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Good day one and all,
I am not 100% sure if this is the right place for this but anyway.....
Sometime back I visited a brewery here in Africa and during my discussions with the operations manager I was surprised to hear that they had a major problem with spent Yeast! It would appear that at present they were producing approximately 15-20 wet tons of waste Yeast weekly, and they were dumping it at some cost into municiple systems. They informed me that at present the relevant muncipality was charging them a premium for this but had informed them that they had to make alternative arrangements in future as this could not carry on.
I was informed by the manager that their only recourse was to install costly drying equipment in order to dry the wet yeast from approximately 70% to 5% moisture which they could then sell on to farmers for feed. The reason for this, i was told, is that the wet yeast is problematic to handle and pack and the farmers cannot use the wet yeast. Besides the equipment cost was added the energy cost in the drying process and this all made the whole exercise costly and troublesome.
On some further investigation of my own it would appear that current yeast drying proccesses have a negative effect on the Yeast itself, in that the exposure for long periods of time to high temperatures tends to damage the Protein to a very significant level. I have heard that as much as 85% of the Protein is lost.
Why this was of any interest to me at all, was because I had been looking into effluent treatment in general for some time and I had come across some technology in my travels on this subject. One technology in particular struck me immediatly as the answer to this Breweries problem. I investigated further and am still putting it all together but I may have found a way to dry Yeast without any significant Protein loss at all!
I have spoken to local food producers and farmers about the possibility of supplying high quality spent Yeast at about 3-4% moisture content with very positive feedback.
Now how does this impact on the Brewer?
The cost of this drying technology is more than most current prosesses, but not significantly so. But I know from years of dealing with SAB MILLER, that their attitude is that "If it aint Brewing - we're not interested" This attitude is so strong within SAB that some years back they disbandend their project depatment because "they weren't in the business of building plants, they brewed Beer" So why not make the waste Yeast problem dissapear?
If someone develops and builds the drying facility reasonable close to the Brewery - say within 100 KM at no cost to the Brewery at all. My proposal will be to approach the brewery and ask then to do an assesment of the current cost, time and return their waste yeast efforts incompass. Then would it be of interest to them if they could simply load their wet yeast directly into tankers and transport it off site to somebody else, off load it forget about it? The total cost would be the transport of the wet product to the drying facility.
This brings me to the crux of this thread. I would like to dertermine -
A) Is wet Yeast handling and disposal that much of a
problem for Breweries? At this point I guess we need to
put some sort of size to this so let's talk of Breweries
with 15 wet tons per week.
B) If so - would my above proposal be of interest to the
Brewery?
Any feedback from this community would be most helpfull nfor me determine if it's worthwhile pursuing this avenue or not.
Thank you for your interest.
I am not 100% sure if this is the right place for this but anyway.....
Sometime back I visited a brewery here in Africa and during my discussions with the operations manager I was surprised to hear that they had a major problem with spent Yeast! It would appear that at present they were producing approximately 15-20 wet tons of waste Yeast weekly, and they were dumping it at some cost into municiple systems. They informed me that at present the relevant muncipality was charging them a premium for this but had informed them that they had to make alternative arrangements in future as this could not carry on.
I was informed by the manager that their only recourse was to install costly drying equipment in order to dry the wet yeast from approximately 70% to 5% moisture which they could then sell on to farmers for feed. The reason for this, i was told, is that the wet yeast is problematic to handle and pack and the farmers cannot use the wet yeast. Besides the equipment cost was added the energy cost in the drying process and this all made the whole exercise costly and troublesome.
On some further investigation of my own it would appear that current yeast drying proccesses have a negative effect on the Yeast itself, in that the exposure for long periods of time to high temperatures tends to damage the Protein to a very significant level. I have heard that as much as 85% of the Protein is lost.
Why this was of any interest to me at all, was because I had been looking into effluent treatment in general for some time and I had come across some technology in my travels on this subject. One technology in particular struck me immediatly as the answer to this Breweries problem. I investigated further and am still putting it all together but I may have found a way to dry Yeast without any significant Protein loss at all!
I have spoken to local food producers and farmers about the possibility of supplying high quality spent Yeast at about 3-4% moisture content with very positive feedback.
Now how does this impact on the Brewer?
The cost of this drying technology is more than most current prosesses, but not significantly so. But I know from years of dealing with SAB MILLER, that their attitude is that "If it aint Brewing - we're not interested" This attitude is so strong within SAB that some years back they disbandend their project depatment because "they weren't in the business of building plants, they brewed Beer" So why not make the waste Yeast problem dissapear?
If someone develops and builds the drying facility reasonable close to the Brewery - say within 100 KM at no cost to the Brewery at all. My proposal will be to approach the brewery and ask then to do an assesment of the current cost, time and return their waste yeast efforts incompass. Then would it be of interest to them if they could simply load their wet yeast directly into tankers and transport it off site to somebody else, off load it forget about it? The total cost would be the transport of the wet product to the drying facility.
This brings me to the crux of this thread. I would like to dertermine -
A) Is wet Yeast handling and disposal that much of a
problem for Breweries? At this point I guess we need to
put some sort of size to this so let's talk of Breweries
with 15 wet tons per week.
B) If so - would my above proposal be of interest to the
Brewery?
Any feedback from this community would be most helpfull nfor me determine if it's worthwhile pursuing this avenue or not.
Thank you for your interest.
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