MILWAUKEE - Crack open a beer and what ripples out is 95 percent water.
Water quality determines taste. Water is why beer ads tend to mythologize springs, glaciers and aquifers. It’s why the MillerCoors brewery in Milwaukee ranks as the biggest user of water in the Milwaukee region.
Yet the vast preponderance of water used to create a cold one isn’t added at the brewery. Rather, it irrigates the fields that produce beer’s next most critical ingredient: barley.
Today, Miller Coors and others in the water-intensive brewing industry are confirming what scientists and environmentalists have already figured out: Supplies of cheap, seemingly limitless fresh water are drawing to a close, even in the world’s most developed nations.
“No water, no beer,” said Kim Marotta, who oversees water policies at MillerCoors.
As a gesture to water conservation practices, Miller-Coors in 2011 turned a barley farm in southern Idaho, one of its biggest suppliers, into a showcase of smart irrigation.
The brewer gave a grant approaching $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, whose irrigation experts transformed the 5,000-acre farm at the headwaters of Silver Creek into a testing ground for conservation technologies. They installed soil sensors with GPS satellite connections and smartphone applications, all designed to add water efficiently and only as needed. They redesigned the spigots and valves on the long arms of centerpivot systems for more precise irrigation that also reduces evaporation waste.
The farm saved 270 million gallons in its first two years, enough to supply one of the large MillerCoors breweries for two months. Using the same model, MillerCoors is introducing its watershed management practices to other barley farms in the most distressed areas of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming.
The push to save water began when an internal inventory done after the 2008 joint venture that combined the U.S. operations of SAB Miller and Molson Coors revealed that three of the venture’s eight major U.S.breweries - those in central Texas, southern California and the flagship Coors facility in Colorado - rely on water sources that were already at risk of being overstretched.
The internal audit didn’t stop at the breweries. It also found that many of the barley farmers who supply Miller-Coors operate in water-stressed regions of Colorado, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
“Barley is to beer as grapes is to wine,” Marotta said.
MillerCoors also implemented water conservation strategies at its breweries - not just those deemed most vulnerable, but even in water-abundant Milwaukee.It added valves, sensors and systems that reduce water use. It reorganized workers into “sustainability councils,” joined forces with nonprofits like the Nature Conservancy, and moved to the front lines of the conservation crusade.
Also, because the 5 percent of a beer that isn’t water - basically, the barley and hops - requires torrentially more water to grow and malt than what’s added at the brewery, the brewer became enmeshed in agriculture and irrigation methods.
All told, it takes 300 barrels of water on average to produce a single barrel of beer, with only three or four of those barrels added at a modern, efficient brewery.
The growing and malting of barley thrust Marotta’s water-sustainability teams into the heart of the most serious water issue that confronts just about any economy: Agriculture guzzles far more fresh water than all homes, industries, swimming pools and golf courses combined.
Because of inefficient irrigation, like the jumbo center-pivot systems that douse indiscriminately in circular patterns and pump heavily from underground aquifers, agriculture is often the biggest waster of water as well. For many water activists, Exhibit A is the eight-state Ogallala aquifer that irrigates Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and much of the nation’s breadbasket. The Ogallala for decades has been falling faster than it recharges.
Most notable among the malt barley farms are those in the troubled San Luis Valley of Colorado, a major agricultural basin and home to 150 growers who supply MillerCoors, including one farm directly owned by Coors. San Luis Valley farmers have over-pumped the valley’s groundwater for decades, in an area without regular rainfall.
MillerCoors’ efforts are sure to spill into other industries, experts say. Since 1950, water demand has tripled as farmers intensify their efforts to feed growing world populations, industries expand, middle-class affluence spreads in developing countries, and data centers and Internet server farms multiply and need to be cooled.
The United Nations projects that by 2030, nearly half of the world’s population could face a scarcity of water, with demand outstripping supply by 40 percent.
“It’s an inevitability that industries in general are going to have to take water conservation more seriously and ignore their own water consumption at their own peril,” said Russell McLendon, an environmental anthropologist and science editor at Mother Nature Network, a leading environmental website. “Water is becoming more expensive in general.”
The U.S. has avoided the most severe of the world’s water bottlenecks so far. But a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a centrist environmental nonprofit, predicts that 1,100 counties - one-third of the lower 48 states - will face higher risks of shortages by midcentury. “More than 400 of these counties will face extremely high risks of water shortages,” it said.
The brewing industry provides a barometer for the economic effect of global water issues. Between them, the parent companies of MillerCoors operate 206 breweries around the world that illustrate the localized differences.
In arid South Africa, for instance, SABMiller needs more than three times more water to make Castle lager and Carling Black Label than the company’s 1839-founded Plzensky Prazdroj brewery in the Czech Republic, maker of the world’s first golden Pilsener, Pilsner Urquell. The reasons are almost exclusively related to irrigation, the company said.
Many breweries have already made strides in lowering water use, according to the Brewers Association, a U.S. brewing trade group.
A little more than a decade ago, the average brewery needed seven barrels of water to make one barrel of beer, including water to cool equipment and rinse kettles (but not including the huge volumes used to nourish crops). Most breweries today are around a 5-to-1 ratio, with MillerCoors doing better than the industry average.
Water conservation efforts also are underway at Anheuser-Busch InBev, brewer of Budweiser; Stella Artois; and Guinness, the only U.S. brewing group bigger than MillerCoors. Anheuser-Busch has cut its water use by 19 percent since 2009, according to its website.
Business, Pages 19 on 03/24/2014