Ep 32 - How To Get Industry Leading Water Efficiency - Felix James of Small Beer

In this episode of The Modern Brewer Podcast, we sit down with Felix James, the mastermind behind Small Beer’s world-class water efficiency.  Discover how they’ve redefined brewery operations with radical concepts like the Dry Floor Policy - NO floor drains, NO hoses, just innovative water-saving techniques that brewers globally are taking note of.

Felix breaks down their approach to minimizing water use, from rethinking wort cooling to using hot water sanitizing over chemicals. Whether it’s cutting costs, saving resources, or pushing boundaries, this episode is packed with practical insights every brewer should know.

Key Topics:

• How Small Beer achieves water efficiency without floor drains
• The game-changing Dry Floor Policy 
• Managing water and carbon footprints in brewing
• Saving water in packaging and the hop industry

Chapters:

01:48 - Water scarcity in the UK
19:44 - Dry Floor Policy
24:40 - Hot water sanitizing vs chemicals
33:16 - Water accountancy
49:57 - CAPEX costs for water savings

Sponsor: Thanks to Brew Resourceful for supporting this episode! Check out their free benchmarking tool to optimise your brewery’s sustainability.

🔗 Felix's LinkedIn
🔗 Small Beer
🔗 Brew Resourceful

Tune in now for innovative ways to transform your brewery’s water efficiency! 

Transcript

0:12

Hello everyone and welcome to yet another episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast with me, your host, Chris Lewington. As most listeners will know, I have a company called Brew Resourceful. One of the many things Brew Resourceful does is collect and benchmark breweries key operational sustainability metrics such as brewhouse efficiency, Water intensity, energy intensity, and purchased CO2 intensity. With nearly 90 breweries now submitted data, I've been privy to a wide range of success stories within sustainability in craft breweries. And today I have with me one of the biggest success stories. And the reason I love this case study so much is that this industry best result has been achieved with a passion to do better for the planet and with almost no capex. I'm of course talking about today's brewery Spotlight Small Beer. When small beer first submitted their results for benchmarking, I had to actually respond with my Are you Sure? Message? Simply because their water intensity of 2.2 liters to make one liter of packaged beer was half of the best result I had seen at that time. So when Felix explained to me how they had achieved it. I quickly entered the data and congratulated them on being an industry leader. I want to take a moment to talk about water. Water, when compared to other utilities like electricity, gas, CO2, are considered Insignificant cost streams and often sidelined in favor of electricity and gas reduction projects. But what most don't consider is that of all those four I just mentioned, water is quickly becoming the most scarce resource of them all. By 2050. Water demand here in the UK is set to increase by 40%. Couple this with climate change set to reduce rainfall in the UK in the summer by 50 percent in that same timeframe, we are heading towards intense periods of drought and water scarcity. In the Southeast by 2050, there will be an estimated 1 billion liters of water. Of water deficit every single day. And I often see these types of scary statistics, but I always have faith that humans will prevail. We will find the solution. But what's really scary to me is that the privatized water companies show absolutely no interest in solving these UK. Since 1991, when they were privatized, water companies in the UK have paid dividends over double. The value of what they've invested in our waterways was water. It certainly still comes out the taps. The system is a total mess behind the scenes. And to me, when greed rules My faith in humans prevailing in these situations starts to crumble. So for me, water is our most scarce resource, and one I want all brewers to actively reduce. Not because you want to, But because you need to. For those who don't know Small Beer, they are a South London brewery who champion mid strength brewing and sustainability since day one. In this episode, we're going to talk about their world class water intensity, how they got there, their biggest sustainability wins, and key lessons learned from one of the industry's biggest sustainability champions. But before we jump into the episode, in lieu of a sponsor, I just wanted to plug the benchmarking tool I made for breweries to compare their operational sustainability. Against the rest of the craft brewing world. All you need to do is go onto my website, www. brewresourceful. com and click on the benchmarking tool. From there, you can enter your monthly usage data and I will create the intensities and benchmark them against the current industry standard and the four breweries of a similar size. The data is entirely anonymous, so other than Small Beer's water intensity metric that I've just mentioned, no one knows who each other are. All of this is entirely free. I do this because I genuinely care, not because I want to make a profit from it. Every submission to this data set further validates and improves it. And I use this data set to help educate and inspire breweries to better their sustainability. So please, Help the cause and and submit your brewery's data for free. And do your part to help support sustainability in the industry. On that note, I will also be doing a talk on water usage in small breweries, not small beer using the very data set I've just mentioned at an IBD event on Thursday, the 17th of October. at Curious Brewery in Ashford. It's totally free to attend and you will learn about water conservation in small breweries, all the way up to the world's largest. I am just one of three speakers at this event. And of course, as always, these are great networking opportunities. especially because there's going to be a lot of. Attendance from bigger breweries. I always found some of the most valuable networking is when we stepped out of the craft circle. and got to engage with what brewers are doing and the challenges they face in the largest brewers in the country. And of course, a couple of beers always helps these events along. So let's get ready to learn from one of the UK's sustainability leaders. Welcome to the show, Felix James. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. It's, it's fantastic to be here. Yeah, really excited, man. we know each other away from the podcast as well. So I'm actually really excited to have you on the podcast. it's been something we've been trying to do for a bit of time, eh? do you know what, for the listeners who don't know who you are? If you could just give a little bit of background about yourself and SmallBeer, of course, as a Absolutely. So, I am, I'm a brewer. I got into brewing really through a love of biology and food. so I came out with a biology degree, really wanted to get into brewing and she ended up working for, for, well, At the time, what was AB, Sir Anheuser Busch, brewing, Budweiser in Mortlake. and then I've had a brewing career now. I've been brewing for coming up to 20 years next year. So, it's been a little while now, both as a home brewer. And then also, as a, as a vacation, and got into, as a, as a career, I guess you could call it now slowly. so through, yeah, Budweiser, then moved to Fuller's, and I was at Fuller's for six odd years. And then actually I met my business partner, working at Sipsmith Gin Distillery. So I took a short stint out of brewing, to go and I was the head of operations there. my business partner there was the head of sales and we just have this great idea to set up a brewery, which we can talk more about, but effectively we set up Small Beer Brewery, back in 2017. So seven years on now and, Yeah, we're, we're brewing up, brewing up a storm. That's awesome. What roles did you have at Fuller's? I think was it Fuller's Asahi at this time or Fuller's No, this is Fuller's OG. Good old family business. Wonderful traditional family brewer. so I was actually in, I actually never had an official brewing job there. I was, so I started out in quality systems. Then I covered everything from sort of quality as a whole. So lab work, micro, you know, physical samples, all that sort of stuff. You, you'll be very familiar with all this from your bigger brewing days. and then I got into production pretty quickly. so I started out in production as a packaging projects team leader, and then kind of got into, then I ran the bottling line. So we had a team of. wonderful grumpy old men running the bottling line there. and then, then I was the team leader on the cask and kegging lines and then kind of took a more sort of, you know, global, sort of packaging, team leader role. and then I was actually just breaking into the, so I I'd spent the entire time. They're really spending a lot of time brewing. Because my kind of my, my mentor there was Derek Prentice, who was at the time, the brewery manager. and we used to, so I, I probably spent more time in the brew house than a lot of brewers there. because I guess when you work in a bigger brewery, It's very easy to end up being one cog in this massive. So you're either in work production or you're in, filtration or you're in yeast management, or it can be, you can be doing one tiny part of the process. And unless you kind of stay for long enough to really see every part of the process, it's quite hard to get a holistic view of the brewery. whereas I was spending a lot of my time officially doing quality or packaging roles, but actually, doing quite a bit of packaging. stuff in the brew house and really got a really nice kind of holistic view of that I was also on the tasting panel, you know There are lots of bits that you kind of add on to your job when you're when you're in a role like that. and I was on a a trade quality panel. So I used to go around pubs tasting fullers beers and determining all the quality faults and all that sort of stuff. So that was that was great. such a good foundation for You Brewing. I always think