The Brewing Process & Where Energy Goes3 / 13
Refrigeration & Cooling Demand: Wort to Cellar
Wort chilling, fermentation temperature control and cold conditioning — the brewery's other dominant load, this time electrical.
10 min read · Jacob Willis, Net Zero Lead · Last reviewed July 2026
If the wort boil sets the gas bill, fermentation and conditioning set the electricity bill. Both are refrigeration loads (cooling jackets on vessels, run by a glycol (or ammonia) chiller plant) but they have very different shapes, and it's easy to guess wrong about which one actually costs more over a year. This lesson uses the refrigeration COP concept from the systems courses to find out.
In this lesson
- 01Fermentation: short, intense
- 02Conditioning: long, gentle
- 03The non-obvious comparison
- 04Why this shapes the rest of the course
- 05Sources and further reading