Ep 33 - Turning Wastewater Into Biogas - Dr. Thomas Fudge - WASE

Wastewater: Craft Beer’s Dirty Secret 💧🤐

The topic that no brewer wants to talk about. Wastewater.

But what if that “waste” could power your brewery?

In this "Tomorrow's World" style episode, Dr. Thomas Fudge, Founder of WASE, reveals how wastewater can be converted into valuable biogas—turning pollution into power. With brewing as a significant contributor to water waste, Dr. Fudge challenges the industry to rethink wastewater as an untapped resource.

Explore the science, real-life examples like Hepworth Brewery, and practical advice to make your brewery greener. If you’re serious about brewing sustainably, this episode uncovers the next big step in eco-conscious brewing.

Key Topics:
•⁠  ⁠Brewing’s impact on water pollution 🌊
•⁠  ⁠Anaerobic digestion - transforming wastewater into biogas
•⁠  ⁠Hepworth Brewery’s waste water case study
•⁠  ⁠Practical advice for sustainable brewing

Chapters
05:06 - Wastewater and its impact on the environment
13:51 - Key terms in wastewater (COD/BOD/TSS/TDS/pH)
24:01 - Anaerobic digestion overview and WASE solution to its problems
39:01 - The quality of biogas produced, can it be used as a like-for-like replacement to grid gas?
44:23 - Hepworth Brewery case study
52:07 - Top 3 questions brewers ask Dr Thomas Fudge

Sponsor: Jack Coomber Marketing

Links:
🔗 WASE Website
🔗 Article - Craft Brewers: Do We Need to Talk About Wastewater?
🔗 Chris' LinkedIn
🔗 Jack Coomber's LinkedIn

Transcript

0:13

Hello everyone and welcome to the latest episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast with me your host Chris Lewinton. I was blown away by the reaction to the last episode on water efficiency with my good friend Felix. I had so many brewers shocked at the incredible efficiency and of course This legendary dry floor policy. I actually had a message from one brewer who was like to take away a brewer's hose. It's like taking away their coffee or oxygen, which I actually thought was pretty funny and also so true. so it's actually quite apt that in this episode, we move to the other side of the water conundrum in brewing. As I said in the last episode and at my talk at the IBD last week, which actually went great. By the way, thanks for asking. I predict that water will be the biggest issue craft breweries face. In the next 10 years. And part of that prediction is because I know and have seen firsthand that craft brewers do not look at their wastewater in most parts of the country. You have legal limits in chemical oxygen demand, which is COD total suspended solids, which is TSS. To give you some context, although this will differ as per your water authority and agreement, but Thames Water in London, for example, has a COD limit on business of 1, 000 mg a litre. For context, beer has a COD of 20, 000 to 40, 000. milligrams per liter. Hops 60 to 100, 000 and yeast 50 to 150, 000 milligrams per liter. So as you reflect on what goes down your drain, you can start to see why this is an issue. So far, breweries, especially small ones, fly under the radar. Most I speak to have never been checked. Of those that have, We'll know full well how being caught not consenting will lead to a fine, a strike against your name, and in some areas, like London, if you are caught three times, In a year, they will ban you from putting anything down the drain. Good luck with that. Now I am going to release an article on my website, which for those who don't know is www. brewresourceful. com link in the show notes, as always, that will detail how you can combat this with process based solutions, but ultimately it's unlikely to be enough. And. Means you will be so reliant on people and processes that errors are inevitable and repercussions of being caught are so severe. So what is the ultimate solution for your wastewater? Well, I was on a site visit over a year ago at Hepworth Brewery and I saw one of the best innovations in wastewater I have ever seen. So today I bring you that innovation. Anaerobic digestion is widely used in many industries, but not so much in the craft brewery. Why? Because it's ludicrously expensive, doesn't have any ROI. They are an absolute nightmare to handle as they ultimately are a live digestion process that requires steady and regular loading and can take up more space. The most brew houses and sellers do combined. So in today's episode, I have Dr. Thomas Fudge, the founder of Waze. He is going to talk to us about wastewater management, anaerobic digestion, how he invented this remarkable technology and how it fits into the craft beer world. so welcome to the show, Dr. Thomas Fudge. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Really excited to have this conversation. Yeah, man. Thank you so much. And you know, I, I said it when we did the talk at the Brewers Congress recently and actually at the start of this, but I actually first came across Waze when I was at a site visit of Hepworth Brewery, which is. No, actually the reason I was going was to see their wastewater, but it was something Andy was super proud about. And I fell in love with the technology and the concept and I got in contact and we've kind of been in contact since then, which has been awesome, man. And I've seen that your company's growing as well, which is so cool. like really, like really excited for you and your journey, but we've spoke quite a lot before. So for the listeners, you haven't, could you just explain who you are and a little bit about Waze and how it came about? definitely. So yeah, my name is Tom, co founder and CEO of Waze and at Waze we are unlocking the power of waste to make it the fuel of the future. So what that means is we're helping industrial manufacturers treat their sort of high strength sort of organic waste water or organic waste on site. And then really utilizing and extracting the value from that. So the main way we're doing that is to generate biogas and biomethane so that organizations can then use that to decarbonize their thermal energy demand. And it's been a long sort of really exciting journey and really sort of developing this and sort of now scaling up and installing systems that you saw at Hepworth Brewery, which is fantastic. A real sort of mission and real what we're really trying to do is really highlight the valuable water, the value of water and really what it means. It's the only reason that we're here on this planet, is the one thing that makes us really unique. So we need to really start protecting that and really looking at extracting. The value and utilizing resources on site to create a much more sort of circular industry so that we can really accelerate net zero and sustainability initiatives because we have to protect our resources. Otherwise, future generations are going to. Really have a very difficult time, going forward if we're sort of really extracting, no value and really polluting a lot of people. So that's sort of really what got behind sort of me and the team to really sort of push forward in helping industry. understand sort of the problems and understand issues that might not be highlighted and actually change it from a perception that it is an issue to a perception that waste