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Beer Cities, Craft Brewers Are Looking to PVC Pipe
At Vinyl360 last month, we were lucky to hear from several water infrastructure professionals. One surprising session was about how PVC pipe can be useful for beer cities.
Christina Davenport joined us from the City of Bend, Oregon, where she is a city program manager in environmental compliance. Bend, which is known as a beer city, has 24 craft breweries, a cidery, a distillery, and several kombucha producers. The city regularly competes with Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine for the most breweries per capita.
A presentation about breweries may not be what you’d typically expect at a plastics industry conference. But what we learned during Davenport’s presentation is that brew waste can be really hard on pipes and wastewater treatment plants.
For one thing, brew waste has very high biological oxygen demand, making it super high-strength waste. Beer brewing creates some pretty drastic fluctuations in pH and temperature. For example, beer maintains a pH level of about 4. But when brewers clean the barrels, they’re using caustics that are much more basic and can reach a pH of 12. Additionally, beer brewing can reach temperatures over 165 degrees. When you combine that with hydrogen sulfide, you get sulfuric acid, which is incredibly corrosive.
That’s where PVC pipe can help, Davenport said. Due to PVC’s resilience, it can handle large temperature and pH fluctuations without damaging the integrity of the piping product.
There’s no way around it that brewing impacts water infrastructure. One craft brewer in Bend brews upward of 500,000 barrels/year and sends more than 25,000 gallons of waste to the treatment plant each day. In her presentation, Davenport showed a photo of one downstream metal pipe from this particular brewer that lasted only a year and half before it corroded to the point where there was a hole in the pipe and needed replacement.
Davenport mentioned that the city is trying to get standards and specs changed so that the trenches are lined with PVC so they can prevent future corrosion and ensure longevity of their infrastructure.
We’ve long known the benefits of PVC in water infrastructure – but we now have a new reason to boast the advantages of PVC: to ensure our beer is brewed!
Learn more about the benefits of PVC piping here.