BrewRight

Brewright is one of the two finalists for the Impact Award of the AtlasInvest Entrepreneurship Grant 2023.

Core business

Currently, large polluters are investing in carbon capture technologies to offset their emission, allowing them to continue polluting. Such a ‘business as usual’ mentality is, however, the opposite of a sustainable mentality. We, at BrewRight, believe in disruptive change by helping smaller companies become more circular that do not have the means to do so.

This is specifically the case in the Dutch brewering industry, where the large breweries already have technology to become more circular while medium-, small- and micro-breweries do not. Consequently, Dutch craft breweries produced approximately 5,6 kilotons CO2 in 2021. To put this into perspective: 2,8 million trees need to be planted to compensate this emission. This is mostly because of two steps in the beer brewing process of medium-, small- and microbreweries. First CO2 produced by yeast during fermentation is released into the air, while only a couple of steps later CO2 is bought for the bottling of beer. This means that biogenic CO2 is released into the air while at the same time fossil CO2 is bought. Besides the environmental impact, many breweries also have financial issues as the CO2 price has increased four to five-fold, due to the Russian gas crisis.

Our solution is to create a downscaled carbon capture system, which captures CO2 emitted during fermentation phase. A part of this captured CO2 is used for the bottling of beer, while the remaining CO2 is excess and can be sold to other local companies. Additionally, the system will track the amount of CO2 captured at fermentation, which will be used to set up carbon trading and carbon offsetting schemes. Besides CO2, the system will also capture other gaseous compounds that can enhance the flavour of beer. Therefore, with the prototype we are developing breweries will have an increased resource efficiency and profits, decreased carbon footprint, and an enhanced taste of beer.