The Legend of Pure Spring Water: The Development of Industrial Water Treatment and its Diffusion through Technology Transfer as the Basis for the Industrialization and Internationalization of Brewing

1 Introduction

A central element of beer advertising is the idea of a special water as the foundation of the product.^[1] This practice has a long tradition, and it seems that it can be found in all industrialized nations. Frequently, advertising utilised links between brand identity and specific, positively connotated regions. These links have remained stable over relatively long periods of time as can be seen in advertising slogans such as “[…] pure Rocky Mountain Spring Water”^[2], “Fellsquell-wasser”^[3], “[…] from the Land of Sky Blue Waters”^[4] or “L’eau de source”^[5]. Furthermore, it was a common phenomenon that a local water quality was named as an essential prerequisite for a particular beer brand. To name but a few: The Olympia Brewing Company, formerly Capital Brewing Company, in Tumwater, Washington since 1902^[6] or the Krombacher-brand of the Schadeberg-Brewery in Krombach/Westphalia since 1961.^[7] These associations serve potential consumers’ ideas of untouched natural landscapes or at least rural idylls. This utilisation of nature and down-to-earthness reflects a fundamental discrepancy with the reality of industrial production. And thus, this is an indication of escapist tendencies, a factor that takes on a special quality in the context of the potentially dangerous nature of the drug alcohol.^[8]

In the pre-industrial period, locally accessible water was used to brew beer.^[9] Especially in urban agglomerations where watercourses were used as sewers and for the disposal of heavily polluted wastewater such as that from dye works and tanneries,^[10] there was also a long tradition of constructing deep wells to access drinking water.^[11] Apart from the associated health issues, the composition of the water determines the quality and taste of beer.^[12] Soft water with a low salt content is more suitable for light beers with a relatively high proportion of hops, such as Pilsener, like the crisp clean lagers in Bohemia.^[13] While other regional beer specialties are not least dependent on the respective water quality. In Dortmund, for example, the comparably high water-hardness, which is not due to the carbon content of the water, is more suitable for the Export type, and the hard water of Munich or London with high carbonate hardness for the dark beer.^[14] Ever since temperature-controlled fermentation became possible in beverage technology - an innovation of the late 19^th century that was made possible by another invention: refrigeration machines^[15] - the supply of adequate water was the bottleneck of beer production and so the technology of water treatment found its costumers among brewers.^[16]

Three main phases of the adaptation of industrial water treatment in brewing can be named. First, the softening of process water to protect the existing equipment from damage by encrustation; second, the modification of the quality of the brewing water in order to be able to prepare different types of beer at one location; and finally, the creation of the same water quality at different locations in order to be able to generate an identical product worldwide. Globalization after the Second World War resulted in a small number of internationally operating corporations developing an interest in manufacturing identical products in different locations. This meant both entering new markets by distributing established product lines and taking over foreign brands and selling them in domestic markets. In the U.S.A., for example, Carling National with Tuborg and Miller with Löwenbräu had already done this in the 1970s.^[17] Due to the relationship between price and weight of the product, it was an obvious practice to produce in relative proximity to the consumer, which, especially in the case of the United States, led to brewing in diverse locations. This has been demonstrated by Gatrell and others in the case of the Budweiser brand.^[18] At the end of this development, the knowledge base was reached which made it possible that “today, brewing water can be ‘tailor-made’ at any location and for any desired type of beer.”^[19]

The three phases named here are not to be understood in the sense of a stringent sequence. Since the work of Edgerton, it has been clear that technical change at no time would have excluded adherence to traditional practices.^[20] The discrepancy mentioned at the beginning between consumer perception and the application of innovative technology may serve as a stimulus to trace the vertical technology transfer of water treatment processes such as those used in brewing.

For this purpose, it will be necessary to trace the interplay between scientific research and technical application and to consider the diffusion in different industries.

The conditio sine qua non of high-quality beer production before the scientification and mechanisation of brewing was the natural availability of water of sufficient quality and quantity,^[21] which means that the special local water quality often used in advertising need not have been a myth to begin with.^[22] Yet, with the growth of industrial production, this basic requirement became a production bottleneck. Accordingly, the breweries sought out solutions, such as special technical processes that will be detailed in the next section. This, in turn, made the idea of a special water as the basis of a specific product absurd.