that starting with bigger breweries and working your way down to smaller is the way to go. Cause you can learn from the big boys and then use that knowledge as you work down. going the other way, you always end up seeming like, uh, like a bit of a home brewer amongst the big boys, which I guess can be can be interesting as I think I did, I did, it in reverse. If I think about like smaller, smaller, smaller. Larger, larger, and then well. Hmm. And I always said to the people in my team, I was like, this is, you know, starting larger and going smaller is so Yeah. Yeah. your skillset becomes a bit more desirable as well. no, I think some big brewers probably look at. craft brewers and think, you know, that's just not what we, we do. And yeah, I think all small brewers would look at a big brewer, brewer coming in and be like, Oh yeah, they're going to teach us so much. So it's just totally. Equally. I think there are a lot of people that work in big breweries who have no idea how to make beer. As in, they are just fulfilling their function. And they don't necessarily get the full picture. So actually, you know, for those people who do work in bigger breweries and have never brewed beer themselves before, I would say like, you've got to get like, do some home brewing at any level that you don't have to have all the kit, you know, you can brew a six pack on your stove at home using. A couple of saucepans and a sieve do that because it really does. You know, you, you, I was very hungry for knowledge when I started brewing. And so as a homebrewer, you're asking a million questions and you're. Searching every blog on the internet to try and find out how to do these things. And then there's a very different set of questions that you get when you're in professional brewing, which, you know, tends to be more around, you know, shelf life and stability rather than, you know, Flavor and function, you know, there are very different questions that you end up asking. But there you go. Yeah. And, and learning how process dictates flavors is a big part of craft brewing that you, you definitely would not see as much of in a big brewery. So yeah, I guess the, if you want to be the, it's the complete package of seeing it all, isn't it? You know, or working in A craft brew that's got big production and it's, you kind of like a bit of this and a bit of that. Yeah, it's really fascinating. I always think i'm slightly envious of people who worked in fullers But in the og days it just seems like you know of all the people I I speak to about it All the legends that have come in the brewing industry that have come from it. It sounds like a real You know historical moment in beer in in the uk and beyond. So yeah, It was magical. a bit more about it because I just love it. Yeah. And you're right. I mean, the, the, you know, Fuller's fingers have kind of, have, have spread far and wide. It seems like You know, I now know virtually, well, I mean, I, I certainly know someone at every brewery because they all went, they all started off in at Fuller's. So there are lots of, yeah, it's good, good for industry contacts. Yeah, absolutely So look felix, let's talk about this world class Water usage, water intensity, I should say. So from the data that you submitted to, to my benchmarking report, it was 2. 2 liters for a liter of beer. Now that at the time was half of the best result that I'd had. So it was a huge, it was a huge thing to see. and a bit more investigation and more chatting and getting to know you, I could see how incredible it was. Yeah, it was. And the amount of effort that you've put in and the philosophy that you had to get that low. for the listeners here or, and even the viewers on YouTube now, could you break down sort of the steps? In the brewing process where you saved water the most and, what critical parts would you say for anyone listening they should look at for water Absolutely. So, I think when we first set out, you know, we didn't set out to be a sustainable brewery. We didn't set out to be, or a sustainable beer, let's say we didn't set out to, you know, be sort of groundbreaking in any sense. the world of the word we what we really had was this this big idea on making mid strength beer and we can talk about that later on but what I couldn't believe actually coming from so amalgamating that sort of big brewery knowledge and then the and then the home brewing was how it was that people actually were managing to waste as much water as they did, in breweries. and I guess actually when you look at, when you look at the, the, opposite sides of the picture. So if you look at home brew and how much water they waste, I was wasting virtually no water in home brewing. the, on the other side, if you look at bigger brewers, and that, and yeah, it depends on technique, I guess. It depends on which methods you're using. if you look at big brewers, they're also relatively water efficient, but there does seem to be a bit of an issue in the middle where you can be losing a lot of water during the process, particularly in sort of small to medium sized breweries. and so really, I designed the brewing kit specifically to brew small beer, but also to save water. and I based it on a lot of the things that I'd learned both from those bigger breweries and then also from my home brewing practices. and I, you know, I thought critically about, well, If I'm not wasting this water at a home brewing level, what is it that is holding me back when I'm designing a brewery? And one of those things actually was, was removing solids. So one of the things that we designed in was, there's a lot of emphasis on cleaning in place in breweries, CIP. and what that means is that you are pumping water through a spray bowl In order to clean the insides of the vessel, you don't get that liberty when you're home brewing, unless you've got a really fancy kit. and so a lot of your cleaning involves, I mean, I used to have a sponge and a bucket of water and I'd sponge out, you know, my brewing vessels and, and so I, a lot of the thinking was, well, how can we use those same sorts of techniques? So for instance, we don't have. A single hose as in a water hose in the brewery The only hoses that we have in the brewery are transfer hoses. So we use flexible hoses to move wort from the brewery to our fermentation vessels. But we don't have a single spray hose anywhere in the brewery, as in for, for washing things down with water. one of the, so one of the places that you would typically use a hose in a small to medium sized brewery, is in the mash tub. and you would. Wash down in order to remove solids from your mash tun. we instead use physical so we we have a squeegee on the bottom of our rake Which is actually really useful, for getting every little last bit of spent grain out of the mash tun we then just physically climb into the mash tun and we use vacuum So we use basically industrial powered vacuum cleaners instead of water, to remove solids rather than to wash solids down to drain. And that is, A, it's more water efficient, B, it's way more effective. Like if you've got wet spent grain in a mash tun, trying to spray it into one, typically you'll get breweries will lift one of the plates. And then try and wash all those bits of grain down into that one hole where the plate is, is removed. That's an extremely difficult exercise. It takes a lot of time and the cone shape of a spray of a water jet coming out of a hose. Is not your ideal tool for trying to move things into one location whereas if you're using a vacuum as soon as you point the vacuum at something it's gone, right? You don't have to worry about moving it from this place to that place to that place to then get into the hole which is I guess You, You, get so used to doing these things as brewers, you know, using a, a jet gun that you forget actually what you are really trying to do is just remove that little bit of grain. so, and you know, we have a bit of a complicated rake that's got lots of little holes in it and lots of little, you know, nooks and crannies. And just getting in there with a, with a vacuum cleaner, with a wet dry vac effectively, is so simple because it sucks everything outta these little holes and you're not trying to. Blast it from certain angles with the, with, with water. so sorry, that was an extremely long way of saying, solids removal is one key place. we don't, for instance, we also don't have floor drains in the brewery. so we have, what we ended up calling, I thought it was a bit nuts to begin with, but it seems to have stuck is the idea of a dry floor policy. so again, we're not using spray guns, you know, typically in a brewery you walk in and a brewer is in all wet weather gear, you know, with wellies, squeegee in one hand, hose in the other, and it's all about water. It's like, how much water can you splash around this place? Because that's cleaning, right? It's all about making things wet. Well, I learned a great trick and a great bit of insight from, from a bartender actually, during my gin years at Sipsmith, which is that something isn't clean if it's wet in order to clean something, you've got to wet it, remove the, the, the dirt, rinse it, you know, get it wet and then dry it. And when it's dry, it's clean, because microbes live in nice, warm, damp environments, right? Breweries are warm, wet environments, and you've also got lots of malt dust in the air, you've got, so a nice sugar source, you've got, you know, bricks, and you've got all this wonderful porous material for things to, to live in. tile grout and all this sort of stuff. Mm hmm. And so what we do here at the brewery is we just keep everything as dry as we possibly can all the time, which A is more hygienic and B saves a lot of water. So we do have a malt store, but instead of having the malt store up on a mezzanine, where you might typically see it in a brewery as is on the ground level, we then move the malt up to the mash tun through a, through an auger. and we keep the malt store as a nice dry, dusty environment. and then we sweep it, so we don't wash anything down, which is fairly typical. but we don't then allow any mulch dust