on all of these aspects, there will be specialists also working on it. And we are working on the filtration steps making these as efficient as possible. And as I'm saying, there is a lot of CO2, UM footprint production improvement that you can also even yield on the part of the process chain that. We stand responsible for.

So that's the pasteurization around kegs and reuse of bottles. Is that or is it that the pre pasteurization before bottling?

The filtration, of course, is something. That you would do upstream of bottling, right? It's very difficult to filter the product once it's in a bottle, but that's that's specifically what I'm what I'm speaking about. You're right. But then of course, there is a lot of reuse of not to say waste streams here as well. I mean a lot of water, for example, is being used to convey the heat for pasteurization. If you pasteurize cans and that is done by heating up water and then tricking the water all over those packages and there again. Of course you can use that water, but you have to make it up again so that it is clean enough to reuse it and then again there are options for filtration and other technologies to reuse that kind of a waste.

We've had some wonderful companies on the podcast around this. Funny enough, in the more in the wine industry, but it would still be pertinent to beer industry where you've got that bottle, that's plastic bottle that's flat because it's transportation, it's lighter and you can pack more into. I can't remember. They're everywhere and I can't. I I feel really bad because I don't remember their name, but. And then there was another company that washed. They had a kind of barcode or and they knew which bottles were which and where they were. And they had this system. It was, it was in the US and they had a system that they could track the bottles. They all went around and it was a real circular economy and it worked really well for them because it was cheaper, more cost effective and it was much better for the Brewers because they didn't own the bottles, but yet they were being cleaned and washed.

Yeah, you're right. As I'm saying, there are specialised companies on each section of the production of of that and everybody will bring in their know how best as they can to yield the improvements that all of us need really.

What do you see the the the the big next next steps in terms of the sustainability agenda within the brewing industry? Where are the, where are the next big gains going? To be what? What are you working on down the line? Although that might be giving away your game plan. Appreciate that.

No, but actually one of our central center points of interest really is to work on that DE replacement, because that is something where Paul Filtration holds a lot of know how and where the change into going. Not using the E technology is just picking up speed. You just mentioned wine there. The change is already much more complete. Many wine makers have already made the step away from using the E4 filtration going into membrane film. But wine filtration is not as challenging from a from an industrial point of view. Wine filtration is bound to the time of harvest, and it's shorter and smaller batches and so on, and allow me to say it's also not as sensitive a product. So that it took, it took a little longer.

I'm not sure the French would agree, but I'll you know, gloss over that.

But it it. Took a little longer for the brewing industry to to adapt to changing away from the E filtration. And it's now really picking up speed. And as I'm saying, it's a huge industry. We're speaking about 2 billion hectoliters every year of beer that are being produced. And as I'm saying, 90% plus of that is being filtered. So we're speaking about huge volumes that are filtered every day of the week, every hour of the week, almost. So the technological challenge to achieve that is slightly different one and that's why this is only really picking up speed. At the moment. Which makes us concentrate on that aspect very much, because we hold that technology that enables that.

So on the back of that, on the back of what you've just said and what you previously talked about, the the barrier to this would be the, the steel and the you know the equipment that's already in place and the the money that's been spent on that has any research been done? The life cycle analysis of that steel. So could you take all of that steel and? You know, repurpose it, smelt, melt it down and put it back in what? You know, what are the environmental impacts of doing that? Because steel is worth quite a lot and it can be reused.

You're completely right. That is something that is also picking up speed at the moment. This is also something that we are looking into very much and we've also experienced our customers asking for something like that. Do you have this life cycle analysis for your equipment and everything? And we're building it up. But of course, when you look at all the equipment that is out there in the, in the field already for a while, of course it hasn't been done for that kind of equipment. So this is also something that will only make its way into the industry coming in with newer equipment with more technological sophistication and with the understanding of sustainability. That we have these days.

So I've just just been tapping away on my calculator and I'm sure I've got this wrong, but I'm getting to 54,000,000 tonnes of waste coming out from the filtration process. If you're right at 2 billion hectolitres. Which is 200 billion litres of beer, right? And you said it produces about 300 grams of waste per bad bad processors produced about 300 litres of waste at 90 Percent I get. About 50 million tonnes of waste globally does that seem? Am I wrong?

I suspect everyone just seems like a big a lot of a lot of numbers, a lot of notes. I mean, just the millions of hectolitres is like, yeah, ludicrous amounts of beer. So one question I've got is, is how? How much have the big breweries been challenged by the rise of sort of craft beers and microbreweries? I mean, the, the the sector has seen an an unprecedented change over the last 10 years. Have they been driving change or have they been sort of? Encouraging conservatism.

