By Jason Emerson
Editor
Anyone who has visited the new Empire Farmstead Brewery on Rippleton Road knows that business in the restaurant and tasting room is bustling, to say the least. On top of that, Empire’s bottle and keg distribution – possible for the company for the first time because of the farmstead brewery’s bottling line – has also exceeded expectations in only a few months of operations.
“We just can’t make it fast enough,” said owner David Katleski. “Sales have been very brisk.”
In fact, Empire’s beers are selling to well in New York state that the brewing company is actually behind schedule in its planned expansion beyond its native state.
As with any new venture, however, there are hiccups and learning curves being faced by the company’s new brewery, and one of those recently has been Empire’s wastewater output to the county treatment plant. While rumors have been circulating around Cazenovia that the brewery is producing far more wastewater to be treated than expected and is in danger of overwhelming the treatment plant, both Town Supervisor Bill Zupan and Katleski said this is not true.
“Everything isn’t running smoothly, but we didn’t expect it to run smoothly at the beginning,” said Zupan, who also serves as chair of the Madison County Sewer District Board. “It’s the same with any startup – there are issues all the time and we’re working through them. We’re trying to get it so they smooth out the flow to make it easier on treatment plant.”
At issue has been the amount of pH and the concentration of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) in the brewery’s wastewater. The pH of water is a measure of its acidity and is an important part of a wastewater treatment system as it allows dissolved waste to be separated from water during the treatment process, while BOD is a measure of the amount of oxygen needed to break down organic materials in wastewater. Sewage high in BOD can deplete oxygen in receiving waters, causing fish kills and ecosystem changes.
According to expert John Mercer, a licensed wastewater treatment plant operator and brewery treatment operator writing on craftbrewingbusiness.com, brewery wastewater is higher in sugar and alcohol compared to normal domestic wastewater which most treatment plants were designed to treat. In the case of breweries, untreated wastewater in the river causes nutrient pollution, leading to large algae blooms in the rivers and depleting the water of oxygen the fish need to breath.
Empire’s wastewater has not overwhelmed the sewage treatment plant and no untreated waste has gone into Chittenango Creek, it’s more been a matter of the learning process of going from the estimated wastewater treatment of Empire to the actual treatment needed now that the brewery is running, Zupan said.
“People do not need to be concerned,” he said. “In fact, we just had a sewer board meeting last Tuesday night and according to operator we stayed within our permit limits.”
According to Katleski, Empire pre-treats its wastewater with two 7,500-gallon tanks that are buried on site, in which they strip the waste BOD from the wastewater. The yeast, hops and barley solids get sent across the street to Meadows Farms, which uses it for cattle food.
“We are working directly with the sewer department on maintaining the BOD and pH and we now have a system in place to automatically bring the pH to where it should be before we send it to the municipality,” Katleski said. “We send five gallons per minute, nothing more, which is a toilet flush.”
To ensure that the wastewater levels are where they should be, Empire has been monitoring it constantly for the past six weeks, even to the point of having an employee sleep on-site to make sure it is “perfect,” Katleski said. “We’re very conscious of the sensitivity with the municipal plant and we’re doing everything in our power to make sure it is 100 percent effective.”
Zupan said Empire has been working with the town on the best way to send its wastewater to the treatment plant and the municipality has been working with them.
“It will all get worked out,” he said. “We’re working hand-in-hand in Empire to take care of all this and get through the learning process.”
