​Since 1991, the New Belgium Brewing Company has been brewing delicious craft beer at its brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA. New Belgium Brewing is the fourth-largest craft brewer in the United States and the eighth-largest brewery in the nation, producing popular brands including Fat Tire Belgian Ale, Voodoo Ranger IPA, and Citradelic IPA.
To keep pace with consumer demand, New Belgium Brewing expanded its operations by building a second brewery in Asheville, North Carolina, USA. The new facility is sized to produce upwards of 500,000 barrels of beer per year.
New Belgium Brewing’s core values include producing world-class beers and preserving environmental stewardship. As part of its sustainability efforts, New Belgium Brewing wanted a more responsible approach to managing its water. This included installing an on-site wastewater treatment system that would generate an effluent that far exceed the city’s discharge requirements.
Due to the limited amount of space available on-site and the fact that the facility is located near a residential area, the system needed to have a compact footprint and mitigate any odors associated with the wastewater treatment.
Evoqua’s ADI Systems was selected to design and build a customized on-site wastewater treatment solution for the Asheville brewery. The ADI® anaerobic membrane bioreactor (AnMBR) system was chosen as the best treatment solution for the brewery based on the design raw wastewater characteristics (a combination of process wastewater, spent yeast and hops), treatment requirements, limited space available, and the proximity of the wastewater treatment plant to a neighboring residential community.
The AnMBR system consists of a 330,000 gallon continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR) paired with an 86,000 gallon membrane tank. The system was designed to treat up to 142,000 gpd of wastewater and generate a final effluent with biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS) concentrations of less than 230 mg/l.
The new treatment system that Evoqua’s ADI Systems designed for New Belgium Brewing is generating a consistent high-quality final effluent that exceeds the discharge limits of the local publicly owned treatment works. The compact system is also meeting noise and odor limits, preventing any disruption to the surrounding neighbourhood.