is a bioresidue and a resource that we can extract using the right solutions and the right technologies. And it's great to see industries like brewing adopting that, looking at recovering the CO2 and other initiatives. And yeah, it's really exciting to see sort of the real, Push from industry brewers, but also other sectors to really look at circular economy because it makes Good environmental sense and economic sense. Yeah, absolutely. It's really cool to turn something that is, never really had an ROI in my opinion, from the times that I've managed Waze. Water and waste products and breweries. There was no ROI. It was a total cost burden for us, but the ability to turn that into an ROI and, make this set your economy is, is really cool. So how did you first, how did you get into Yeah, that was a long way away, sort of really transcended. so I've previously worked into a startup, but it was in much more sort of like marketing. And I was a designer, but I had a real sort of passion for sustainability, wanting to move into that sector. So, went back to the university, did a master's looking at sustainability, then got awarded a scholarship to do a PhD and was looking at sort of water, looking at developing the technology, but I was like, I'm not an academic. So two months into my PhD, I founded Waze because I was like, Let's build stuff. Let's make it big and not just focus on sort of like beta research. And that was really sort of the mission. But the main sort of driver behind that was just seeing how polluted water is becoming. if you look across the UK, there's huge amounts of sort of sewage discharge and it's really polluting sort of our waterways. 80 percent of water globally is untreated. And water is the most valuable resource on this planet, as I sort of mentioned before, so I wanted to do something to really look at changing the narrative of rather, this is a waste, let's put it down the drain, let's not think about it, it's somebody else's problem. Two, how can we actually look at this as a, it is something that we need to deal with, because we are the ones producing sort of the waste. So, but how can we extract that value to really try and change the perception for individuals and Yeah, it's the start of exciting journey. There's a long way to go. because generally I think there's a perception of water. It falls from the sky. It's there. It's readily available. And it's really starting to change that sort of perception that is a commodity is something that we need to value. And that we need to really sort of pay for, because otherwise we're going to really be paying a hefty price in the future. Yeah, it's so true as well. Not just the fools from the sky, but also when you're, a craft brewer and you're putting. Probably very unconsenting waste down the drain. I think there's a feeling that ultimately they'll deal with it. it will go to the, it will go to the treatment plant and it will get dealt with. So I'm not really causing any harm. what would you say to those brewers? Cause there will be plenty of those out there and maybe some that might be listening to this. And, and like it's, it's really difficult, because you have to sort of already be a certain scale, to sort of be able to initiate everything on your site as well, which is also a cost, associated with dealing with everything. for economically, but like by putting sort of your waste water down the drain, you'll have like different types of waste water that you'll be generating. So if you're putting like your tank bottoms down. There is a lot of organics within that, and then if you mix that with your, like, your first rinse and any of your other cleanings, you're taking, in theory, a really strong, concentrated organic content and then diluting it, and that makes it harder to then remove, more energy intensive to remove further on down the line, and that can be sort of quite problematic, so for a water treatment plant, They will try to deal with that. but what it means is because you've made it very deadly you're making it More energy intensive to extract and water utilities in the UK, the amount of energy used to remove organics from our water equates about 2 percent of the UK's energy, so it's a huge issue. And when you're also putting lots of organic content in there, there's now a lot of research coming out that that breaks down in the sewer line and it will release methane. Emissions. so you're actually having quite a big carbon impact on anything you put down the drain. and then when it rains, a lot of the sewage systems are not able actually to handle what is coming at the moment because of the amount of like rain infrastructure. So the amount of roads and concrete we have. So when surface water. Comes into the sort of rains down, goes into the drain. Sewers then have an overflow so that we don't flood. Cities and towns. So if you're putting it down the drain then, and it, we have an overflow, it will just be put into the river straight away. So there is also that issue, and obviously it's, put it down the drain, somebody will deal with it. But we also have a responsibility that we need to start thinking about what we put down. So even at like a household level, don't put fats and oils down your drain because it will cause, to form in the pipes where jewels in the pipe. That means that somebody else has to go and deal with that. and I think there is sort of a tendency for people to be like, I can push that. Somebody else can deal with that. I'm paying somebody else to deal with that. but I think there's also, we need to think responsibly of what are there better ways that we could help that system as well, That is a wonderful answer. I love that. yeah, really, really strong. And I think. Also, a lot of smaller brewers probably thinking I'm not really making a big impact because it's just a little bit of yeast, it's just half a bucket. But when you times that by everyone else, who's doing the same thing, that starts to become more and more substantial. And we're such a collaborative industry, collective industry, so we should. We should also be aware that everyone else is doing the same thing. It becomes all of our problems. So yeah, I love that. do you know what, before we start getting into this, Tom, if we could just highlight some of the key terms, because not everyone is going to be familiar with the key wastewater metrics, and there is just a load of, Abbreviations as there are in every industry. So I'm going to very quickly start saying COD, BOD, TSS and pH. So before I start ruining that, Could you just explain what chemical oxygen demand, biological oxygen demand, total suspended solidism, and pH, although brewers are, of course, pretty familiar with pH. So with biological oxygen demand and chemical oxygen demand, what that means is it's a way of measuring the amount of organics within your water. And when, what you have is when you have organics within water to break those organics down and remove them, you need oxygen to come in. So what it's saying is, If the biological oxygen demand is looking at biologically, how much oxygen will be needed to remove all of those organics from the water, converting them into something like carbon