That's a good way of putting it. I mean you, you obviously you also followed the the the craft beer trend, right and that promoted very conventional ways of producing most typically that's actually something that was very much put in the forefront of some of the strategies. So this together with craft Brewers, typically producing smaller batches and many different varieties, makes it very often difficult to be as efficient.

As a big one for a small balloon. So the big Brewers are typically more efficient when you look at the numbers of what they really consume and what their specific consumptions are like when we speak about the water per water, water per beer consumption.So I don't think that the big ones are being driven by the small ones. When it becomes to when it comes to being more sustainable. Here the big ones I really think are on the forefront of that because they can be more efficient. It's easier for a bigger one to invest into more modern production equipment and then having the benefits paying back over time. And it's also that the big ones are addressed of course by legislation much more than the small ones.

But it's very much also the other way around. As we've said before, if there is beer out there that can be produced sustainably, then also the other ones are going to hop on that train. And of course the craft Brewers are doing their best to be sustainable as well. There are many craft Brewers out there that have their programs in terms of being CO2 neutral.

There is a big one even out there that has a CO2. Negative burn out. There and things like that. So I wouldn't say one drives the other, but the whole brewing industry moves towards more sustainability. And if you allow me, coming back to what I'm trying to bring into. The market, those Technologies are a puzzle piece in that change, right? Being able to Reduce the CO2 footprint of filtration by 40% is a puzzle Piece that you want to have in the chain if you want to. Be more sustainable in in total.

So that's very interesting. I I sort of I take a point, there was a moment where my heart was sinking, where you were effectively saying I need to go to bigger breweries and and stop my sort of slightly sort of love of small craft breweries. But you pulled it round right at the end by saying. Maybe there are some out there I could drink. What about alcohol? Free beer does that. Is that better or worse than the environment?

I can see where that question is coming from, because alcohol free beer is, of course one of the major trends in brewing these days, and almost. Every brewery produces 1. Alcohol free beer is much more diverse than the traditional alcohol containing Beer there are.

Technologies to produce alcohol free beer that vary greatly, so I don't think that you can generally say it's better or worse in terms of sustainability, but it again will come very much down to the technologies that are being used to produce it. The batch sizes play an important role when it comes to specific consumptions. The one thing. That I can say is that of course, alcohol free beer has its own very specific challenges of being produced, like for example, when we mentioned pasteurization before, alcohol, free beer is of course more. Susceptible to microbiological spoilage, so you have to pay more attention to that kind of the quality of the beer. And here again also modern production equipment offers a lot of advantage. And Brewers are very wise if they pick carefully what kind of technology they want. To use for that production. Because very much as you're saying you, you cannot have alcohol free beer being much less sustainable. So you also have to be very much looking out to what kind of technology you want to use to produce. And then I'm as as I'm saying, to make a summary of that very long answer, I don't think you can say it's more or less sustainable, but Brewers have to pay very close attention to the kind of technology that they're using by example again.If you have an alcohol free beer and you heat pasteurize it, you need much more heat to pasteurize it. So that opens a window that we love to speak about when it. Comes to maybe. Using final filtration to reduce microbiological risk as compared to traditional pasteurization.

So that's a that's a relief. I I don't have to feel that I need to drink alcohol. Free beer from a sustainability perspective necessarily. Thanks. Doctor Roland, that's really helped.

Finally, we're coming up to Christmas and we I don't know about people on this, but I do buy beer for the family. We get, you know, you have all the family coming over. In the past. I've always bought Toast, Dale, because I'm, you know, I trust and know the Toast Ale brand.

But are there any other brands that? You can talk about that you think, actually, they're really best in class at what it is that they do.

That is a question where I have to ask your permission not to answer it directly, because obviously I very. I cannot.

Here and I cannot advertise anything here. But I can say so much. I I think I said that all the time that many Brewers pay attention to being more sustainable. The big ones, having their strategies and so and so that's something where I always say they wouldn't be the big ones if they made bad beer. That's number one. The other thing that a Brewer always will answer you is stick to the regional beers. If not, if you, if you don't want to go to the very big brands, they have everything in their process under control, but a regional beer will always have a short transportation chain. It will most probably have regional crops that they are using and everything, and it's most typically the most fresh beer that you can. We have which also helps a lot and freshness is a very important quality for beer, which we also try to support with our technology.

Read it. I love it. Buy local.

It's such an amazing brewery that it's such a they still they, they cool the beer off in this tower and it's still still don't to this day.

Local beer is great Isn't it?

They've stopped doing it because of birds getting into it, but they still deliver using horses in the. They still deliver to the pub using horses.

It's brilliant. I love that.

Anyway, Dr Roland, that was so kind of he really interesting. Lots to to think about there and to certainly think about next time you're buying a pint. That's it for this episode of Sustainability Solve the Sustainability Business podcast.