out of that room. In the same sense, you know, we also don't allow any, any liquid. So any, say you've got spent yeast, you know, hop trub, in a lot of breweries, they will let that down onto the floor and then wash it into a drain. so we don't allow anything onto the drain. And so this is where we came up with this concept of a dry floor policy. So the dry floor policy says, Yeah, no water goes on the floor unless you're specifically cleaning the floor. for which we have a really nice little machine. You have a floor scrubber, and it puts water down onto the floor. it splits the water into ions first. So you get this, it's called Eco H2O. It's a nice, nice floor scrubber that basically. splits the water, puts the water down as, as ions so that you're not using lots of harsh chemicals and then sucks it back up again. We use for the entire square, so we have, 5, 000 square foot here, so about 500 square meters in the brewery. And we, we can wash the entire floor here. with one, load is 40 liters, but we barely use that it's about 20 or 30 liters to wash the entire floor. Typically in a brewery, you'd be washing just the brew house down and you'd use hundreds, if not thousands of liters. I mean, we have, this, the insight really came from my fuller's days, whereas I was fortunate enough to be on the green team there and our biggest So our biggest wastage of water, so not the consumption of water, the brew house was using a fair bit of water as you can imagine, but our biggest water wastage was from handheld hoses. so I determined, To just cut that out of the process so we just we don't wash anything down with hoses If you want to do some cleaning, you know cleaning pipe work in the brewery for instance It's a jug or if you know or a bucket Uh with a with a cloth and you can go around and you can do it all like that way No, there are no chemicals, for external cleaning. we don't, you know, as a lot of breweries will be familiar with using chlorine caustic foams, for, you know, for trying to get sort of that, that hard seated grime, off your floors and off your vessels and things. There shouldn't be any grime. If everything stays nice and dry, then you're not going to get microbes growing and forming biofilms. And biofilms are tough to get rid of, right? You've got a lot of protein in there. You've got a lot of microbes. they then also, a nice, you know, biofilm protects more biological action happening underneath that biofilm. So you've, you then have to physically break a biofilm. You then have to. kill anything that's left underneath the biofilm. It's, you're causing more trouble by making everything wet. So, yeah, that, that's one, so, that's one of the things is cleaning, right? cleaning goes a little bit beyond that because then you've got, so once you've cleaned everything down, you then need to sanitize it. So, a lot of water is used in brewing is for, It's for sanitizing kit, and we don't use chemical sanitizers for cleaning the insides of vessels. so typically in, in a microbrewery environment, microbrewers are very familiar with using peracetic acid. we do use spray bottles of peracetic acid, but that's the only place that we use it. It's safe for, for cleaning. effectively sanitizing fittings before they go together. and that means that, when we're, when we're cleaning the inside of vessels, we clean them. So we do use caustic as you would do in, in other breweries. So, so effectively is your detergent for removing solids. but once that caustic, once we've rinsed the caustic off, we then don't use a parasitic acid sanitizer. We use, hot liquor sterilization. So hot liquor sterilization is one of these things that has been used quite a bit by breweries. In large breweries, they're typically using, they use chemical sanitization for the insides of vessels because the vessels are so big that heating them up, is incredibly inefficient. and then they would use hot liquor sterilization for mains. So for, for, for pipe work, we are small enough. so our, our fermentation vessels, a hundred hectoliters. 10, 000 liters each. We're small enough that actually hot liquor sterilization does make sense for us still. but you get breweries that are much smaller than us that already rely on chemical sterilization, which is unnecessary for their scale. Now it depends how you're looking at this, right? This is the difficult thing about water, is that water is A, incredibly cheap, However, Energy. So heat energy is expensive for a brewer, right? We need a fair amount of energy in breweries and the thought of heating up water to then use as your. sanitization step for brewers is, well, that's going to cost a lot. Actually, if you look at the way that we use energy in our brewery, so we start the day off with nice hot water from the day before from cooling. we are, we then have to get that water up from, sort of 60 odd degrees to, we actually start our mash quite high because of what we do. So we, we start with a high mash temperature. so we've got a plentiful supplier of water at 80 plus degrees C. Now that water that we're about to use for mashing in, We effectively run around the, both the work line and then also the, the, the vessel that we're about to fill with work, in order to sanitize it. Now, obviously there's, there's a fair amount of heat loss through that system. So we're, you know, we're then having to heat that water again, before we can use it. But what we found is that is that effectively jumping up a little bit higher than our. strike temperature running around the system, A kills bugs quicker. So rather than just trying to maintain say 80, 85 degrees of our hot liquor, if you go up to 90, you can get a very quick hot liquor sterilization done. And by the time you've lost that energy, you've then got your liquor down to your strike temperature. So number one, that, you know, it does mean that we end up using a little bit more energy than other brewers. If you look at the carbon emissions associated with water, they tend to be relatively low in comparison to energy as well. but if you take a full holistic view and you say, I want to use less water. I want to minimize the amount of energy loss. But also think about the energy that is going into producing the chemicals that you're using And the water that you would then get rid of if if you were using a sanitizer chemical sanitizer You end up losing a lot of chemical and a lot of energy And a lot of water. Sorry, so We are saving that water. We are using a bit of energy, but not as much energy as we would As would be used to Global thinking here, in a cleaning that water and be creating those chemicals. our parasitic use is next to nothing. I mean, we have one drum of parasitic that basically lasts us like the year because it's only being used for spray bottles. that's so counterintuitive to so Yeah. I feel like, in the last however many minutes, I feel like I've just so many of my narratives have been challenged. Yeah. And look, this is what it's about. Yeah. That this is the thing, is that brewing is all about using this kind of perceived wisdom or. You know, what you've learned from other brewers. It's all, you know, we talk a lot to other brewers. And the beauty of the brewing industry is that we're all open. And we, and we like to tell each other what we do. But if you're only relying on what everybody else does, you can miss some steps. And it's, it's right to challenge yourself and go back to these things and say, hold on a second, what is actually more efficient and what is better? And at every step, we try to really focus on things that are. Feature proof. Scalable and that aren't just relying on cost as a factor. So We you know water is cheap, right? And this is the problem is this is why all brewers rely on water is that It costs virtually nothing in comparison to energy chemicals that are all this stuff So we really really try and focus on what's right rather than what's cheap and that is And that does mean that it ends up costing us more to produce but But my thinking was well if we settle this up in the first place and we figure out the real cost Of brewing that is the price which we will offer our beer out to to consumers and to the trade and when they ask why You know, we're not able to compete with with other breweries that might be using different practices We can then be fully open and honest with a very very open pricing strategy very very open Cost of production, and some of our costs are going to be higher. Yeah. Yeah, it's absolutely right. So Felix, I think if I was listening to this for the first time, I think there would always going to be a slight challenge or maybe a pushback. You know, I, whenever you challenge anyone's narrative, there's naturally a bit of a Yeah. and I think some people would be, how can you keep a brewery clean, as you said, without using water, how can you clean the inside of a mashtone without a hose? How do your brewery, how can your brewery Not what you must have, some micro problems or hygiene issues. But to go back, as I said, your beers are not high ABV, you know, if any, there's any one brewery outside of a non out, if there's any one brewery that should be really concerned about hygiene, it would be someone who's brewing 2 Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. a fascinating combination and actually really solidifies this, because if you were doing 5%, 5. 