Bofferding Brewery Makes Environment-Conscious Investments

On Thursday 16 December 2021, Luxembourg's Brasserie Nationale, also known as the Bofferding brewery, invited Chronicle.lu for a tour of the brewery and shared its efforts on environment-conscious decisions to invest in energy saving new equipment and several ecological ongoing changes.

Mathias Lentz, Director and Maurice Treinen, production manager and also known as the "brewmaster", introduced the brewing equipment "Merlin", first of its kind in the greater region, which has a cone shaped bottom leading to bigger heating area requiring 55% less energy and half the time to boil the mash than the traditional equipment.

Overall, the "Merlin" equipment saves 12% of total energy equivalent.

The Bofferding brewery produces about 100,000 litres of beer per day and brews between fifteen to 20 batches per week.

The brewery uses electricity produced by 100% renewable and hydroelectric sources.

The heated wort (unfermented beer) is needed to cool down before the yeast can be added for fermentation, and heat exchangers are equipped to recycle this energy. The energy exchangers are coupled with large water towers that recycle the water for both heating and cooling needs which reduced the water usage by 50% and gas and electricity usage by 30%.

Mr Lentz and Mr Treinen also showed the Carbondioxide (CO2) recovery and storage equipment that recovers CO2 from the fermentation step and later uses it during the bottling of the beer. This machinery, a common practice for most breweries, not only recycles CO2 but also avoids adding CO2 to the environment.

Mr Lentz also presented the automated cleaning systems in place for the storage and brewing equipment, which helped reducing water usage by 60% to 70%, and cleaning detergents by 50%. It also reduce the downtime (time needed for cleaning) and is more environment friendly.

the Bofferding brewery is also equipped with rooftop solar panels generating about 30 Mw (Megawatts) of electricity per year since 2018.

In addition to beer, the Bofferding brewery recently ventured into bottled mineral water, "Lodyss", starting in March 2021. The whole plant had an estimated investment of €8 million.

Mr Lentz emphasised the decision to use only glass and not plastic (PET, Polyethylene terephthalate) for Lodyss bottled water was part of their ecological, sustainable and recyclable efforts. Mr Treinen highlighted that currently 70% of the glass bottles are recycled and they would continue working with the distributors to reach 90% or more recycling in the coming years. Four million litres of Lodyss bottled water has been produced this year alone.

For its environment friendly investments and upgrades, the Bofferding brewery has been awarded the "European awards for the environment" and "Environmental Prize for Industry", both in 2002.

Taking note of the continuous upgrades and on-going construction of a water filtration system, Mr Treinen explained: "brewing is all about building something new, all the time".

Touching on the topic of rising energy costs, Mr Lentz stated that Bofferding brewery is well positioned in terms of advance procurement contracts of raw materials and rising energy costs are partly offset by the continuous energy saving steps.

Mr Lentz and Mr Treinen also presented their latest installation of a much compact and upgraded heating equipment, for which they do not have energy savings data yet but are upbeat about its positive environmental affects in further energy-efficient brewing.