Germany's green brewery
January 3, 2012
Project scale: The brewery employs 28 workers who brew 29,000 hectoliters (about 100 liters) of beer each year.
Energy sources: hydropower, solar energy and bio-diesel
Carbon savings: around 9,000 tons each year
Gottfried Härle operates Germany's first ever climate-neutral brewery in Leutkirch in Bavaria. He was ridiculed at first for his green approach towards beer-making. But now, visitors from all over the world come to Leutkirchen to see first-hand how he goes about brewing his beer in an environmentally-friendly way. In 2010, Härle received the German Sustainable Award for his work.
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He has a simple recipe for success. The furnace in the brewery is heated with wood chips sourced from local forests. That saves an estimated 120,000 liters of heating oil and as a result 350 tons of carbon dioxide each year. Three solar panels on the roof power the brewery while all the firm's trucks have been running on bio-diesel for more than ten years. To ensure that his brewery has a light carbon footprint, Härle makes sure that all the raw materials for the fuel come from Germany. The brewery opts for canola and sunflower oil rather than widely-used palm oil from Indonesia.
In the film, we accompany a group of students from a technical high school in Finland as they vist the brewery. They learn from Härle where and how energy can be saved in the brewing process and how emissions can be lowered to make a truly climate-neutral brew.
A film by Vanessa Fischer/sp