5 percent beers, I think then naturally it would be like, that brewery is not clean. But actually it's not possible to make 2 percent beer in an unhygienic environment. You're absolutely right and yeah, there always was a concern but at the same time if we can make this work at two percent Then everybody can do it. You know, if, if we were specializing in, in seven, eight, 9 percent beers, and I was saying, Oh yeah, you can get away without cleaning your mashtab, then, then, you know, the, I'd be like, Oh God, what is this podcast? Oh proof is absolutely in the fact that we did. I mean, you've tasted our beers. I hope you can agree that. We don't have any micro issues. and that's not to say we don't use water. We do use water and we do rinse our mash tun. So we're not, you know, we're not entirely relying on, on water for removing solid, you know, well, we remove solids before we clean the mash tun. That's the key thing is that when we do rinse the mash tun, we're using a very, very small amount of water to do that. and effectively what, what helps us in this process is that we run a water And I would say that every brewery should be running a water audit in the same way that they should be Auditing all of their usage. I mean You would say that I was completely bonkers if I didn't know the stock you know the stock value of my hops or my malted barley If I couldn't tell you How I suddenly lost A ton of hops while I was making a beer. You'd say, hold on a second, how can you run a brewery when you've just lost a ton of hops and you don't know where they've gone? Same thing, right? Water, energy, you should know where you're using each bit of your water and energy in the same way that you know At which point in the process you lost your hops, right? So we run a water audit which basically means when we start the day We take a a reading from our water meter and we then take another reading at the end of the day and we calculate how much water we've used during that brew. our total, consumption that we use for our total brewery ratios isn't just the water that we use for brewing. It also includes the water that we use for flushing toilets and, you know, and, and for rinsing drip trays in the tap room, you know, that sort of thing. But the, but we, We take those two readings so that we can work out how much water we've used. We then also look at, so it's a little bit like, it's a bit like accounting. We have our actuals. We also have our budget. So we have a water budget where we say, Okay, for rinsing down the mash tun, we know that we should be using 50 liters. Now we, unfortunately, we don't have flow meters absolutely everywhere around the kit. It would be wonderful if we did but what we do have is we know that and we have a completely manual system So we're not using automated valves for doing two second bursts. But what we do is we we effectively act like we are using an automated system with two second bursts where the procedure for cleaning the mash tun Is open this valve for two seconds close it Open the valve for two seconds, close it. And so what we know is that at the flow rate that we're running at and the, you know, given the diameter of that pipe work, and, and the amount that we open that valve, we can calculate roughly what that is in terms of liters. We do have, you know, we have enough flow meters around the kit that we have a good understanding of, you know, some of the, Figures in our water audits are exact actuals. Other ones are, are assumptions, right? Now, based on assumptions, we, we fully understand that. What we can then do is at the end of the day, we can say, okay, well, we should have used X amount for, you know, strike liquor, sparge liquor, you know, liquoring back, rinsing the mash tun, rinsing the copper. you know, we've done this number of CIPs on these size vessels. We know that we shouldn't be using, you know, the same thing on the CIP when we're when we're rinsing down a vessel so we do a rinse on the vessel, but that again is done on number of seconds that you open up that valve, in again in bursts. Bursts are key, right? If you want to reduce water usage for rinsing things down or for cleaning things, quick short bursts, because then you're, you're not, you know, you're not ending up with any pooling in the bottom of the vessel. you also give that water some time just to rinse the walls of the vessel so that you're not just putting water on water. so you're getting good clean, rinse cycles, if you've got an automated kit, great. You should, you should, in theory, be able to do better than this, right? But for us, we effectively act as if we are Automating things and then Mm. and then I guess, you know doing simple things like checking the pH of your rinse liquor, you know When you're using it to then know I don't need to rinse this anymore. I'm happy, you know, let's move on so Yeah, so there's, you know, dry floor policy, cleaning, external cleaning, internal cleaning, keeping, yeah, keeping everything dry and clean rather than just wet all the time actually means that we then end up with less mold. So you'll be well aware of black mold growing up walls in breweries and then using chemicals to then try and remove that. we don't have any mold in the because we don't keep the place wet. so, you know, We're not then using water to tackle water effectively, which is the key there. And then the, I mean, one of the biggest places that we save water versus a lot of other breweries, on a small scale at least, is in our cooling. So we have, again, when I specced the kit, we put in two plate heat exchangers, one after the other. So we use, and you'll find this in bigger breweries, typically they use water for One heat exchanger so that you're collecting your brewing liquor for the next day's brew when you're cooling your work down. And then they'll use a second chiller as a trim chiller to get the exact temperature that they want in the, in the fermentation vessel. Now we do have that. second chiller. The second chiller then runs on, on a closed loop glycol cooling system. and so we are using for some of our cooling capacity, we're using electricity rather than water. Now that electrical energy is a hundred percent renewable as every brewery should be, you know, should be buying in a hundred percent renewable electricity now, if they're not. Speak to Chris. You, you know, you know, the best, the best way of doing that. you know, certainly if you, you know, if you're not generating your own electricity through solar panels and, and wind turbines, you should at least be buying a hundred percent renewable electricity. So we use, We do use more electricity, for cooling because we're using that second plate pack, for cooling but the point there is that again on the water audit We know exactly how much water we're going to use for that next day's brew So we know the strike liquor, the sparge liquor, you know, any other liquor that we need during production But we also know the exact amount of liquor that we need for rinsing down the mash tun and rinsing down the copper So we know exactly how much water we need to start that next day off with and that is one of the one of the real Determining factors is you've got to constrain yourself, right? If you start off with a nice full hot liquor tank at the start of the day You Your mentality is well, I can put as much liquor into this as I like Whereas if you only start off with exact amount that you know you need Then if you end up at the end of the day With no liquor and you're having to top up your hot liquor tank Damn, that's going to take time, energy. It's, it's counterproductive, right? So we only give ourselves that much, that amount of liquor, plus a little bit. It's like a little bit of a, you know, there's a tiny buffer at the end that we allow ourselves, but then we can gauge on that, you know, whether we've ended up with that buffer or not. and then, that really constrains you in the same way that the dry floor policy constrains you. If you don't have floor drains. You won't put water down the drain, right? We just don't have floor drains. If, so, the, the way that we get around the floor drains is that we have double valve connections on every hose. So if we're filling up a vessel with wort, hose, that flexible hose, will have two valves. So then when we break that union, instead of just allowing the hose to That was full of, you know, your push liquor, for instance, to just drain out onto the floor, because we can't allow anything to go on the floor. We have an egg cup full of water that's left in between those two valves. So we shut both valves and then we undo everything's tri clamp. So we undo the tri clamp and we end up with a tiny, tiny bit of water. And even that water we walk around, right? So, so it's, it's all about retraining your thinking. You walk around with a drip tray and you take your drip tray with you so you don't get the floor wet. You put the drip tray under and you catch that little bit of water. and you realize that there is very very little water to waste in the brewery when you're thinking, along those lines. So the same thing is is constraining yourself so that when we're chilling our wort, we only catch the exact amount of hot liquor for the next day's brew as we need it. according to the water audit. and then any remaining cooling capacity has to then come from that second plate pack. So we know now, exactly how to run that second plate pack in order to get the first plate pack to generate the exact amount of hot liquor For the next day. So generally speaking what happens in breweries is that hot liquor produced from that first plate pack Will just go straight into the hot liquor tank It'll top up until it's full and then it'll run over into the drain and a lot of brewers don't even know they They're not aware of the fact that that hot liquor is running into the drain because because that that pipe You know the overflow pipe from the hot liquor tank goes straight into the drain So, how would you know how much has gone down the drain? You don't. What we do is we We, we don't have a hot liquor tank effectively. We don't have, so at the end, at the end of our, of, of, of, of sparging, we shouldn't have any liquor left in our hot liquor tank. we then only collect during, during the, you know, while, while we're using that, the, the heat exchanger, we only collect the exact amount of liquor. that we need, and that way our hot liquor tank effectively goes down to nothing every day and then, and then fills up again. so that's where, yeah, that's where you should end up, is just zero based, zero based budgeting. Water budgeting, this is. yeah, I mean, I think there's two sides to this. There is the attitude of yes, we can like, yes, we can really low water uses and we do not want to waste. And that's like an attitude, philosophical thing. But then on the other side, I feel like there's a