ATETA Case Study - Church Farm Brewery

Title:               ATETA Case Study - Church Farm Brewery 

Duration:        2.35 mins

Begins

[Logo of University of Birmingham, ATETA, and European Regional Development Fund]

[TEXT: ATETA has supported over 200 businesses in the West Midlands, including Church Farm Brewery.]

[Andrew Reynolds, Head Brewer, Church Farm Brewery] We're at Church Farm Brewery and we're in the brewery. We're an ex-dairy farm that now produces beer on site. Our largest expense is chilling beer basically, cooling beer down and keeping it cold. And so when we were approached by the University about doing some sort of project,  we immediately went, it's the cooling in the beer we need to look at.

[TEXT: How has ATETA heled Church Farm Brewery?]

[Andrew Reynolds] ATETA came and basically were looking for some energy saving ideas and anything that we could run more efficiently.

[Dr Pouriya Niknam, Knowledge Exchange Fellow, ATETA] To start with a Simple conversation with the stakeholder and a subsequent site visit. I was looking for something that could be useful for waste heat recovery, and I noticed that there was a huge amount of energy being wasted from the cooling section and particularly the chiller unit. And then I started just a technical assessment for finding out how much energy is being wasted and what are the potential solutions.

[TEXT: What solutions did ATETA find?]

[Dr Pouriya Niknam] There are two approaches. The first is just reducing the waste heat. The second one is just to store the waste in a useful form like batteries, either electric or thermal. They have some kind of free electricity at the end by using that waste heat.

[Andrew Reynolds]I think a business should work with people like ATETA to find out what is good for them, in cost saving ideas, energy saving ideas just to make their business more efficient, basically just from minor changes. In today's climate, where electric's going through the roof, price wise, it will make a huge benefit to chilling beer because it will make it cheaper to do and making beer because it will be cheaper to do.

[Dr Pouriya Niknam] It's good to see that the University of Birmingham is supporting local businesses and keep the business growth in the local area and in all aspects we can take advantage from seeing that our knowledge, our research has some impact on the society.

[Andrew Reynolds] Well, hopefully ATETA can come and look at everything else we do here to see if we can save some more money or have some more ideas to utilise what they know and we don't.

[Logo of University of Birmingham, ATETA, and European Regional Development Fund]

[TEXT: birmingham.ac.uk/ATETA]

[University of Birmingham logo]

Ends