Teaching innovation and sustainability to the future brewers – Meet Jacob Friis, brewing utility expert at NIRAS
Jacob Friis is a Senior Consultant in NIRAS’s Beer & Beverage department. He holds a BSc in Sustainable Engineering and has worked at NIRAS since 2018. Alongside his job working with energy and utilities for clients in the brewing industry, Jacob teaches students at Copenhagen University in “Brewing Process and technology” on the topic of utilities.
In his courses, Jacob teaches aspiring brewmasters about systems, concept, design and operation within brewery utilities. Through topics like heating, compressed air, cooling, CO2 recovery, and other building related utilities, he aims to provide the students with an understanding of all the aspects of a brewery when it comes to energy and utilities, and to facilitate discussions around alternative solutions with a strong focus on innovation (and sustainability).
“I want to give the students a nuanced and highly technical understanding of brewing processes, and I try to provide the full perspective using insights from my work with design and optimization projects in the beer and beverage industry in NIRAS.
It’s important for me that we provide the young professionals who will be working with brewing projects in the future with a thorough understanding of critical quality parameters in the process, but also that we teach them to be open and curious about new technologies and ways of doing things. The way we work at NIRAS is very much characterized by creativity and openness towards new solutions and technologies, and it’s important to me to help instill this way of thinking in the people I teach at my course.”
The craft, the process, and future technologies
NIRAS’s brewing department is closely connected to the Danish brewing industry, and Jacob and his predecessors have been teaching at Copenhagen University for over 10 years. Teaching the courses both maintains a connection with the student environment, but it also allows for a continuous flow of ideas both ways:
“It’s gratifying being able to share knowledge with a new generation of brewmasters and to give them our insights into how energy and utilities play into the brewing process, but also how these processes and technologies can be implemented more sustainably.
I teach a highly technical course, and it’s my experience that students at these types of courses are extremely dedicated to the brewing craft, which makes for interesting conversations and discussions around new vs. old technologies, and how the brewing process can become more sustainable in the future.”
“It’s gratifying being able to share knowledge with a new generation of brewmasters and to give them our insights into how energy and utilities play into the brewing process, but also how these processes and technologies can be implemented more sustainably."
Not your usual job description
When Jacob isn’t working on brewery projects, like the one NIRAS is doing for Heineken as part of their iNZP (net zero) programme, he provides breweries with expert assessments of a series of KPIs that help breweries benchmark against competitors via the NIRAS Brewing Benchmark Club.
Here, he and his colleagues get to stray from their usual focus on engineering design and optimization of breweries, and explore what makes for the better beer, and dive into how beer producers fare against the competition on a series of market indicators.
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