real practical. You know, auditing your water, accounting for your water and budgeting. Your water is such a powerful tool that you would naturally, even if you necessarily didn't have that philosophical, I need or want to reduce my water when you start accounting for it, naturally, you will start to reduce it as that number may sometimes goes higher. And you're like, well, why did that go higher? And you start looking and you'll be like, oh, okay, well, that's why that was high. Well, let's not do that again. And then naturally by just recording, measuring, And, you know, almost internally benchmarking, you will naturally start to reduce as a Yeah. I think it's so interesting. I mean, of course, like. Just as I said, the narrative challenging is so good for me. I, how many times, and I can paint this perfect image because I've done it myself where you're brewing or you just finished today's brewing and you're cleaning up at the end of the day, nearly always a Friday when you're doing a big floor cleans, et cetera, and you've got someone, this used to be me stood there. My well is right up to my knees. Cause the floor was drowning in water with a spray hose that was shooting, you know, at least two liters a minute. being impressed about the amount of radius I could Yeah. without having to actually move a foot, Yeah. spraying everything down, being like, oh, that was a great session. I've absolutely nailed that. But what I didn't realize, you know, as I was using three, 400 liters of water to clean, what could have just been done with a squeegee. And I feel like for those who, I mean, a dry floor policy, right. It's, It's a big thing and it's a big mentality shift, especially if you have a team of brewers. I can imagine getting people on board to be quite challenging, but even just. I thought, like a, a policy of sweep or squeegee before you spray. So if there's a pool of yeast, squeegee it away before you spray it down the drain. That is way more actually time efficient Totally. and water efficient. And that's like your entrance into this. And then you can start to be like, why do we need to do this? And why should that, why is it Ask yourself, why is there yeast on the floor in the first place? Yeah. Why didn't you just use a bucket? question you should be So much easier to use a drip tray or a bucket. Instead of, but well, I dunno, I mean, it depends what your definition of easy is, I guess, you know, for, for a lot of people standing there with a hose is easy. So yeah, we, we realized that it's, it's about being conscious. It's just a, you know, it's about being a conscious consumer, right? It's the same as we, we kind of, we, we see elsewhere outside of brewing, but the, we weren't, you know, I remember one of the, the real kind of light bulb moments came to me when I was. And we were trying to figure out where our water was going. We couldn't account for it. And we had, so occasionally hoses would just be left running overnight. and finally we, you know, we figured out how, why, where, you know, through, through figuring out from various water meters around the place, where these things were happening. But even once we'd dimmed down the water usage from, from hoses, that then shone a big light on where, You know, we had a huge water consumption in the bottling hall because we were using a, a, we were using a vacuum pump, which was continuously water cooled with fresh water, really didn't need to be, because we actually had cooling towers that we would, that we could hook up. So there are lots of places, you know, if you're operating in a bigger brewery and you just think you're just thinking, how the hell do I start here? You know, just start, start somewhere. And it's amazing how much it unravels. From a smaller brewing perspective, we actually get loads of other benefits from the way that we operate. So I mentioned that we don't just have a hot liquor tank. We actually have two multi purpose heating vessels, call them coppers, call them kettles, call them hot liquor tanks, doesn't matter, but we use. We use them both for heating. So we actually heat our strike liquor and our sparge liquor separately, which means that we can, we can treat them differently as well. So if we want a slightly different pH in one, or we want, you know, a different amount, different, chloride to sulfate ratio, or we can adjust our, water additions, to meet the demands of our taste profile that we're looking for. separately. And then we know at the end of, you know, at the end of the strike, there's no risk of, putting too much strike liquor in, right? Because the pump runs dry and we go, oh, that's the end of the strike. There's, there's never, you don't even have to shut the valve because we know exactly how much liquor is in that, is in that vessel. Same on the, on the sparge. We can't over sparge. We literally, we're, we're running out at that point. So it's, it makes your job easier when you know exactly how much liquor is in every vessel and, and, and exactly what its use is, for, and you can, you, it's much easier to gauge, oh, I've got a hundred liters in that vessel than it is to say, well, I know I started out with You know, 80 hectoliters of hot liquor at the start of the day. And I've ended up with, you know, 30, but you know, where did that 50 go? Because it was also topping up during the day and it was very complicated. If you can just, you know, break these things down, make them super easy, then it, it makes the whole process easier for us. Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. You didn't actually have any, I say capital investments, of course the brew kit, but I mean, everyone has a brew kit, so I will largely ignore that one, but to get this low industry. This industry low water usage. Did you make any capital investments or spend much capex other than I guess on the floor cleaner, which is part of everyone's budget anyway. we know, I mean, it was baked into the design and like, not everybody is going to have the liberty of being able to design their own brewing kit, but you can certainly design your own process. I'll tell you what, designing in a dry floor policy is probably the cheapest thing that you'll ever do. In fact, it saved us all the cost of a digging up our floors and putting drains in, you know, we don't have, I mean, we don't have chem tile. We don't have any of that wonderful brewery, you know, stuff. We have a, we do have a polyurethane floor screen. it's completely flat. So our floor is, you know, We don't have sloping floors, and look, we're also not, you know, we're not, completely safe from problems. Occasionally, we have the same problems that everybody else, every other brewery has, right? We, as you know, cause you came to visit recently, We were talking about the fact that our brewery did once flood, when we, yeah, I mean, it's scary stuff, right? Brewery, we, we flooded the brewery once by, by opening up the wrong, the wrong tri clamp. A lot of brewers will be familiar with this story. Now, that was a messy day and it was really, really tough, to clean that up without having floor drains. But it was, it's horrible, but it teaches you not to do that again. That's one great point. and the second point was, you know, it's, it's, this is another thing is that beer wastage is very easy when you've got floor drains, right? Because you can just let a bit more out the bottom of your vessel, or you can, you're very, very focused on beer wasted wastage when you don't have drains to put that beer into. I'll tell you that. we, so off the back of that, we were very, very, I mean, We didn't like the idea of having beer spilling anyway, because, you know, not just the wastage, but there's also a big health health and safety concern when you've got beer on the floor and beer spraying, you know, directly at you out of out of an open valve. So it was a scary moment. Thankfully, on that occasion, we lost. 200 liters of beer, which is a lot of beer, but it's could have been a hell of a lot more. we, it was a big cleaning up operation. 200 liters of beer doesn't sound like a lot to your average brewer, you know, two hecks. but when it's on the floor, it looks like I thought we'd lost the entire vessel. I thought we'd lost 50 heck and it was actually two. the, but. What it meant was that we put it, we put systems in place for that not to happen again, very, very quickly. So we now have all of those triclamps that we don't use on a day to day basis have, like a reusable cable tie system around them. So that it's impossible for you to just open up that triclamp without thinking about it. and I think Chris, you had another great point. way of doing that, which was to use a, a nut on your tri clamp instead of the classic wing nut that you find on there, which. If you think of good ways of doing this stuff, then do it. And then critically with all these things, tell people about it. and I think this is probably the, the, the biggest learning for me is that when we started on that kind of sustainable brewing journey, we didn't think that we were any different to anybody else, right? we then found through people saying, Oh, but your water ratio is tiny. And, you know, you're doing all this stuff in a very conscious way. that was, that was news to us, right? We were kind of, Oh, well, that's good. You know, it's good to know that we as individuals, when we set up the business, we are, we're very, you know, environmentally conscious people. But we didn't think that we were in any way ahead of the game. but it's, the, the critical thing was once we've kind of figured out, oh, actually we've got something that other brewers don't have here, then the critical thing was, well, we've got to tell every other brewery what we're doing and how they can And how they can do it and we've had people calling up from, you know, as far as like New Zealand I had a chat from New Zealand get in touch saying what's this dry floor policy and how can I do it? we've had a lot of interest from the states from Brewers in America saying how you know How can we run a dry floor policy and how do you get your water usage so low? but the critical thing