Gulpener builds most sustainable brew house in Europe

In 2014, Gulpener won the MVO Nederland Award; an award for the leading sustainable company of the past decade. That was not an end point for the Limburg beer brewer, but a stop on the road to further sustainability. The objective for 2020 is ambitious: to achieve a completely fossil-free brewery.

In recent years, Gulpener engineers, sustainability experts and colleagues from brewhouse manufacturer Meura have worked hard. They developed a brewhouse in which innovative brewing and energy techniques make the use of fossil fuels completely unnecessary. Construction of the most sustainable brewhouse in Europe has now begun. This means that 75% less energy will be needed, everything will run on 100% renewable electricity, and only local ingredients will be used in the process.

A new mash filter

The new brewhouse of Gulpener is full of innovation. The brewing of beer can be divided into a hot and a cold part. The warm part of the process takes place in the new brewhouse and features many new techniques.

In the current mashing process, the brewer soaks the malt (sprouted barley) in warm water so that the starch can convert to sugars. When all the starch is converted from the malt, the brew is clarified (filtered). The brew comes to a stop in a filtering vat, the malt residue and chaff sink to the bottom of the vat and form a natural filter bed through which the brew is filtered. What remains is wort (barley sugar water) - the beginning of beer.

The new mash filter does things differently. The barley is still only partially malted, and malted and unmalted barley are ground together into flour and pressed through a filter after mashing. This is fast and efficient, and it yields five to ten percent more wort.

Craft Ecostripper

After mashing, the wort is boiled to make it food safe and to distill substances like DMS and alpha acids from the brew. Traditionally this is done in large boiling kettles, but starting next year the new Ecostripper will do the job. It does not boil, but pushes the wort through a six-meter high vertical tube with hot steam in small quantities. This is a lot faster, costs less energy and also ensures that only 1% of the brew is lost instead of 9% when boiling in the current brew house. Gulpener is the first specialty beer brewery in the world with an Ecostripper.

Heat pump innovation

A new innovative heat pump will provide the energy for the brew house. Heat pumps are a popular sustainable choice because they can significantly increase the temperature of a medium with relatively little energy. They also run on (renewable green) electricity rather than gas.

A brewery is a suitable place for a heat pump because a lot of heat and a lot of cooling is required in the process. The residual heat of about 50 to 60 degrees that is released from the coolers will soon be upgraded by the heat pump to 130 degrees - enough for the brewing process. The innovation in the pump thus goes hand in hand with innovative techniques of the brew house. The pump can efficiently supply steam and hot water - and the new processes are designed for that. With the heat pump, Gulpener's new brew house will be completely fossil-free. To install the heat pump (completion 2020-2021), Gulpener has received a subsidy from the Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland.

Cooperation with local farmers

Socially responsible business is not new to Gulpener. Already in the 1990s, Paul Rutten, who has since retired, embarked on this path. Gulpener is the only company in the Netherlands that has been using locally grown barley and hops for over twenty years. The barley is grown on 450 hectares of land in Limburg, by farmers who are friends of the family business. Two thirds of the hops come from hop grower Wouters in Reijmerstok. Many growers work organically, they all have the Planet Proof label.

With the arrival of the new mash filter, it will be possible to start using other types of grain. Gulpener has already asked its farmers to grow Limburg primal grains such as emmer, primal wheat, spelt and rye. Long live biodiversity and long live a less environmentally damaging agriculture.

More information: Gulpener Brewhouse