The company claims to have prevented the waste of approximately 7 million pints of beer.
A year ago, as Boris Johnson announced the first lockdown, pubs abruptly closed, wasting millions of pounds’ worth of stock.
The Covid-19 pandemic has largely kept bars and eateries closed. According to the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA), this will result in the waste of almost 87 million pints.
The staff at Heineken’s Manchester brewery has developed a method to turn extra beer into electricity in an inventive bid to keep its stock from going to waste.
Using new machinery, the surplus inventory that was headed for pubs across the nation has been recycled.
Beer is taken out once more and stored in empty containers by turning the machinery that normally fills the kegs inside out.
The extra beer is then drip-fed into the on-site wastewater treatment facility, where it is put into an anaerobic digester, which aids in turning the beer into biogas, which is then captured to provide this renewable and sustainable energy.
The biogas is transformed into heat and electricity by the potent combined heat and power unit, which is housed within a shipping container.
Since May 2020, according to the Heineken team, 83,210 fifty-liter kegs have been transformed into energy.
By using nearly seven million pints of liquid that would have otherwise gone to waste, they were able to generate enough energy to heat about 28,000 typical UK homes for a day.
No brewer likes to see their beer not be appreciated, according to Matt Callan, Brewery and Operations Director at Heineken. “After all the care, attention, and passion that went into the beer in the first place, it would have been an immense shame to pour it down the drain,” he added.
“Our team of engineers and brewers at Manchester found a solution — using our kegging line for emptying beer barrels and converting the beer that would have went to waste into renewable energy to power the production of fresh beer, all ready for when the pubs re-open.”
Up to 87 million pints could have been thrown out, costing £331 million, according to an estimate made in February by the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA).
Pubs have lost millions of dollars in sales on beer that they have been obliged to destroy, with a pint costing an average of £3.81.
The brewing sector has been making efforts to go green. In 2018, AB InBev, the largest brewer in the world, pledged to use renewable energy in accordance with the Paris Agreement to fight pollution and climate change.
Additionally, Budweiser switched all of its US brewing to renewable electricity and is labeling its products with a clean energy emblem.