is I was very keen to tell everybody about it. If you turn up at a brewer's convention and say, I've got the best brewery in the world and look how slick my brewery is, you find a lot of brewers just turn off and they say, whatever, you know, this guy, like, okay, he's made the best brewery in the world. But he's full of himself and he has no idea, you know He doesn't know how hard it is to run a brewery a real brewery where we have stuff slopping all over the floor all the time and What i've found with that is that the best way of figuring out You know how to how to get more brewers on board is to say to other brewers What do you do and let them educate you and what I found is that Although we might be good at doing very, you know, certain things for us, water was a big thing when we started out, we've learned so much from finding out what other people do and then saying, well, by comparison, I do this and you might be saving some money, some time. You might be saving energy. You might be saving water and you can compare. And the tricky thing is that there is no one comparison between, you can't necessarily say. That across the board saving water is better than saving energy for instance so there's no, there's no currency conversion between water and electricity. The only place where you could see that really is, you know, I mean, we now, we, we measure our carbon footprint, so you can measure the carbon conversion between how much energy are you saving versus how much water are you saving. but I really, really keen to just say this, you know, carbon isn't everything in sustainability. Right. it is critical that we look further than just carbon, because if you just looked at carbon, we could say, well, water is really not an issue. And therefore, let's not focus on water. Let's focus on saving energy. Let's focus on removing, you know, removing material use through, you know, reducing packaging constraints and things like that. Water is crucial. And there are some really, really key, people to kind of learn. From in this domain, there are lots of people, you know, and go out there and find out because there are, there are some, some great insights from people who are finding out really how much water affects our environment, but it goes beyond just carbon consumption or even energy because, you know, it is. You know, we need to think wider and water. I think in our future is going to become more and more critical. And we're really going to be, you know, emphasizing those, those, those platforms where people are figuring out how to get by and how to, to work out our economy with less water. It's, it's critical. Yeah. I said that, you, you obviously weren't there for that part, but I said that right at the start of the show where I really went through exactly what you said. It's like energy is the one that people will look at because it has the value and it also has the carbon value and it's talked about. But actually the. The scarcest resource or the scarcest utility that we are, that we have, and that we will definitely be facing in the next, 25 years will be water. The waterways under huge pressure, rainfall is reducing. The population is growing. It's, it's all pointing towards, and also I will add that the water companies are a disaster, so it's all pointing towards that scarcity of water is going to become more critical than energy. And the grid, actually, look how well the UK is doing at decarbonizing the grid. if you're looking for your carbon, like the energy is not necessarily The place to look and actually was water is going to be something that we talk about more in the next 15 years than energy would be my opinion. Absolutely. and I think it's great that, you've already started this journey and people can, learn from your progress. And challenge their narratives.'cause at some point that people's hands are probably gonna be forced. So, maybe someone's listening to this podcast in 2050 going, God, I wish I'd listened to this in 2024. they'll probably be thinking why were people not thinking about water? You know, this is ridiculous Well, what are these two people? You know, these guys think that they're that they're pioneers This is you know, it's laughable how bad this thinking is Yeah. That's so funny. Um, So Felix, it's actually really interesting because we're just kind of talking A little bit about carbon accountancy then. And for those who've listened to the podcast before, we'll know the difference between scope one, two, and three, but making water decisions or like reducing your water is the responsibility of the brewery to do it themselves, but You're buying other people's water inefficiency as well. That's kind of how scope three works. So what's your SmallBear do anything to sort of put pressure on suppliers in 100 percent this is an absolutely crucial part of, of the influence that we have as brewers, is, it's not just the amount of water that we use here, which actually You know, we think we're a very water intensive industry, which we are. You know, I mean, when we first started brewing, the average brewery was using, eight to 10 liters of water per liter of beer produced. you know, the average, the industry average has certainly come down significantly from there. You know, it's more like between four and six. There's a water ratio typically, of, liters of water used to produce a liter of beer. We, I think you mentioned early on, our consumption at the point at which you, you came and audited us or we, we provided information to you, was just over two to one or around two to one. we actually, within the brewery here, we, We've actually managed to get that down to, we're pretty much back to where we very first started, which was one and a half litres of water used to make a litre of beer, which is, which sounds great. I will, I will caveat that by saying that not all of the water that is used for our process is here within the building alone, because we, we don't have any packaging lines here. So although we fill kegs and casks here on site. We don't fill bottles and cans and those within a full scale brewing operation really do need to be factored in. Because filling bottles and cans can be very water intensive. Now we try and get out of the brewery as much and put, and one of the first places where we can put a lot of pressure is on, is on that third party canning and bottling line. and, you know, one of the things that always irks me is when you turn up on a, on a, on a packaging line and there's usually, so after you fill your cans or bottles, there's a water rinse. and that water rinse can just be as simple as a hose hooked up to, to a little jet nozzle that is just constantly on and it's just spraying water no matter whether there's a can there or a bottle or whether it's just spraying it onto a conveyor. It's just spraying water. Now, some lines, thankfully, are sort of, you know, clever enough to go as far as putting a sensor there so that if there is, or hooking the water supply up to a, to the actual, panel within the, within the filler. So if the filler isn't running and you're not producing, bottles or cans, then, then it's not running. You can be much cleverer with that thinking, i. e. you shouldn't be washing down any cans and bottles that aren't good stock, which in large bottling lines I mean, I mentioned that I started off my career at Budweiser. The first thousand bottles that came off the line when you were doing first offs would actually be destroyed. And because the filler was getting up to speed and the oxygen levels hadn't quite got down to, to get enough quality, it's an insane amount of wastage, but actually when you imagine that they were doing, you know, 2 million bottles per shift, that actually wasn't the biggest, the biggest You know, they had much lower beer wastage and lower, packaging wastage than a lot of smaller brewers, which is just mind boggling that you'd have a skip full of perfectly good beer bottles that had potentially slightly high DOs. but I mean, that's, you know, that, that is big, that's big, you know, large scale production for you. but you should have, you know, for, for those rinses, You should be verifying the exact amount of water that you really need to rinse down. If you have an air knife, so you can have varying steps of how efficient you are with, if you use an air knife to skim any beer off your can or bottle before it goes through the rinse, Then you're using that rinse as a rinse rather than as a wash. So you're, you know, then your rinse water isn't really being contaminated by the beer that you're actually trying to rinse off. So it's critical that you do rinse. So, a lot of crown caps will rust or they'll, you know, they'll deteriorate if they're in contact with beer. and also you don't, you know, you don't want a sticky bottle or can. And going into packaging, you know, you're going to get molds and all sorts of but so if if you get An air knife so you should have jets running in underneath the crown cap if you're bottling you should also have an air knife. that is used for For removing any beer then have your rinse Then if you have the rinse after the air knife, and you've effectively removed the liquid beer, then you should be recirculating that water, because it is a very, very simple, and that, you can recirc the water a few times before dumping it. And it's, it's one of these things that you can really go quite far with the engineering approach, but with an engineered solution like that, you end up saving a lot of water, which eventually does Save you money, you know, so there is a there is a benefit in doing that. as I say, you know As I mentioned before vacuum pumps, are also a big user of water if you can use those with a cooling tower or or another means of cooling your water. That's great. we had a fantastic example of a cooling tower solution at sip smith gin distillery, which unfortunately We never put into use, but there was a, the neighbor right next to Sipsmith has an outdoor swimming pool. And my dream was always that we would use their pool water to cool the condenser within our still. So that we could give them a heated swimming