VICTORIA MARTINEZ
News Editor

The brewmaster and owner of Paddock Wood dropped by the University of Saskatchewan for a pint of his 606 ale and a talk on Oct. 20. Aside from making delicious, unique local beer, Steve Cavan wants to make sustainable brew.

To that end, Cavan hopes to build a new brewery outside the city, with larger and cleaner production. The new brewery would allow him to create more adventurous beer than his already artisanal line. He wants to use some “really exotic Lambics” in the Belgian style, which is pretty generally delicious, but that would require using some vile bacteria, which couldn’t happen in the city.

“I’m kind of hoping we can do it in a couple years — we just have to increase our volume just a little bit,” he said.

Diverting grain from methane to mushrooms

A huge part of the waste from beer brewing is spent grain, a mix of grain husks and seed bits from after the mashing process. Normally, this stuff gets fed to animals.

There’s one major problem with this process: methane. Apparently, cows expelling gaseous waste from their nether regions is an actual environmental problem now (just like that Arrogant Worms song!).

In 1989, a German chemist named Dieter Ehhalt estimated that “the world’s cattle emit into the atmosphere approaching 100 million tonnes of methane each year, enough to warm up the planet.” So yeah, it is an issue.

Cattle that eat grasses, their normal pasture, will not be nearly as methane flatulent as those eating grain, so to be more environmentally friendly, all that spent grain has to go somewhere else.

One super green brewery, Sierra Nevada, uses fuel cells to convert bio gases, including those from spent grain breakdown, to electric power for the brewery. They also sell off excess electricity to the grid. Heat from the process heats the brewery itself and the steam helps boil beer and clean tanks.

Under Richard Evitts, a professor whose specialization includes fuel cell electrochemistry, chemical engineering students at the U of S studied the anaerobic digestion of spent grains to see the viability for a local microbrewery like Cavan’s. Cavan doesn’t have the funds to implement a fuel cell — which would require high beer production — but says that by the time he builds his next brewery, he could hopefully find investors.

Other breweries, like Storm Brewing in Newfoundland, use the spent grains to grow mushrooms, particularly shiitake, which find a nearly ideal environment in the mash.

For now, Cavan’s best solution is vermicomposting.

“The worms take what is a low-grade protein and turn it into their body mass, which is high-grade protein,” explained Cavan. Cavan envisions using turkeys to eat the worms, thereby separating worms from the grain pretty efficiently. Plus, their droppings, unlike cow farts, are good for the earth. They make great fertilizer.

Other creative green options exist for larger breweries, like recapturing carbon dioxide released from the fermenting process and piping it to a greenhouse, rather than releasing the gas.

Estrogen and toxins

As for the post-brewing process, Cavan has already implemented what he considers to be the best option. Paddock Wood beer all comes in bottles or kegs, not cans.

The beer on tap is available at a few local bars and from the brewery itself. Kegs obviously cut packaging and can be refilled. The choice of glass bottles was a more important decision.

“Glass has a very negligible impact on the environment,” he explained, citing the abundance and inherent cleanliness of the sand used in its production, compared to aluminum cans, which come from a smelting process that leaves behind five times the aluminum’s mass in acidic red sludge.

To boot, cans are generally lined with estrogen-filled Bisphenol-A plastic, which as of Sept. 23 has been officially listed as toxic in Canada. We could just drop the toxic plastic from packages but then that whole metallic taste interferes with beer taste, and that’s no good for anyone.

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image: Pete Yee