Hall and Woodhouse brews up environmentally sustainable beer

Hall and Woodhouse, which owns many pubs across Sussex, has now found a sustainable solution for unsold beer.

Over the last year huge amounts of beer have been returned to breweries, thrown away or spoiled due to the pubs being forced to shut.

The brewery managed to use the returned beer and convert it into green electricity by using the biogas it creates. This was done by using their wastewater treatment plant. The amount of energy created from the beer could power 17,000 homes for a day – or 46 homes for a whole year.

Hall and Woodhouse brewery.

Toby Heasman, Hall & Woodhouse head brewer, said: “Although lockdown meant that many of our pubs had to return unsold beer back to the brewery, the silver lining has been that none of this has gone to waste.

“Thanks to our wastewater treatment plant, all of the returned beer has been used to generate green electricity.”

While pubs were closed, fans of Hall & Woodhouse’s award-winning Badger Ales turned to supermarkets to buy their favourite beers. This led to an increase in sales.

The increase in demand for Badger Ales through supermarkets also helped boost the amount of green electricity produced by the brewery. This is due to the fact the wastewater created during the ale brewing process is also processed through the sustainable electricity generators.

Inside the Hall and Woodhouse brewery.

The brewing company for the last six years has wanted to be more sustainable and figure out ways to use more green energy.

Toby said: “Brewing is a highly energy-intensive process, so as far back as 2015, we started to look at ways we could incorporate more green energy into the way we work.

“The decision was made to make sustainable energy production an integral part of our new brewery, which came into operation in 2017.

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“In addition to solar panels, we installed a wastewater treatment plant, which creates biogas. The biogas is fed through a unit which generates electricity to power our packaging lines and utilities.”