pool and we would get free cooling because that's you know They wanted to be hot. We wanted to be cold if you can find win win solutions like that in cooling You are absolutely, you know that that is that's great. That's just that's the gold standard is heat someone's swimming pool And if you're not heating their swimming pool, you should put, put a swimming pool in yourself. so that's a there many people with if there's a many people around you in Bermondsey that have swimming pools in Ha ha ha! We should do that. We're going to open up South Bermondsey Beach. get people, you know, set up a nice, nice sauna and swim lodge. I think you've, you've, I've just figured out what the new tap room is going to look like. Um, but so that, that is one, one supplier service supplier albeit, but it's a supplier that we can put pressure on now going further down the chain. So if you're actually looking at, or sort of up the chain, I should say, if you're looking at raw materials and and packaging as well, they are huge. Water consumers. So, let's start off with hops. for instance, you have, there are certain hop growers that don't irrigate. There are hop growers that do irrigate. Now in the UK, We typically don't irrigate hops. So hops are grown, they, you know, they have fairly nice long root systems. They're, they're a weed. They grow very happily in very poor soil conditions. but ideally, you know, you do want to be nurturing. If you can nurture soil, I mean, and all of this all comes back to soil, right? Every, every conversation comes back to soil, but soil is critical for, for reducing water consumption. If you can make good soil structure, By feeding the soil by using, old age, conventional or organic or regen methods, you're making for good water retentive soil. and you don't need to irrigate your hops, depends what kind of climate you're in, right? So, you know, this as well as I do, if you now go down to Kent, you know, the hop garden of England, and you go and look around those hop gardens, I mean, last year, actually the year before last as well, was, was terrible for hops. We had really, really low yields from Kent, right? Because global warming is shifting that, you know, the, it, the South of England is now too hot for hops. And it's perfect for grapes, right? If you're, if you've been, if you set up a, a, a, a winery in the South of England, you're laughing because you're making better sparkling whites than they do in Champagne. But, you know, you are the future of wine, but unfortunately hops do like to be relatively wet. So we're now, you know, I think we're seeing that hop growing is really shifting a little bit further north. so, you know, the hop shires, so Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire are doing really well growing hops and because they're a bit more lush and green and we get a That means that we don't have to irrigate in this country. So hop growers in the UK don't. If you look at where a huge amount of our hops come from now, Valley, they're big on irrigation there. And they use a fair bit of, and mean, it's like a desert up there. is a desert. And so they are, they're bringing, you know, water in, to make that work. you go a little bit further south, Oregon is a fantastic hop growing state. And if you're after, if you're after, you know, those funky American hops, then consider sourcing hops from Oregon rather than from Washington. it is, typically you'll find that they use a lot less irrigation if they're using irrigation at all. you know, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to source. Our hops from, from the Pacific Northwest, and they would be coming all from the UK. and I know that, you know, Charles Ferrum, are doing a lot with their hop development program. we don't have the, the, the, sort of capacity for, for, R and D that they have over in Washington, but we certainly, you know, doing our best at getting some really nice fruity, funky, you know, high alpha hops, grown in the UK. So yes, you know, water consumption is critical, even when you're looking at. And especially really when you're looking at your, I, I've got a, at your raw material supplies, I've brought a, there's a bit of a show and tell moment, this book, I was mentioning that there are some really great, there's some people who've spent a lot more of their time looking into how dire the water situation is globally, but this is Tim Smedley. Smedders, who, he came down to the brewery, to the brewery recently, and we did a really wonderful day, with Tim, where he just enlightened us on how drastic the situation is. I mean, it is incredible how much, we rely on and really take for granted our water table. but, you know, one of, one of Tim's, focuses is on soil as well. So he was saying, you know, there's this great test in farming, where you can, you bury a pair of underpants, have you heard about this? And you dig it up a few months later. And if it's still in one piece, then it means that your soil is dead and it doesn't retain water well enough. if the underpants has fallen apart and you're just left with a little ring of elastic. then you're good. You've got lots of microbes in your soil, soil structure's good, lots of water retention, and this kind of stuff is crucial, for, you know, so I'd be looking for, if you're not already using, hops that aren't irrigated, that are grown on land where the growers are really looking to, to improve the soil. and the, and the water retention in the soil. That's a critical one. where I really, really think the future is, because so many people focus on hops, hops make up such a small proportion, depends, you know, how crafty you are, but they do make up a small proportion of total agricultural material. When you look at beer worldwide, the real golden ticket really for, for water in brewing is going to be using a long root system cereal crops. So using old school, you know, ancient grains. instead of our now conventional barley, using perennial crops, you know, if we can really start brewing using perennial crops, we're going to be, you know, at the forefront, of, of, of saving carbon, saving nitrogen, saving water, you know, we need to be getting stuff back into the soil, including water, and that's going to reduce water consumption massively for agriculture. That's agriculture. Let's talk about, packaging materials. So, recycling, cardboard and paper, does consume water. if you're not as particular about exactly what your recycled paper looks like, it consumes less water. If you're you know, growing, growing fresh, growing fresh, you know, growing trees in order to make virgin paper and creating virgin paper is incredibly water intensive. So Hmm. trying, you know, a, I mean, number one, just reduce the amount of packaging that you use, if you possibly can, obviously reduce, reuse, recycle, all that. But, if you can find, you know, if you can find suppliers that can give you data on water consumption, then get hold of it, you know, and even just asking the question, I feel like, you know, puts you in a position of. of authority right you we need to start asking more of these questions and getting you know I've found that suppliers and think of yourself when you're Selling beer. How often is it that you know, you hear someone say I need a session beer or I need a I'm looking for a stout, right? You only have to hear three or four people say, I really need a stout in my pub before you start thinking, God, yeah, maybe I should start thinking about this, I should probably start brewing a stout, I should add that to the, to the lineup, brewers will, will understand this, or if it's not, you're not talking direct to consumers, you'll hear it from, you know, your market, go and speak next time, the marketing team say, Hey, I think we should really start thinking about brewing a stout. How many people did they listen to before they decided that brewing a stout was a good idea? the same with our suppliers, if they hear two or three brewers. You know, contact them and say, Hey, what's your water consumption? All of a sudden they're going to go, Oh God. Hey, you know, either we've never thought about that before, or, Oh, you know, we buy in our card and then we print it and we cut it. Maybe we should be asking our suppliers or, you know, Oh, actually we have thought about that, but we realized that we're not very good at it. And that now people are actually asking the question. So just start asking questions. You don't have to even know everything about this and be putting the pressure on just just go and ask and and if you have Two or three different card suppliers or two or three different label suppliers go and ask them, right? Say what's the water consumption look like ink, you know, if you can use better water based inks you're reducing your, your chemical usage, but also, you know, inks that can be washed off, you're reducing then the amount of washing that needs to happen when you're washing plates and printing presses. There is, there is water everywhere. Unfortunately, it's, you know, it is as you say, it's a bit like carbon accounting. It's a bit like. You know, financial accounting, there is, there are savings to be made everywhere. and we've just got to start exposing more of those savings. And, but one of the things that, Tim mentioned when he was here was that, you know, we're actually, when you look at the cost of the water cost of a pint of beer, we think of it in terms of what we use in the brewery, you know, you might call it eight, a ratio of eight. You might call it ratio of four. You might call it ratio of two. You might even call it a ratio of one and a half. That is so tiny in comparison to the actual water consumption of your pint of beer. I mean, they're talking at ratios of when you're really looking at, at the, the water that is going into, and particularly water We're not talking about rainfall here, for crop growing, but irrigation. and then also for, you know, there's water used for materials for transport, for energy production. You know, a lot of water is used in producing the energy that you use in your brewery, but when you really expand that