Bayou Teche creates an eco-friendly brewery
As local craft beers continue to explode in popularity, Bayou Teche Brewery has carved its own niche with a steady release of pale ales, seasonal and barrel-aged beers.
The brewery is also turning heads thanks to its wetlands system, which uses the wastewater from the beer-making process in an effort to be more environmentally conscious.
The brewery is located along the Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, which previously dealt with decades of pollution. About five years ago, passionate residents along the Teche pressured local government officials to clean up the waterways. Now, the bayou is an attraction that can be used for fishing, kayaking and swimming.
“[The bayou has] become a great asset for the community,” Knott says. “When we were building the brewery, we definitely didn’t want to do anything that would adversely affect that waterway.”
When construction started in 2009, Knott wanted to use wastewater in a way that wouldn’t affect the overall health of the bayou, but help create a wildlife habitat instead.
“For every gallon of beer you drink, you waste anywhere from three to six gallons of water,” Knott says. “Often times, breweries will put that in a municipal sewage system. Some of the big breweries set up their own septic system where the water is cleaned and dumped into city sewage. We wanted to turn that water into an asset for us.”
In working with the late Ron Sheffield of the LSU AgCenter and Whitney Broussard, a research scientist at UL Lafayette, the brewery developed a three-step process.
The waste first goes to a deep pond where the solids are settled out. Then, the water is pumped over to a man-made marsh where plants such as cattails, cypress and red maple soak up more of the waste and further purify the water. Once the water is purified and has filled in the second stage, it gets released into a third man-made marsh the brewery uses as a crawfish farm.
Without these systems in place, the wastewater would be dumped straight into the bayou, creating an algae bloom and a waterway where fish couldn’t survive. Broussard put the final pieces of the wetland system together, creating a pond and habitat that breaks down all of the waste. By creating this system, he says the brewery is improving the quality of water in the bayou relative to the runoff that comes from urban streets.
“From a water quality perspective, it takes everyone in that watershed to improve a water body’s health,” he says. “Bayou Teche Brewery is an example of a conscientious business working to improve that watershed.”