Hence, technological advancements and the growing importance of scientific procedures in food production seem far apart from the consumers’ ideas about the products. In sociology, this is described as a “Fiction of Rationality”, the decision-making processes in complex social networks of relationships. Since the mid 2000s this concept has been applied to technical consumer products in the works of Wengenroth and Neumeier.^[23] In modern mass consumer society the individual is exposed to a constant excessive challenge in his consumption decisions. To make decisions, individuals fall back on supposedly rational explanations, that often tell us more about the consumer’s background, level of education and social integration than about the products. Accordingly, this is not a static phenomenon; rather, the use of abstract ideas such as nature in advertising for beer is subject to both temporal change and local particularity.^[24]

At the same time, this phenomenon is not limited to the brewing industry but implies the social relevance of complex issues in terms of consumer behaviour, consumer power but not least the social acceptance of technical change.

2 Water and Brewing

From a process-engineering point of view, however, spring water is conceivably unsuitable for this purpose of brewing due to the high level of hardeners it contains. Already in the late 1870s, scientific research showed that special kinds of beers required specific water qualities.^[25] Hence, along with the development of the large-scale technical realization of brewing,^[26] industrial water treatment developed. Especially in the second half of the 20^th century, this business field was served by a very small group of U.S.-American, German, British and Japanese companies, often acting as subcontractors for plant manufacturers and thus, showing a high degree of specialization. At the same time, they were asymmetrically dependent on their suppliers, especially the chemical industry. The aim of this paper is to present this largely invisible aspect of the history of the internationalization of brewing, building on the contents of an older research project that also included a local oral history project.^[27]

From the point of view of a history of technology committed to cultural studies, this aspect is of particular interest, since the discrepancy between the scientification and mechanization of the food industry with the simultaneous utilization of notions of naturalness, tradition, and identification in marketing were a regularly occurring phenomenon across borders and industries. Critical engagement with this phenomenon has a long tradition, extending from Upton Sinclair’s description of Chicago slaughterhouses to Jackson’s work on wine or Salzmann’s on drinking water.^[28] Accordingly, this approach is inspired by current discourses on consumerism and industrial food production and builds on an investigation of the genesis of a number of relevant technologies. For the understanding of this complex of questions, it is essential that two diffusion phenomena can be proven as they have been typical for innovations from the time of the high modernity; on the one hand the horizontal and on the other hand the vertical transfer of applied science.^[29]

The first, the horizontal, is the transfer of knowledge at a comparable institutional level; in this specific case, it was a matter of companies, such as breweries and plant manufacturers, but also highly specialized suppliers. Whereas vertical technology transfer describes the genesis from the episteme to the product, in other words the path from basic research via application-oriented development work to the dominant design of a product accepted on the market. To understand the concept of technology transfer as distinct from the purchase of a technical product or service, it should be mentioned that technology transfers have proven to be lengthy, cost-intensive and by no means always successful processes. Only after a technology transfer process has been successfully completed – a process which is also always a process of exchange and negotiation between the relevant groups of actors – can the result of this process become a product in the sense of a dominant design.

As will be shown in the following, both transfer models, which are used in economics to explain the external exploitation of technological knowledge, can be demonstrated in the case examined here. However, it should not be neglected in this regard that this is a theoretical approach which only gained importance in connection with the renewed Schumpeter reception in the wake of the structural crisis of the 1970s, and it is therefore an anachronistic systematization of the phenomena – accordingly, no corresponding content can be found in contemporary discourses.^[30]

3 Treatment of Hardness Components

Hardness components of water such as calcium or magnesium have the capability to damage technical equipment, and especially in the production of food or pharmaceuticals, these and other dissolved substances can negatively influence the product properties as well.^[31] Thus, the need to use the cleanest or softest possible water in industrial processes has a relatively long tradition. In terms of the brewing industry, according to Krauß, it was academic teachers at the Institut für Gärungsgewerbe zu Berlin, founded in 1874, where Wilhelm Windisch (1860–1944) and Paul Kohlbach (1894–1920) in particular worked on the modification of brewing water. Accordingly, they recognized that the bicarbonate hardness of the brewing water reduced the acidity, while calcium ions had the opposite effect. Based on this knowledge, they produced manuals for the practical application of this knowledge in actual brewing operations and operated their own Water Technology Department as part of the institute.^[32] In view of the brewing industry’s self-portrayal and probably also its own perception, especially in the period of high modernity, as progressive and open to science and technology, the finding that the supposedly relatively trivial treatment of brewing water was not the industry’s own achievement may be surprising. As will be shown below using two technologies as examples, vertical and horizontal technology transfer was the rule. For instance, this can also be demonstrated by the history of refrigeration technology as studied by Hård or Dienel.^[33] In this case, the innovation came from the field of mechanical engineering, and the breweries were initially merely customers, irrespective of the implications and options that the innovative processes brought with them.