dioxide, and it will remove that from there. Yeah, and the biological oxygen demand is looking at what biologically it can do. That is, was one of the oldest tests that we did, and because you're using a biological process, it takes quite a long time to actually do that test and that analysis, and we isn't used as much anymore because you have quite a long period of time, you have quite a few days to do that, and you might run it for 3, 5, 7 weeks. Then you have a new one, which is called chemical oxygen demand, which is a quick test where it's using. Chemical reaction to then evaluate how much oxygen is the mark to remove those organics from the water, and that's a quick like 2 to 3 hour test. So it's a much more sort of industry standard way of evaluating the sort of how dirty the water is from an organic content and contamination point of view. And that's important because you need oxygen in sort of a normal wastewater treatment process. So people might have heard of aeration technologies and why it's so energy intensive is because when you put the water, dirty water into a large centralized plant, you don't have giant ponds and you just have big blowers and you blow oxygen through and blow air through. And then the bacteria use that to then break down the organics within there, and then that can help remove it from the water. And it's really important because if you, if say you put dirty water into like a river, you can cause quite big issues where if all those organics break down, In the river, it can actually remove all the oxygen from the water source, and then that can actually be really bad because it can kill all the wildlife, because all the fish will use that dissolved oxygen in the water. So that's why we need to look at, it's quite important when we look at measurements. Then you've got the sort of total solids and total suspended solids, and you also have total dissolved solids. So this is just measuring the amount of solids within the water. So the total solids is the total amount of solids within the water. Then you have your dissolved solids, which are, you can't see them because they're sort of dissolved within the liquid stream. And then you have your total suspended solids. Which would be small things that are floating around, so it could be like pops, or like parts of like the, the spent grain that have broken down, that's sort of floating around, so generally, depending on what type of treatment you can remove certain aspects of those, so the dissolved solid is a much more harder to remove through a filtration process, and you need another type of treatment to remove those and break those apart. And what we're working on is helping remove most of those solid content using our process. And then you have the pH that measures the alkalinity and the acidity of the water. And that's important for when you put that. You want to make sure you have sort of a fairly good balance of where it's depending on where it's discharged. Because it could affect the biological process of. Bacteria, any are breaking down or removing. and obviously really this how affect yeast, and the growth of that and the fermentation process is really important and sort of the same when you're looking at sort of a, an environmental, biological process that's breaking down organics. You wanna make sure the bacteria in the right operating conditions that they can actually function properly. Perfect, love that. and of, I mean, you work with breweries, you've seen at Hepworth, of what a brewer puts down the drain, in your opinion, what are the biggest offenders in terms of COD, maybe TSS, pH? What is causing The biggest issue for wastewater Yeah. So I would say the biggest issue is the tank bottom. So anything and like the first rinse where you're sort of removing sort of the bottom bits. Brewers are great at like looking at sort of circular economy and like we're probably one of the industries where circular process has been initiated really early on with spent grain going for feed. and removing that and thinking of extracting that. And I would say it's generally, yeah, the bits that are left over, so you might have like hot yeast, I know sometimes brewers can remove some of that, but a lot of the time you are still sort of left with bits around that first rinse, and that's where you get a lot of sort of the issues from a biological point of view. And depending on sort of what chemicals you're using for cleaning, and also add sort of COD, BOD, into sort of the wastewater, but I would say that. The big, big, bit is where you've got sort of organics and anything like that going into the system is where it's a big issue. yeah. And there'll be plenty of brewers listening to this or been to other brewers where they've seen exactly where that yeast and hop tank bottom goes. So yeah, quite interesting. so we're going to talk a lot, obviously about anaerobic digestion, because that effectively is the umbrella in which. Waze sits. maybe you could just spend a few minutes talking about, you know, what is anaerobic digestion potentially on just whatever. I mean, there's aerobic digestion. You mentioned it actually a bit earlier, but maybe just like what technologies are available, to, to, I would say to craft brewers or to brewers in general on how they could treat it. And then we'll obviously go into what Waze does and how that differs. So there's, there's 2 types of generally, water treatment technologies. You have aeration and then you have anaerobic treatment. so aerobic is where you've got oxygen present and generally you can get a really good quality of water coming out of the system. It's really clean, but it's very, very energy intensive. And it can generate a lot of sort of sludge because you generate a lot of like biological growth and putting those organics out creates a lot of growth. So you generate sludge from that process that you get a really clean water with anaerobic treatment that is the breakdown of those organics without oxygen. So with that and with anaerobic digestion, it means you can generate biogas. And then you can generate methane within that biogas and that can then be used as an energy source to replace. Natural gas, it can replace oil, kerosene, and other sort of fuels that might be used, by brewers, depending sort of the location and if they've got a sort of gas grid connection. That's where you can, it can be really sort of beneficial. with an anaerobic treatment, you do remove, reduce the amount of sludge that you're generating as well, but you can't get the level of treatment. That you can with an aerobic process. So generally the most effective and efficient way to have. A stream is having an anaerobic process to remove the bulk amount of the organics, so the COD and the BOD, remove the most of that, recover the energy from that process, and then have a small aerobic system, which then really polishes the water and really removes the final amounts of those organics, but in a much more efficient way than doing the whole process. One of the challenges for a sort of smoother Brewers is generally the cost of equipment and the scale of equipment. So, at the moment, there's not a lot of equipment out there for really small sort