Extreme Variations in
Brewery Waste Characteristics and
Their Effect on Treatment
J. T. O'ROURKE, Graduate Student
and
H. D. TOMLINSON, Associate Director
Environmental and Sanitary Engineering Division
Washington University,
Saint Louis 30, Missouri
Prior to the turn of the century, the problems of waste treatment associated with the brewing industry were not serious since there were a great number of waste sources with only relatively small pollutional loads. Today,
however, the industry is producing 2.5 times as much beer with only . 10 the
number of breweries that were operating in 1900 (1,2). It is this 25 fold concentration of brewing activities that has imposed some serious problems on
existing sewage treatment facilities and has created a need for new or additional facilities in the municipalities where the breweries are located. A
single brewery, in a moderately sized community, may double or even triple
the total pollutional load of the community in terms of biologically oxidizable material (3). The industry, in general, has done an outstanding job in
reducing the strength of their liquid wastes by employing extensive by-product
recovery. It has not, however, made much progress in eliminating the soluble organic materials from its final waste streams.
During 1960, 229 breweries operating in 33 of the 50 states, consumed in
excess of four billion lbs of farm products and paid nearly 800 million dollars
in federal taxes, while producing some 94 million barrels of beer (2). At the
same time this industry discharged between 180 to 500 gals of waste per barrel of beer brewed containing from 400 to 1, 200 mg/l of five-day BOD and
from 200 to 500 mg/l of suspended solids (4, 5).
From this current production of beer, it is estimated that the brewing industry discharges between 17 and 47 billion gals of waste annually, or an
average of approximately 82 mgd. It is further estimated that the industry
discharges in excess of 430, OOfl lbs of five-day BOD per day. This is equivalent to the waste discharged by nearly three million persons per day.
PURPOSE
Since the final composite waste from any brewery is the combination of
wastes from various batch type operations, its strength and constituency may
vary greatly. The extent of these extreme hourly variations has never been
reported. The purpose of this study was two-fold; first, to determine the
magnitude of the hourly variations in strength of a total brewery waste and,
secondly, to determine the amenability to biological treatment of the composite wastes by the total oxidation principle.
The first phase of this investigation included the measurement of hourly
waste  discharges  from  a typical brewery and the collection of continuous
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