A wide range of different biological, mechanical, and chemical processes underwent continuous development over the course of time, which has not only resulted in the capability to produce pure water, but also the capability to design water according to precise specifications. Companies specialising in this field developed as early as the end of the 19^th century, setting up and operating water treatment plants primarily for the operation of steam engines. Breweries, dairies, and laundries relatively quickly expanded the clientele.^[34] At the same time, innovations in mechanical engineering and plant technology were adopted by the brewing industry with a time lag.

From the broad variety of different technical solutions, two key technologies will now be examined in more detail in order to provide a basis for further discussion of the economic implementation and transfer of the technology to the brewing industry: Precipitation by means of binder aggregates and the ion exchange process. Although these technologies are by no means the only or exclusive methods of water filtration and treatment, they may suffice as examples at this point. One the one hand it can be shown that the precipitation-technology was a direct predecessor technology, through the deficits of which the discussion of ion exchange filters was first inspired. And furthermore, complex ion exchange processes from the 1960s onward were to make it possible for the first time to shape the composition of liquids largely freely. These are examples that were not only particularly widespread and common in use, but also demonstrate the transfer of knowledge within the cluster of industrially developed regions.

4 Technology Transfer Between Sectors

And once again, the food industry was not at the vanguard of development, but adapted the new technology only after it was safely mastered in other industries and medium-sized plant manufacturers were actively working on its diffusion. This development was triggered when IBM produced its first computer system family, the IBM System/360, which was produced between 1964 and 1978.^[86] Two basic principles of IBM are relevant concerning the question of industrial water purification: local production and global standards. Concerning the demands for local manufacturers and suppliers, the American headquarters defined the standards but wherever feasible local resources were applied. The production of circuit boards for the IBM System/360 needed unseen degrees of cleanness concerning the rinsing water, which was needed after galvanization and electroplating, because the comparably small circuit paths could easily be damaged by even the smallest encrustation from hardness components.^[87] Managed by John W. Gibson, who was responsible^[88] for project-wide components manufacturing,^[89] the solution for the rinsing water lay in the utilization of not one or two ion exchange reactors but required so-called ion exchange trains.^[90] These systems had separate reactors for strong-acid cation, weak-base anion and strong-base anion exchange resins. While in the reactor for strong-acid cation exchange all cationic substances, such as iron, aluminium, chromium, zinc and others were removed from the rinsing water, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, chromic acid or hydrofluoric acid formed inside the downstream weak-base anion exchange reactor; all these substances were neutralized in the downstream strong-base anion exchange reactor. When the removal of weak acids, such as carbonic acid or boric acid was wanted, a further strong-base anion exchange reactor was necessary. The regeneration was carried out with acids and accordingly with bases.^[91] If a continuous process was desired, a parallel redundant reactor train was required. Systems like this were able to filter up to 98 percent of the dissolved substances. Without the upstream filter technology, such ion exchange trains consisted of three to eight reactor vessels.

In fact, ion exchangers can be found today in a wide range of everyday applications, from dishwashers to nuclear power plants. The genesis and location of the artifact of ion exchanger trains, on the other hand, is a very specific and not atypical form of development: Only after the efforts of IBM, an actor in a highly innovative industry, had developed the existing body of knowledge into an established technology, did the initiative of medium-sized plant manufacturers lead to a transfer of this technology to other industries, such as electroplating, power plant and mechanical engineering, and even the food industry and thus brewing. In the course of globalization from the late 1970s onward, brewing groups began to produce and market branded beers that were as identical as possible at locations around the world.^[92] This was a process that was accompanied by the elimination of smaller breweries and was a typical phenomenon of cluster formation in the course of globalization.^[93] The conclusion of this observation implies at the same time that, prior to this development, local production of beer in many cases simply solved the treatment of the process water by means of special technical equipment and, if necessary, resorted to the modification of the brewing water by the targeted addition of reagents, so-called brewing salts, which had already been recommended by Petit. This means that the ion exchanger trains developed under the auspices of IBM found their way into industrial beer production. Euwa in Gärtingen near Stuttgart, a company founded by former Hager + Elsässer employee Hanns-Heinz Eumann in 1965, was particularly successful in participating in this trend and continues to play a dominant role in this market segment to the present day. The fact that the application of state-of-the-art water treatment technology stands in stark contrast to the use of the ideal of the pure mountain spring as a means of marketing, as mentioned in the introduction, is also reflected in the fact that the companies, breweries and plant engineers alike, acted with great reservation when it came to the visibility of these practices.^[94] This statement that closes the circle to the introductory remarks about the discrepancy between the rationality fiction of consumers regarding the properties of brewing water and the relevance of this condition for the advertising and public relations of breweries in the past and present.

