More solar beer as XXXX brewers install 690kW of PV

One Step Off The Grid

Castlemaine Perkins, brewers of the (in)famous XXXX (pronounced “four-ex”) beer announced last week that it had completed a $2 million project to install solar panels on its Brisbane brewery.

The brewer announced last week it had installed a 690kW solar array atop the 140-year-old Milton brewery. The 2,200 solar panels system will generate approximately 1,368,000 kilowatt-hours a year – the equivalent electricity consumed by 150 large Brisbane homes annually.

XXXX beer – known the world over – is, if not an Australian favourite, at least an Australian brewing icon, with Queensland origins that date back to 1878.

According to Lion, the parent company, XXXX Gold is still “Australia’s number 1 beer” thanks to a 3.5 per cent alcoholic content “that’s big on taste, and we think best matched with big blue skies, sun-drenched days, good chats and great mates!”

That’s certainly one point of view… Regardless of your taste in beers, though, Lion can be praised for recent efforts to improve its brewery over the past decade.

Already the company has spent over $5 million on such innovations as “a state-of-the-art reverse osmosis plant which reuses waste water – enabling XXXX Gold to be produced at a ratio of 2.8 litres of water for every litre of beer produced, which is approaching world-leading levels of efficiency for brewing,” explained Lion’s Group Supply Chain Director Ian Roberts.

To read the full story on RenewEconomy sister site, One Step Off The Grid, click here…