of craft brewers, because a lot of people have been really focusing on building, like working with much larger, bigger industrial sort of organizations. Especially on the anaerobic side, and because the anaerobic treatment generally takes quite a long time to break down and process all of the organics, you need quite a lot of space for that. Whereas an aerobic system is much more compact because it can treat the waste faster. so. Generally, a lot of smaller breweries, it's the space, which is a bit of an issue. and having an anaerobic system is not necessarily always really viable and an aerobic system, depending what you're paying might be sort of cost prohibitive for sort of really small. and what we're trying to do now is looking at how you can make a solution that is suitable for smaller organizations. Great. Love that. So how does Waze fit into this? So you actually mentioned it, anaerobic digesters and the one I worked with, which was, I think predates sadly when Waze was here, but it was, a huge behemoth of a place. It was. Constantly needing live feed, consistent flow. It actually starts dictate our production schedule as much as anything else, because it's a living organisms really. So they need, constant feeding. It's actually not something you can just turn on and off. It's not like a plant in that sense. So. how does Waze fit into this anaerobic digestion journey and yeah, what, what actually specifically and how does it work? So I think that's quite interesting for brewers, especially as we love bacteria and sometimes hate it, depending on where it is. But yeah, I think it's actually quite interesting to go quite technical on like how anaerobic digestion works and how Waze differs from everyone Yeah. So anaerobic digestion, is a really old technology and it's a really simple technology, but it's also super complex because you're dealing with bacteria and like microorganisms and it's really hard to know how they're feeling. And generally it's just a giant tank that you put your bacteria in and then you flow through sort of organic content and you heat it up. to around like 37, 38 degrees for a sort of a normal temperature. You can sort of operate sometimes at higher temperatures. And you just let it sit there and the bacteria just slowly break down those organics and in sort of a giant hot tank. And then they'll start producing methane during that process. But generally it's quite, because it's quite a slow process, you need a lot of space and you're dealing with sort of microorganisms and you have to have really strict operational conditions to make sure the bacteria are in the optimal range. So, And that can be really problematic for brewers, because, as you mentioned, it's dictating your feed, your production schedule, you don't really want your treatment system to dictate what you have to brew, and when you brew, you want the market and your customers to tell you what to do for that. So, and that's definitely because it is complex. We don't know what they're doing. So what we have got a new process, which. Is called electro methanogenesis, and we're using a different strain of microorganisms and what instead of her just having a large tank where we just have bacteria growing, we have electrodes. And on these electrodes, we grow electrically active bacteria and they're really cool and it's really interesting to know that these bacteria are around because when they grow on our electrodes, they form a biofilm and they break down all of the organics within the wastewater. And as they do that, they release electrons from the organics. onto themselves, through the biofilms. They sort of do like a Mexican wave of passing these electrons from the organics. They're breaking down from themselves onto the electro stuff, which is really cool in itself. But what it means is they're generating an electrical current. So the bacteria theory is sort of generating electricity, which is. amazing and fascinating that they can do that. And it means that we then can start generating hydrogen ions within the anaerobic reactor, and we can convert carbon dioxide into methane. So we can increase the amount of energy that you can generate compared to normal anaerobic digestion systems. So it helps really start further decarbonizing. the thermal energy demands that brewers have and other industries that they have. Really importantly is that we, the pro, the bacteria are able to do this much faster than the normal strains of bacteria that, and their normal anaerobic digestion. So we can process waste at a much higher rate. So you can then have a system that's a 70 percent smaller footprint than a traditional digester. And so that makes it much more suitable for sort breweries, especially where there's been like, it's really great to see sort of the growth of breweries and really start expanding, but it means that they might have then just put in loads more extra brew kits, but they haven't actually bought more land. So trying to take up space for sort of the water treatment rather than brewing beer is a very sort of difficult Decision. A lot of brewers have to make. so what really trying to shrink down what they can have on site is really important to make sort of sustainable grace for organizations that might not be able to purchase or new places. Another key aspect is because we've got the bacteria generating an electrical current. We're biosensor. So it's like having a heart monitor on your bacteria or a Fitbit, so you know when the bacteria are stressed and when they're not. And because graft and independent brewers are changing sort of what they're brewing every single day, will get different amounts of organics coming out of your tank bottoms, and that can cause a lot of biological upset. So if you go from producing like a stout, to a PLL or you're now trying to make like a low alcohol sort of beer production. The amount of organics that you're putting into the, our reactor will change and the way that you need to think about that is you have to sort of try to feed your system because it is a living organism fairly consistently with a normal digester. And if you have. Changing feed. Imagine sort of you waking up one day and you'd be like, right, here's a fryer. And then here's a roast dinner. And the next day you're like, no, you're not having breakfast. And here's a salad. You'd be like, I'm really annoyed. I'm really hungry now. And you might just be like, I'm going for a nap. And it's the same sort of thing. So if you're like stress testing yourself, and if you're like constantly like doing that, the biology and the bacteria are just like, well, this is also a bit problematic. So what we can do is we'll measure the current and the electrical activity of the bacteria, depending on what we're feeding the system. And then that means that we can automate the pumps and automate the control of the plant. depending on what is being fed and what is being brewed at the facility. So you remove the complexity and the need to understand what the bacteria are saying. And it's sort of a way that we can now start communicating with the bacteria and the bacteria are telling us when they want to be fed and where, how we, so we can then operate the plant. And allow brewers to really focus on producing great tasting beer, because that's really important, because a lot of the team, we like to go and have a beer after work, so we need to focus on that. And we can focus on like the water treatment and operating that. absolutely fascinating. And it's such a cool invention because you take something, as you said, this historic process that's just laced with inefficiency and complexity and constraints, and you've made it accessible and manageable and something that people actually want to introduce their system. I think it's amazing. And what, what started this. journey and how did you actually manage to be the one or part of the team, of course, who, who did this? Yeah, so yeah, as I mentioned, it was part of my PhD research, sort of span out of that, because I didn't really want to sort of stay in academia. I love building stuff. that's something that's really excites me is sort of my hobbies at home is like building stuff from a little, little kid. I was always in my granddad's garage building, building everything I could, playing around with stuff. And I think it's good to just get stuff out there. And that's how I also learned. I learned by building stuff and trying stuff out. I'm not one for sort of sitting in a room, just trying to sort of absorb everything. So definitely sort of lended itself to my nature of like, let's go and test it. Let's go and build it. Why not? That's really exciting. and that's what gets me out of bed in the morning is the excitement, trying to do something different. And then I met my sort of co founders Will and Hugh, who joined, I was teaching one of them at university on a course. They joined and initially we were starting in a completely different sector. We were focusing on sanitation. We were working with, NGOs looking at projects. We were trying to do a project in a refugee camp, looking at treating sort of sanitation waste, fecal sludge. So definitely, not as, Pleasant as working within breweries, but sort of really, really necessary, but really had the realization that we're trying to develop a new technology and trying to work in sort of the new market. There's a lot of things we need to work on here. And COVID also sort of came around and then we were like, right, We can't develop a new market and there's sort of a new technology. We need to really focus on where we can sort of, where there's a really big need, closest sort of pipe. And that's where we sort of really pivoted into the food and beverage sector and then started working with breweries. we're doing stuff with stilleries, other cooks or cooked food industries and growing out that work. and that's sort of how we got into this space. Love that. Yeah, really cool. I mean, it sounds like a, I guess the sanitation and refugee camps, it's a, would be a big problem. Is that something you might stretch into in the future? Or how has that project side It would definitely be something I think all of us would love to sort of have going into the future. I think the realization is that our technology could definitely be a good fit. For building out sort of new infrastructure and recovering energy, and we would want to work with the local organization that has feet on the ground, knows the challenges, knows the problems, and are the ones, the experts who could really sort of, and we can potentially be a small piece, in sort of the execution of that one. would be great to do maybe in like five, six years time, if we could sort of be in that position. At the moment, we've got, yeah, enough of sort of a challenge and opportunity to work within sort of like industrial, sort of processes really at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. Bringing it back to, Breweries. What sort of utilities are required to run, I mean, not just whey, I mean, anaerobic digestion, I guess, in general, and does wheys differ from what the typical anaerobic digestion utility requirement is? So with the utilities, you generally just need to have a way of putting out sort of the wastewater, from the existing brewery. There could be brewers that aren't able to discharge to sewer. There's generally sort of a normally a tank or something where a lot of sort of higher strength stuff is collected and then it's then tanked and driven to another site to be processed. So that is really easy for us to integrate. And we would say if there is a. Companies out there that are tinkering or sort of waste water and slurry, there is a huge opportunity to save him because they're paying through the roof, somebody else to potentially extract that value. And you're just driving a truck around just driving waste water. the only water you want to be driving around should be, because you're sort of really paying somebody else to extract that value. Otherwise, it would be looking at ways you have to try to divert the higher strengths of liquids. So the tank bottoms from sort of your lowest rent, with less organics because You want to really look at targeting the very high concentrated streams because it means you can have a smaller project is lower cost and you get more value out of it really a lot easier, rather than trying to collect all of your wastewater and then trying to process and extract the value out of that. And the way it's like you want, like the bottle of water. sort of like squash. we can take the squash and we can extract the value out of that really quick, easy. But if you're diluting your squash and then you have like, here's 10 cups, we're like, okay, great. That you can do it. It's just going to cost a lot more. It's going to be bigger space. So is there a way of extracting that value and that concentrate is the best way for us to be able to really implement these projects, much easier. Then it would just be looking at how you can sort of connect gas. The, so for some, you can put a combined heat power system, so you can provide electricity and heat, looking at using the heat to heat a hot water tank potentially that could then be used as a heat store before it goes into like the steam boiler or as a preheating system. Obviously a lot of smaller breweries don't brew seven days a week, so it's how can you store the heat and the gas that's being produced over for like that the whole period because you're producing gas 24 7 and you don't really don't want to store the gas for allow, have a huge like two, three day storage of gas because you need a loss of. unless you start compressing the gas, but then that's very energy intensive and it doesn't really make sense. So you want a way of looking at storing the thermal energy that you're generating 24 seven and like hot water tanks can be really good at that. And you can then use that as a pre for like a steam boiler or something going in. so that's sort of the two main hmm. It's that we can connect with. this is the water coming out could easily go down into the drain. It would need further treatment. But what you can do is you're removing the really challenging problematic stuff to a point where actually, it's not going to have a big on the system and on the train. So it's going forward. You can then look at further sort of treatment. So if you want to