out, you are looking at ratios of like a hundred to 160. You know, some of these figures. It's very hard to actually put a, put your finger on it because, who knows it's like such a wide web, but they are, but it's certainly in the hundreds, hundreds of liters of water to make a pint, to make a liter of beer. So do absolute, I'm not saying that your scope one, you know, that that the water consumption within the brewery is. Is to be you know washed away by any means to be diluted. Oh, there's so many water puns here That is crucial get get your scope one, right, but also a you know If you don't have the time or the budget to be focusing Focusing on scope one or you've really pushed it as hard as you possibly can you think that you can do better than that's great Do it but what's not going to cost you anything? I mean, there's probably a water cost to emails as far as we, you know, when we're working out. But it's not going to cost you anything to just shoot off a few emails this morning to your suppliers and say, Hey, what are your water ratios? You know, I buy, I don't know, 10, 000 labels from you every month. What's the, what does the, what's, what's the water consumption of that? And they'll probably come back to you and say, I have no idea. And, you know, I've asked and nobody knows back here. We'll get them to ask the same thing. I mean, surely you could put that together. If you speak to your paper supplier and your ink supplier and your, we need to pull something together and you say, look, we're going to have to pull something together, otherwise we just simply can't buy labels from you. Just push, push. push. It's, it's so, it's such a good point. And I actually heard from a guest who's been on this podcast twice, his name is Jan Paul. He said something that was really fascinating. There was like, if everyone looks after their, their pets. Scope one and two, in theory, you don't have to worry about the one, bang on. And it's a really nice way of looking at it because I think when you start looking at carbon accountancy and exactly what you said, you know, maybe you're using two and a half liters, but actually your supply is using over a hundred. It can quite very quickly get a bit disheartening, but actually if everyone just looks after their one and two, you don't necessarily have to worry about what everyone else is doing, but to get people to work, to look at their scope one and two, you have to challenge them. It's absolutely correct. Like is the analogy was perfect. It's like if a bar S if five bars ask you to make a stout, you'll make a stout. It's exactly the same thing. These suppliers. are just like you. If there's demand, they will fulfill it. So make the demand, force the question and ask them. It's such a great point. And I I've spoken about that in talks that I've done. It's just look after yourself, like, Do what you can do, but also make sure everyone else is doing what they can do and force that. And, but make purchasing decisions. Sometimes I appreciate you can't do it all the time, but based off that. So if you see a supplier doing particularly well in, say, sustainability is an overall topic. Let's say you pick a multiplier and you know, the price between. A ton of malt varies between supply and supply, often not dramatically, but if you can then make a decision that, well actually I believe that that company is doing way more to reduce what they consume, reduce the water intensity, I will make that purchase decision from them. Then you validate everyone's efforts and everyone else wants to catch up. It's such a, it's so It's actually really not overly difficult to Yeah. just that everyone needs to, to take action and force the book on other people and look at themselves as well. I think it's such a The crucial thing here is that it does take a critical mass. That critical mass might be five people asking you to brew a stout, but if you had five tiny bars asking you to brew a stout and you, you know, your minimum production, you know, your minimum brew length to brew a stout was, you know, a hundred hectolitres, then you might not be that interested. If a large retail company, you know, a multiple retailer contact you and contacted you and said, well, we want you to burst out. Or if you had, you know, some really influential bars or, you know, people who were perhaps a bit more mainstream, you know, if, if, if, I were a, a packaging supplier and Chris, you contacted me and said, how much water do you use? I think, well, yeah, but Chris is an, is an, is an expert. He's, you're not actually. pushing the agenda. Whereas Chris, if you ask me and 10 other brewers to contact that company and say, how much water do you use? All of a sudden that's becoming a mainstream thought. So if it's just little old me, you know, in my perfect sustainability bubble, just firing out a hundred emails to all the suppliers saying how much water do you use? No, one's going to care. Cause they all think I'm crazy. If I can convince, you know, our local breweries and we've got plenty in Bermondsey. That they might want to do the same thing and let's not all send the email on the same day. Then, you know, then we can start forging a, an interesting accounting system here. Awesome. Yeah. So Felix, that was, that, I mean, that has been really inspirational to me as I really hope it has to the listeners. we have covered a lot on water, intensity, you know, we originally were going to do this as a water intensity and mid strength brewing, but we have just, we've just burned through so much good. Topics on and content on, on water that we're going to have to record the mid strength brewing one separately. I hope that's okay with you, but we are definitely for the listeners listening and the viewers viewing. We are going to do another episode, but on mid strength brewing and, you know, maybe on some other topics as well. I think that'd be really fun. Absolutely. And look, I just want to add that I'm not an expert here. I've just found my way through this. So I don't have a PhD in water saving. Everybody, you know, we are, we, I mean, climate crisis gets, is an overused term, right? We do need to start thinking about water. So if you haven't thought about water, then Then start thinking about it contact me. Sure. i'm a busy guy and I won't necessarily be able to tell you absolutely everything and spend two hours with individual people, which is why we've done it here but the But no, it's you've got to find your own water journey and and just crack on You know, start, pick up that phone now. Yeah. Start asking those it. Yeah. yeah, thank you so much, Felix. And you know, I know. As you said, you're a busy guy, but perhaps some of the listeners do have questions. Is it okay if they, you know, reach out and contact you and just say like, how did this, how did you do this? So what was, did you have any challenges here? Because you know, how brewings are, you know, how breweries are, they're very Personal. So even when you hear someone's success story, it's sometimes hard to apply it to your own. So if there people have any specific or bespoke questions, I appreciate not two hours of coaching, but, you know, a couple of questions or something that'll be, is that okay if they 100 percent please, please do. don't, contact me asking me for a, for the right time for a video call. As Chris knows, I'm notoriously bad at video calls. Just get me on the phone and we'll have a quick chat and we'll solve all the problem. I mean Again, i'm not the expert here, but we can reach a solution together. Yeah 100 Love that. And that book you held up for the viewers, of course, they will be able to see it, but for the so you go through the name of the title, what it is and where they can find it, and I'll put a link in the show notes, of course, So this is the last drop solving the world's water crisis By tim smedley. So the last drop by tim smedley And he is a really really inspiring guy. I mean he is he's again He is self professed Not expert. He just is interested in why it is that we treat water, the way that we do. We really need to be thinking about it differently. Love that. And what a, what a wonderful way to end the episode. Felix, thank you so, so much for coming on and spending your time. I know how busy you are, but I really hope that this is going to be that educational piece for so many brewers and actually very inspirational. I, it certainly was to me when I very first discovered this, the dry floor policy, just the overall approach. To water and your overriding philosophy towards sustainability has been inspiring to me. So I really, really hope that this is inspiring to the listeners and viewers as well. So thank you so much for coming Thank you, Chris. It's been a pleasure to be here. Well, thank you so much to Felix. Thank you to you listeners and viewers who are now viewing this Modern Brewer podcast video of both the guest and myself on YouTube. Uh, I just a big thanks to everyone. I really, really love this episode. I, you know, we really did try and do two things in once because I just wasn't sure how much content we could get over on water intensity and it turns out we managed to get a lot of content out on water intensity. So. We will be recording another episode on mid strength brewing in the future uh, I I don't have a date for that yet, but we will be doing it because For me personally, that mid strength category is fascinating and one that I think maybe be getting missed out at the moment, but will be a big part of our brewing future. So I really look forward to having the inspirational Felix back on for that. So thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast. If you're still listening now, please, if you could share or help me promote this podcast organically through your social channels, through brewers that you work with, Or friends you have in the industry. It would mean the absolute world to me to continue to grow this platform, to allow people like Felix to inspire brewers from all over the world. So thank you so much, everyone. And I'll see you on the next episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast.