SOLARBREW · Solar Brewing the Future

The objective of the project is to demonstrate the technical and economical feasibility of large-scale solar thermal system integration in the brewing industry for the first time. Brewing and malting processes are especially suitable to be supplied by solar thermal systems since basically all required processes are in the temperature range between 50°C and 100°C.Three large-scale solar thermal systems are going to be applied at three different sites: in one drying process of a malting plant, at one mashing process of a brewery and one pasteurizing process of a brewery. The total installed capacity of the three plants is going to be 5.08 MWth, corresponding to 7,270 m² of collector area. Besides the different processes also different climatic zones were chosen for the solar thermal systems in order to evaluate the performance of the plants under different solar radiation conditions. The objective is to have good examples and best practices for the brewing sector which can act as the basis for the large-scale market deployment of the huge potential of the solar thermal source in the whole beverage sector.Special efforts are going to be devoted to an integrated approach combining energy efficiency measures in the brewing and malting processes itself and advanced solar integration concepts, which are adapted to the special requirements of these processes.Special requirements of the type and size of solar thermal systems relate to stagnation behaviour, collector field hydraulics and an intelligent heat storage management in combination with the related batch processes.Based on the operation experience and the monitoring results the so called “Green brewery sector concept” will be developed. This sector concept will serve as basis for a broad European wide training and dissemination programme, which is going to take place for the energy manager of all breweries of the HEINEKEN group, solar experts and energy consultants.