have a more extensive system, you could then just charge it back into the local environment. Obviously, then you need to look at environmental permits, understanding your local ecosystem. But it can be good because it means you could be returning to watch back that agrees to system. You could be looking at sort of increasing biodiversity, with ecological treatment systems, like a reed bed where you grow plants and you put into a new nutrients back in the sort of a quite a nice way of integrating the system. And then for larger organizations, you could also then look at treating the water so you can reuse it back on site. And that is like. the ultimate goal, but that's not economically viable for a lot of breweries because the cost of equipment to do that is very high. And I would say you would need to be in areas where there's water extraction in this, you know, and water stress regions or very, very big, options Mm. Yeah. And you talked about biogas or the methane that it produces. How does that compare to the gas that people would have in the grid? Is it totally comparable? Can it be used in a gas steam boiler as normal? Does it need to be treated? Or you mentioned compressed. Yeah, so it's very easy to normally integrate into an existing boiler depending on how old the boiler is. there's a lot of new boilers coming out that are like dual fuel. So you'll have two heads, we're talking to some distilleries and you can integrate the biogas and then they've got, because they're in like really remote locations, there's no natural gas. They're using like kerosene. so you can have those two fuels being blended and used together and that's quite easy. And compared to sort of natural gas. Natural, natural gas is methane, in just a very high percentage. So from an anaerobic digestion, you get biogas between 50 and 60 percent of it is methane, and the rest is carbon dioxide. So if you want to replace your natural gas with standard biogas, you will need to inject the gas at roughly like twice the rate. to get the same sort of thermal energy because you've got a large proportion of the carbon dioxide. With our process, because we are converting a portion of that carbon dioxide into methane, we get around 20 percent higher methane content. So we can get like between 70 and 80 percent for breweries of methane. So it's not where it is at the natural gas level, but it means that you don't need to inject it at as high a rate. And you can generally just have depending on the gas is changing the gas boiler sort of injection head. So you just would have just slightly different portholes for the gas to flow through. Sometimes that can be like a 300 or a head change and integration. So. It's quite easy to integrate, especially into some of the new boilers, a lot of people are sort of looking at this and see biogas is a good option for integrating. So that's quite easy. And what you would, you would kind of have that just sort of operating sort of 20 percent or you could get a sort of a separate boiler that would then heat up a hot water tank. That hot water is stored. And then you just flow your hot water into your steam boiler, right into the steam, boiler. So then you've already preheated, so you reduce the amount that your normal boiler has. There's a few ways you can integrate it quite easily. Thermal batteries definitely seem like the future in a lot of craft breweries for that exact reason. They just don't have the standard seven day, 24 hour process where it makes sense to constantly be putting that in. So you need to store that energy rather than store the methane, which as you said, if it's not compressed, you need quite a large, it's in a balloon. yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's generally, it's just like a big balloon. it's like a sort of a multi layered membrane, that can sort of inflate. So there's, yeah, so it's quite easy to store and it's like safe to store because it's sort of quite a large sort of gas molecule and unlike sort of hydrogen, which can be sort of quite difficult to store because it's so small, it just seeps through everything. Methane is a very sort of easy to store gas that, and especially when it's sort of biomethane. It's sort of carbon neutral. You're reusing it. So it's a really good sort of energy store that integrates with everything really easily because we've been using methane and natural gas for hundreds of years. So it's a really easy. We've got a lot of infrastructure already in place. to use that. Do you need any specific permits to store this methane on site or any, specific checks or legal requirements? the various health and safety aspects that you'll go through. So, but a lot of this stuff probably Brewers are aware of, like going through a disease study, hazard, and we've, we go through that with any of sort of the customers to make sure that there is a hit or something environmental, and health and safety regulations. Perfect. I'm sure that would be because you often get that question is like, well, can I actually store it? So, yeah, that'd be really useful for people to know. Yeah, and it's generally like, people like generally like having sort of a gas canister at home that you might have on a barbecue or something like that. Generally, there's probably more gas stored in one of those than what we would suggest storing in one of these systems. So I think that's and that you can get some of those that are now installed on forklift trucks. It's not something that people should be scared of having the methane on site. It is like, there's lots of ways to really safely store it, really easy to utilize, that shouldn't be sort of a deterrent for people not looking at something. that's great. Yeah. fear of the unknown is so big, in, in every industry, but yeah, especially in this, sometimes people are just like, that's a roadblocks. That's a really nice way of putting it. there's more gas in your, sometimes there's more gas in your barbecue gas bottle than there is stored there. So yeah, that's great. We spoke about Hepworth Brewery. Tom, that was the first, is that the first Waze unit that was in a brewery? I think it was. And if so, what did you learn from that? What did you take away from that? And did you make any changes and how was that whole Yeah. So that was, yeah, we started that quite a few years ago. so that was, yeah, initially that was a pilot system and we were sort of really testing, really validating sort of the technology, making sure that it really worked. And we learned a lot. And I think one of the sort of the big ones that I think is really sort of key for sort of the industry is also the technology. learning how much the COD and like the organics change depending on what's brewed. Because that is a big issue if you want to install a biological treatment system at a plant. And it could be an anaerobic or an aerobic system. We've spoken to other breweries. They had a membrane bioreactor, an aerobic system, and because the CDD was constantly changing, it, the bacteria just couldn't handle it, and they, the system died, and they had to shut the system down, and that was a really big issue, because you don't want to invest in something that's not going to work, and