A new €169m brewhouse at Ireland’s most famous brewery has become the first in the world to receive an acclaimed environmental award.
Brewhouse No 4 at the Guinness site in Dublin city received the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification at a ceremony in St James’s Gate, becoming the first major brewery across the world to be honoured.
The plant opened in September last year and can produce 300,000 pints in a 12-hour brew, or one billion a year. It is the fourth brewhouse built on the site, which has been producing stout for 250 years.
But high-tech design means some 33pc less energy and 14pc less water is needed to make each batch of the black stuff, while St James’s Gate has also begun extracting water from an aquifer underneath the site to reduce demand on the city’s drinking water network. In all, the energy saved in one year is the equivalent to the total amount of energy used across the entire Irish industrial sector in one day.
“The accreditation started before construction, we have zero waste to landfill and all power is produced on site,” said capital project manager Nick Quirke.
“It’s the most environmentally friendly brewhouse in the world, and we don’t say that lightly,”