Latest / The Operations Podcast with Fexingo: Process, People, and Profit in Modern Business / How a Brewery Cut Water Use by 40 Percent with Operations
Transcript
- Lucas: So Stone Brewing — one of the bigger craft players out of California — they've cut water use at their Escondido facility by 40 percent over the past three years. Went from about 7 barrels of water for every barrel of beer down to 4.2. Luna: That's a huge drop. And I know for context, the industry average is still around 7 to 1, sometimes worse for smaller operations. Lucas: Right. And what's interesting is how they did it — because it wasn't one big capital project. It was a series of operational tweaks stacked together. Dry hopping changes, closed-loop cleaning, real-time flow data. Luna: Let's start with dry hopping. Because that's the one that sounds the most surprising — that a recipe change could save water. Lucas: Yeah, it's counterintuitive. The way most breweries dry hop — adding hops after fermentation — they use what's called a hop cannon or a hop torpedo. That equipment requires a lot of water to flush the hops through and clean afterward. Stone switched to what's effectively a floating hop basket — a stainless mesh container suspended in the tank. No water needed to introduce the hops, and cleaning is just pulling the basket out. Luna: So the water savings there are basically the elimination of all those flushing cycles. How many barrels per batch are we talking? Lucas: About 15 to 20 barrels per batch of 200-barrel fermenter. Not enormous in isolation, but when you're running multiple batches a day, it adds up. Combined with some yeast management changes, that alone accounted for about 10 percent of the total reduction. Luna: Okay, so the other 30 percent — that's from the cleaning side? Lucas: Exactly. The big one was clean-in-place — CIP — optimization. Breweries typically run a standard cleaning cycle: caustic rinse, acid rinse, sanitizer, final rinse. But those cycles are often over-engineered. Stone installed conductivity sensors and flow meters on every tank. So instead of running the caustic for a set 20 minutes, they run it until the return conductivity reads clean — which might be 12 minutes. Luna: So it's real-time monitoring versus a fixed timer. That makes sense — the same logic as a dishwasher with a soil sensor. Lucas: Exactly. And they did the same with the final rinse. Instead of a fixed volume, they rinse until the conductivity drops below a threshold, then stop immediately. That cut rinse water by about 35 percent per cycle. Luna: And then the closed-loop piece — is that recovering and reusing cleaning solutions? Lucas: Partly. They installed a system that captures the final rinse from one tank and holds it in a buffer tank, then uses that water as the initial rinse for the next tank. It's not potable—it's recycled rinse water—but it's perfectly fine for the first flush. That saved another chunk. Luna: I've heard of breweries doing that with their hot liquor — the hot water used for mashing — but not with CIP rinse. Lucas: It's still relatively rare. Most breweries treat each CIP cycle as an independent event. But if you sequence your tank cleaning, you can reuse about 20 percent of your rinse water without any contamination risk. Stone sequenced their tank cleaning schedule so that the same style of beer — say, IPA — is cleaned consecutively, minimizing flavor carryover concerns. Luna: That's clever scheduling. So it's not just equipment, it's the order of operations. Lucas: Right. And one more thing — they installed a counterflow heat exchanger on the wort chiller. Instead of using single-pass cold water to cool the wort, the exchanger uses glycol on the secondary loop, so the water that used to go down the drain now goes back into the hot liquor tank. That saved about 5 percent. Luna: So between the dry hopping, the CIP optimization, the rinse recovery, and the heat exchanger, they're at 40 percent. What was the total investment? Lucas: Stone said about three hundred thousand dollars across all the projects — sensors, the hop baskets, the heat exchanger, the buffer tank and piping. Payback period was under 18 months, mostly from water and sewer savings. California water prices have gone up a lot, especially for industrial users in San Diego County. Luna: And I assume they're also saving on effluent treatment costs, because less water out means less sewer charge. Lucas: Yeah, that's a big factor. Sewer rates are often based on volume, not just content. So cutting 40 percent of your water output cuts your sewer bill by a similar percentage. Luna: Honestly, if a listener found this episode helpful — maybe it nudged them to look at their own process water — the show stays ad-free because of listener support at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's that simple. Lucas: Yeah, and we keep it that way. If the episode was worth a coffee to you, that's the link. But back to the brewery — one question I get is whether a small brewery can replicate this. Luna: That's what I was thinking. Stone is a big operation — they produce over 300,000 barrels a year. A 10-barrel nanobrewery probably can't justify three hundred grand in water-saving gear. Lucas: Right. But the principles scale down. The dry hopping basket costs about five hundred dollars. The conductivity sensors are maybe a thousand each. A small brewery could do the hop basket and the sensor-based CIP for under ten thousand dollars and probably still cut water by 20 to 25 percent. Luna: And the payback might be longer, but water is only going to get more expensive. Especially in the West. Lucas: Exactly. That's the bigger picture. Water scarcity is already reshaping where breweries locate. We've seen Sierra Nevada expand in North Carolina, not California. New Belgium moved some production there too. Operational water efficiency isn't just a cost play — it's a license to operate in certain regions. Luna: So what's the one takeaway you'd want an operations person to remember from this episode? Lucas: That you don't need a single breakthrough technology. You need to measure, then sequence, then reuse. Stone didn't invent anything new — they just applied sensors and scheduling to existing processes. The 40 percent came from ten small wins, not one big bet. Luna: And the beer still tastes the same. I checked. Lucas: That's the real test. If quality had slipped, none of this would matter. But they maintained their scores while cutting water by nearly half. That's the kind of operations story worth paying attention to.