one of the difficulties is, if you're taking samples, From your brewery, and you'll be like, Oh, well, we do a few samples over like a week or two weeks. You might not actually still get a very good picture of how much your COD fluctuates. So it's really good to see how much it would change over sort of days. because we would have sometimes this The organics cripple overnight, and that was really good for us to help develop and design our sort of machine learning automated biosensing system because they're like, that is a really key feature that needs to be put in place. for industrial manufacturers of this huge fluctuating. Otherwise, there's a really big risk that we're now going to say, well, you have to do all of this analysis and testing to make sure the system can operate at your site. That's quite a big barrier for a lot of organizations and customers. They're like, well, we don't want to have to pay somebody to do this. Like, That's what we're trying to pay you to do. So we're trying to take those problems away from organizations and customers. And that was probably one of the really big key learnings that we had. And it's also now really exciting because it's such a cool feature that we can now sort of implement. and like you've got bugs and microbes telling us when they want to be fed, generated because of the biological current they can go and we're automating that part and using the machine learning, which is brilliant. Incredible. Cause it's like now like the brain and the feed, which is fascinating. And I love hearing sort of the engineers that the scientists sort of talking about it and seeing their lives light up with the excitement of sort of all the new features and everything that we can learn from that, would say that the biggest learning. And now we're going into sort of full commissioning of the larger full scale sort of plant stage. And that's really, really exciting to sort of see that being, sort of implemented and integrating now. Yeah, that's so cool. It's such a, I mean, when you're like pioneering something, I guess just the level of excitement just must be day to day would be so good. Cause you're making a breakthrough. This is a big breakthrough for a lot of people in a lot of industries. So that's so cool, Yeah, yeah. And it's not always a happy, like, shiny days. Like, it is always, it's like, every brewer probably knows when they first set up their, their brew kit. Like, the amount of times where you feel like you're banging your head against the wall because you're just like, why is this not working? Why is that? And it is one of those sort of constant learning sort of curves. And it's nice now to know that, like, how much we've learned. It is now going into like really sort of pushing things forward and everything's sort of getting better, faster, really more exciting. So yeah, it is a cool journey. that's awesome. And do you know, you spoke about that, that brewery had their, membrane reactor that they just weren't using. I've also been to. Quite big brewery here in the UK. That was, I visited them and they were like, yeah, we just had to turn ours off around the road digest because we just couldn't, we couldn't live with it because it was, as you said, the demands or the, the COD was so like this. They weren't brewing necessarily every single day. And they were just like, we just can't manage this. And it was very much, they had to manage it, which is very different to it being self managing. it's almost a fun it's not far off being someone's full time role. If you're doing all the measurements, checking the production schedule, checking the health of the organism, checking the temperature, there's so many aspects to monitoring and measuring a wastewater treatment plant that is almost a full time job from what I could see before anyway. Yeah. because you have to take your pH, you have to understand sort of, are you building up with too many acids in there? Are the bacteria going to like those acids? What's the temperature that you're putting in? do you need to into your system? And it's really, really compact because You've got loads of different types of microorganisms that you're like, right, this is what we think they want. And are we actually feeding them the right amount of stuff or no, we're not feeding them. Oh, actually, now we need to put this in there. Oh, actually, like they, we just fed them like one really streamlined thing. So now we've got to give them loads of multivitamins because they have to be fit and healthy. It's like you do feed like the microbes, like try and give them a varied diet. And it's, it's the same way. So it is really, really complex. like how many people know exactly what they should be eating every day. And that's them who would go to like nutritionists and dietitians to be like, right, I've got this issue. Is anything in my diet that can help with that? You need to have experts tell you what you need to do. It's the same with the bacteria, the biology of the system. And. What brewer or like food and drink manufacturer wants to spend their time doing that. They're like, I want to own my craft in this specific area and don't want to have to employ somebody to operate a water treatment plant. And that's why there is like, and I understand why people put stuff down the drain because it's like, well, we can't actually do it. If we do this, we're going to spend loads of money. It could go wrong and it could be a real big problem because you hear about stories where somebody installs. be like a multi million pound anaerobic digestion plant if they're a large brewer. And if that doesn't work you're not getting any value and you're not having to employ more people and it's becoming more of a headache and it's dictating what, when you have to brew, what you have to brew, like, That's you. You've shifted business. You don't want to be doing that. You want to be focusing on why you started. So that's where having like much more automation, smarter, more resilient technologies that what we're trying to do going to be really hope is really helpful in removing all of those problems and can really accelerate a net zero transition and a circular economy transition. Yeah. And you. Almost explained exactly my experience with an anemone digester, where you get one, then you realize, Oh my God, we've got to keep this alive. And it might actually, it sounds when you explain it kind of like a fun job, actually, but it's all fun until that's just one part of your very busy job. And then someone's like, this isn't fun anymore because I've got to think about this and we've got to think about this. I've got to do this. So yeah, it's, it was really interesting. Actually, you almost described exactly the experience that I had. With, with a big anaerobic digester. Tom, I've got, I was thinking about this whilst we were talking, but like. What do you, you must speak to a lot of brewers. What are the sort of the top three questions you get asked about ways and what would be your answer to them? Shit. interesting. so I would say probably one of the big question is, and what I love and I think is so Interesting and cool about this industry is Brewers are just fascinated about the