Wastewater from breweries was an afterthought to Astoria in 2012, when the Wet Dog Cafe & Brewery and Fort George Brewery contributed an estimated 5% of the suspended solids being treated at the city’s Tongue Point lagoons.

By 2014, when Buoy Beer Co. had come online, the contribution of solids had nearly tripled to 13.5%. By 2016, with Fort George and Buoy two of the 15 best-selling beer brands in Oregon, the contribution ballooned to nearly 40%.

With the lagoons nearing treatment capacity during drier summer months and the breweries still rapidly expanding, Astoria is considering new industrial wastewater pretreatment requirements to meet federal standards and help stave off building an expensive new treatment plant.

The city’s push for pretreatment has taken Fort George and Buoy by surprise. The city’s premier breweries hired their own consultant in recent months to improve wastewater treatment.

Wastewater from around Astoria is pumped to three treatment lagoons built on the east end of Alderbrook in 1974. The waste is progressively treated through the lagoons, chlorinated with gas and dechlorinated before being released into the Columbia River.

The lagoons are antiquated compared to the more common, mechanically driven wastewater plants, but have sufficed in Astoria, where the population has remained relatively stable for decades.

The lagoons were only designed to treat residential waste, said Cindy Moore, the city’s assistant engineer. The city enacted ordinances to keep out heavier industrial waste and has turned down requests by seafood processors to discharge into the system.

But city staff noticed dramatic growth since 2012 of brewery related waste entering the system, with wastewater at times turning an orange-brown and smelling of beer.

“You can smell the sweet smell of sewer, that turns to beer,” said Bryce Majors, the city’s wastewater treatment plant supervisor. “It’s very pungent. It almost makes you thirsty.”

Suspended solids

Breweries create exponentially more wastewater than they do beer. And that waste usually has a dramatically higher concentration of suspended solids from the hops, barley and yeast used in the brewing process.

Dale Richwine, a consultant hired by Astoria to study wastewater issues, estimated the city’s lagoons now receive enough solids for a city of 23,000 people despite only having about 9,700 residents.

The rainy seasons dilute wastewater to acceptable levels of solids under the city’s federal permits, Moore said. But city staff are on pins and needles in drier months when water flow decreases and the waste coming in is heavier.

The problem has inadvertently been exacerbated by more efficient home appliances reducing wastewater entering the city’s lagoons, and by a $50 million combined sewer overflow project to decouple rain runoff from domestic sewage to meet the federal Clean Water Act. The project was meant in part to help limit soil and minerals flowing down the hillsides and into the treatment system, where they have compacted and filled almost half of the initial treatment lagoon.

“Normally you would dredge, but some of that stuff’s as hard as cement,” said Jeff Harrington, the city’s public works director. “So you can’t dredge this. You have to drain it. People have to smell it for all that time. Then we have to get excavators out there to scrape it up. And then hundreds and hundreds of trucks have to go through Alderbrook.”

A study of the wastewater treatment system in 2012 found it would cost around $8 million to remove the solids, Harrington said. Richwine and the city formulated a cheaper plan to turn the initial treatment lagoon into sludge storage, use floating baffles to increase capacity in the two other lagoons and upgrade the treatment system’s headworks to filter out more grit and other solids.

With those improvements and an industrial pretreatment program, city staff estimate the lagoons could serve Astoria until at least 2045. If nothing is done, the city estimates it could need a new mechanical wastewater treatment plant within five years at an estimated cost of between $40 million and $60 million.

Industrial pretreatment

None of the improvement projects have a definite timeline or funding. They’ve taken a back seat to the creation of an industrial pretreatment program to cut down on solids coming primarily from Fort George and Buoy, which continue rapid expansion.

The problem isn’t unique to Astoria. Cities and breweries around the country have grappled with how to accommodate an exploding craft beer scene pumping more solids into municipal treatment systems. Newport has created an industrial pretreatment program and levied fines for years against Rogue Ales based on the amount of solids the brewery sends to the city’s treatment system.

Astoria is looking for a consultant to help create equitable surcharges for heavier wastewater. The program could include different user classes, from hotels that turn out large quantities of mostly residential-strength wastewater to breweries churning out more suspended solids.

City staff plan to present the City Council with a more detailed hypothetical plan in the coming month, including what it could cost local companies.

“We are not taking this lightly,” Moore recently told the City Council. “We realize that this is important to be fair and clear with how our charges are set up.”

Despite feeling taken by surprise, representatives from Fort George and Buoy said they appreciate the collaborative approach the city has taken thus far as they try to become more efficient. Dave Kroening, the general manager at Buoy Beer, said the company has already instituted more aggressive side-streaming of heavier wastewater based on their consultant’s work.

Chris Nemlowill, a co-owner of Fort George, said the breweries have explored sending heavier waste to Farm Power Northwest, a Tillamook company that takes runoff from the nearby Pelican Brewery and mixes it with restaurant waste and manure in an anaerobic digester to harvest methane for fuel. The remaining grey water is used to irrigate pastures on local dairy farms.

“It’s just extremely expensive and it doesn’t feel very sustainable,” Nemlowill said. “We just can’t afford to do it. We’re going to do it if we have to, but … without work done to our treatment plant, there’s going to be an environment where the breweries, the hotels, the restaurants cannot grow in Astoria without us doing something.”