Bluntrock Brewery wants to lead the way in sustainability in its sector. Here, co-founder Hugo Roads tells the story behind its new carbon capture system.
The Bluntrock team with their new carbon capture system and Anurag, from Hypro, who travelled from Mumbai for the installation
The brewing process is resource-heavy and has large emission sources, from the agricultural
emissions in the ingredients used, right through to the transportation of beer to customers.
We want to do everything we can to help future-proof our beloved industry, so with the realisation
that our impact was only going to grow with the brewery, we put a lot of thought into the best
investments that we could include in our expansion, to help us become a more sustainable
business.
Initially, the most obvious choice to us was the opportunity of carbon dioxide recovery. Here, the CO2 produced as a by-product of fermentation of beer is captured, rather than letting it drift away into the atmosphere. Once captured, the CO2 is then cleaned, stored, and re-used for use in carbonating the beer, in the packaging process, and for purging tanks. This creates a closed loop, effectively taking a waste by-product and streaming it back into the business for re-use. The circular economy approach that carbon capture achieves resonates perfectly with our sustainability goals, so including this technology in our expansion became a top priority.
CO2 recovery systems are relatively new to the craft beer industry, having previously only been scoped for macro-scale breweries, but the technology is achieving greater accessibility and effectiveness year on year. SSV, the company who installed our brewery, recommended the new HyCrC CO2 recovery system by the India-based company Hypro; a compact, user-friendly solution for smaller craft breweries, which delivers a supply of 99.995% pure liquid CO2 at a rate of more than 15kg per hour. This will save us about 51kg of CO2 every batch!
After arriving in the UK in early April, our new HyCrC system has just been commissioned by Anurag, one of the engineers from Hypro. He flew all the way from Mumbai in India to be here for commissioning.
We’re delighted to say that we will be the very first Cornish brewery to have one of these systems installed, and we can’t wait to put it to the test. Here’s to a more sustainable brewing future here at Bluntrock!