technology and the biology and the bacteria and they're just, I think they're just so inquisitive and want to know and understand and I think that's really interesting and I've sort of spoken about the biology and the bacteria and I think that's something that gets them really, really excited and It's, yeah, I love talking about it. And I think it's sort of like coming from that real passion of understanding sort of how the yeast operate, the biology of the fermentation process and how it creates like the different flavors, the aromas, the tastes, which is great. And I love learning about that, and really sort of understanding sort of how that can sort of come in. So it's, it's great to sort of be able to talk about that and see sort of the passion come through when Brewer's Zeta, then I would say it's great. Looking around how it can integrate into that site and their specifics because everybody might have a slightly different brewer set up and you might have some that have, got various different pieces of kit that they've pulled together and they're concerned is like, can this be replicated at our site? How could this work? How can this integrate? And what we tried to say is the technology we're developing is really trying to be very modular so it can. easily integrate and can be configured to various sites. But there are some areas that we would say at the moment are blockers for sort of customers. We would generally say at the moment for our system, you really want to be sort of producing over like 20, 000 hectolitres of beer a year for us to give you a really good sort of payback, and a really good return on the system. you are tankering waste. Well, this makes it really easy for us to give you a huge payback. And there's a lot of value that can be created for that. And I would say that sort of, and integrating the gas and how that can be used. So I would say that the integration piece is a really, really important one. I know we get a lot of questions around that because it, it can really affect, the, the process. And you talked to that head brewer. They want to know everything that is going on that could impact the brew and the process and their process they're putting in place. And that is really important because you don't want to interrupt that process. Because that is the purpose of the business, and that's where you mentioned it caused issues to you previously, because it did affect that process. So it's making sure, and it's really good for us to understand that whole process, because it means that we can then make sure the system is integrated in a way that doesn't affect it. And there's various ways that we can integrate, like the gas utilization, and have those processes where there is a need. really minimal sort of disruption to that. For the third aspect, I would say it's, I'm trying to understand sort of the sustainability impact, for the brewery, how that could be integrated. And I think there can sometimes be sort of a negative opinion on methane. Because if methane is extracted as a fossil fuel and goes into the atmosphere, it can be really problematic. And I think there's sometimes, there's a lot of media coming out that are like, oh, methane is really bad, it can be really awful. Like, biomethane is a fantastic energy carrier. It's very easy to store, it can be very safe to store, and it can really easily integrate into Existing operations where other fuels can be quite difficult, like hydrogen is great. And I think it'd be a great fuel in certain industries and. I think it can get, it can be really good in the energy transition. But I would say for certain aspects, it's not as effective as by meeting and I think we need to make sure that and it's really good to try and communicate that this is a great energy source that you can utilize. Like waste and bioresidue that's not being unlocked at the moment, and it's a great way to help you reduce your thermal energy demands. It won't cover 100 percent of your thermal energy demands from your wastewater. To do that, you would want to be looking at extracting other sort of organic content like this spent grain. But obviously that goes to like animal feed a lot of the time, and there's a lot of other cool, interesting options to look at. Biomaterials now that are coming out within sourced spent grain as well. So I think we wouldn't want to necessarily, sort of, Divert that. Love that. Yeah. I actually read that. I think I might've read this similar article on what they're doing with brewer's pink rain recently and turning into like bioplastics. And also it's incredible. Tom, look, we're going to wrap this thing up here. So. If I'm a listener and I still have some more questions, or I want to learn a bit more, how can they go about doing Yeah, so? you can get in touch, go onto our website, wadeyspro. uk and we have a sort of contact us button there. we have also a phone number and our team, yeah, would really help, readily help to go through looking Your exact site, how much wastewater you're generating, and we can give you a rough indication of how much energy you can generate quite quickly, through sort of a value sort of unlocking sort of process that we can go through. So that's probably the easiest, quickest way, for us to get in touch. And if anybody's in Bristol, we're based in Bristol. we're also, happy, to have a meeting down here, quite conveniently located opposite, Y fridge free brewery, which is great. Yeah, that is a perfect spot for after work pints as Yeah, Yeah, it really is. It's quite dangerous in a good way. yeah, I think that's one of the most beautiful tap rooms I've seen in this country. I absolutely love that spot. It's so cool. So the interior design is It's great. And yeah, the beer is great. It's really nice. Good vibes. Love it. Look, Tom, I won't take up any more of your incredibly busy schedules. I know that you're around pushing ways, not just here, but all around the globe. So firstly and foremost, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I truly appreciate it. And yeah, thank you for bringing this technology to the industry. As I said, I've, I had such a bad taste in my mouth from anaerobic digestion, that to have that turned around is, is quite. Remarkable. And I only wish that this technology existed when we were making these decisions, because we definitely would have been one of the adopters of that. So thank you so much on behalf of, for the listeners for coming onto the podcast and of course, for Waze in the Thank you very much for the platform. It's a pleasure talking to you again. Hopefully we can share a beer sometime soon. that'd be lovely. All right. Catch you later, Tom. Well, that was a great episode. Really enjoy Dr. Thomas's enthusiasm and love for wastewater and the value it can bring to circular economies in the brewery. If you like the episode, please share with your friends, your brewing colleagues on Instagram or on LinkedIn. If anyone does that, I will just send them a t shirt. So if you want to do a share on Instagram or LinkedIn, tag me in it and I will send you a Modern Brewer Podcast t shirt. Thank you so much for listening and I will catch you on the next episode of the Modern Brewer Podcast.