mowilly

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Interesting.

Anyone see this?:

jgln

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Kind of sounds like a gimmick. I mean ok so it is filtered rainwater. Water from the ground is filtered rainwater too. I wonder how long it takes to collect all that water?

pnj

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I saw that this morning. They can only use this method during part of the yea, I'm guessing....?

Do they add salts and whatnot for different beers?

mowilly

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I don't know what the various filters do. Some might add salt. I would get it more, if it were a place like the mountains, but in a city... All of that pollution is coming down in the rain. I don't know... Maybe I'll go there and try one of their brews.

jds

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Hey, all my beer comes from rainwater too!

In fact, ALL beer comes from rainwater. You know those deep aquifers? yeah, that was once rainwater too.

I smell a gimmick.

jgln

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I think they would need a large collection surface in order to collect enough rain and that surface would need to be exposed, so my question is how clean is that surface? I mean you got dead bugs, live bugs, bird poop, dead birds, bird feathers and just about anything else you can imagine. At least the water in the ground in filtered by soil. I would have to see and understand how they do it before I would drink it. If they filter it anyway what is the sense?

frolickingmonkey

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The sense in using rainwater is that its not coming from the aquifer. In some places, including my former home in Moscow, Idaho, the aquifer level is dropping at an alarming rate (1-2 feet per year). This being our only source of water in the area, and not knowing how deep the aquifer actually goes, the concern was that if we continued to use groundwater at the same or greater rate, we may run out. Utilizing rainwater, even just for irrigating your garden or lawn, can offset your water bill and consumption significantly (lots of research has been done on this), and on this larger scale can be even more significant. As for how much area is needed to produce enough water to brew? Well, you may be surprised.

Collection Area (sq. ft) x Rainfall (in/yr.) / 12 (in/ft) = Cubic Feet of Water/Year
Cubic Feet/Year x 7.43 (Gallons/Cubic Foot) = Gallons/Year

So, working with the example of Five Seasons Brewery in Atlanta, where average annual rainfall is 50 in/yr., a 500 sq. ft roof will produce 2,083 Cubic Feet or 15,477 Gallons of water per year.

So, if we consider brewing at the 7bbl level (217 gal.), and that it takes roughly 5 times that amount of water to produce the beer (mash, evap, cooling, cleaning, etc), that's 1085 gal. per batch. That means from the 15,477 gal. collected, you could brew 14, 7bbl batches of beer, and still have a few hundred gallons leftover. This water is FREE (it just falls from the sky!) so think about how much money would be saved by the brewery, and how quickly they would pay for the tanks, pipe, filters and other equipment for this setup. Also consider how much water was not pumped out of the aquifer. And remember, this is with only 500 sq. ft. of roof! It's a wonder to me that more people don't collect and use rainwater...

And, to give you an idea of how much volume 15,000 gallons is, here's a visual aid. Each tank can hold 15,000 gallons. Notice the guy standing between the two tanks to give you a sense of scale.

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Ewalk02

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So let me get this straight, in order to not draw down the aquifer you are going to cut off the feed to it....sounds a little asinine to me. I think I'm going to have to dump 15,477 gallons out of my faucet each year just to offset this asshole who is cutting off the aquifers source. Its all a huge circle, this "Green" beer is probably no less environmentally harmful that any other beer. What about all the filtering that has to be done to this rainwater, something tells me they are probably using the oh so bad coal fired energy to power the pumps. This is whole thing is just a marketing ploy....I'm sure it probably worked out pretty good too.

justflow1983

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Much of the rainwater gets used in other ways before it makes it to the aquifer. Aquifers are generated as the storage of extra water not used immediately in the environment over the course of many years. It is the water that was not drank by animals, exhaled by trees, absorbed by the soil, or evaporated from puddles into the air, and is a sort of storage bank of all the remainders. By pumping up water from the aquifer you are tapping into an extra reserve of water to the system, but by using rainwater you are using the raw source before it gets reduced, which is actually much easier for the surrounding system to compensate for (since most of the rain makes it to the ground anyway). Also, reducing aquifers in coastal areas negatively pressurizes the groundwater, encouraging infiltration by seawater which makes the entire aquifer useless.

The rainwater can also be filtered fairly easily and naturally. A small particulate filter and minor chemical treatment are all that is needed generally to make it potable, although there are plenty of other available methods.

Depending on your climate it could be very green or not green at all. However, as a means of combating aquifer depletion it is definitely a legitimate and effective method.

rico567

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There's a huge amount of faddism and "what's happen' now" in all the "green" hype. Normally, one of Sturgeon's Laws* is a good rule of thumb. In this case, read "Ignore nearly everything not empirically demonstrable."

*the one that states "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

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