5 Conclusion

A striking feature of the examples described here is the relatively long time between scientific findings and their transformation into a marketable product. Even though there are comparable case studies from other sectors for the establishment of a dominant design, they rarely took longer than a decade, even in the case of large-scale industrial process technologies.^[95] In this context, Anderson and Tushmann assume phases of between five and 20 years between market launch and the establishment of a dominant design. In addition, they also provide empirical evidence that the largest revenues can be generated from an innovation after the establishment of a dominant design.^[96]

The phase of discursive openness,^[97] which was largely characterized by expert discourse, was also at no point exclusively focused on the food industry, or indeed brewing in particular. In fact, some efforts at product diversification on the part of large-scale industry, which was significantly involved in the research and development work, failed, and it was only due to the specific market knowledge of the medium-sized plant manufacturers that the various technologies for industrial water treatment found their way to the customers, and thus also to the breweries. Only after this ultimately open-ended negotiation process between the relevant groups of actors did the concepts turn into products. The consideration of the intentionality of the groups of actors demanded by Callon, which is a fundamental prerequisite for understanding the systemic character of innovative change, can also be traced in the case of industrial water treatment.^[98] Scientists were striving for recognition and to strengthen their position, medium-sized plant manufacturers were interested in expanding their product portfolio, and breweries were striving for reliable processes that could be planned both in terms of process technology and economics.

The description of these key technologies can by no means claim to be a comprehensive account of the genesis of industrial water treatment or even its application in brewing. No consideration could be given at this point to techniques such as the use of reverse osmosis, electrofiltration, different established practices of filtering, or the practice of using different additives before and during brewing, to name but a few.^[99]

As has been shown, the typical vertical and horizontal transfer of technology can be demonstrated for the case study of industrial water treatment in brewing. For the latter, the relatively hesitant adaptation of the innovative technology could again be explained by an application of Schumpeter.^[100] In the question of sector-specific innovative capacity raised by Malerba^[101] - in other words, the distinction between established and thus difficult-to-access markets and new and thus open markets – the computer industry was one of the fastest growing and most innovative sectors in the second half of the 20^th century. In contrast, the food industry and thus brewing as an established sector in a constricted market with only marginal room for manoeuvre was much more hesitant in adapting innovative methods.^[102] Even if this statement contradicts the self-perception and self-portrayal of the brewing industry as technology-affine and science-oriented, the comparative, quantifying studies on the innovativeness of individual industries, as well as the historical transfer of cooling technology from chemical science to brewing as made by Dienel, are able to substantiate this idea. Since the brewing industry, like the food industry, has generally been a recipient rather than an innovator, it is also not surprising that the decisive development steps for the example of water treatment technology examined here did not come from the industry itself.

The behaviour can be explained by market conditions. The problem of ambidexterity, meaning the long-term economically successful balancing between the return on old investments and the necessity of spending on innovations in order to be able to survive in competition, resulted in a rather hesitant performance for breweries in a competitive and limited market with regard to innovation behaviour due to the system.^[103] Accordingly, the technology of the ion exchanger train was only of interest to brewers from the time when a dominant design had become established and the medium-sized plant manufacturers had acquired a wealth of experience in the planning, construction and maintenance of such facilities.

However, it would be a false or abbreviated representation to leave it at this monocausal explanation. With the growing importance of internationally placed branded beer products, like Heineken or Anheuser-Busch, demand from international brewery and food companies for this very technology also began in the 1980s and grew with the massive market shakeout and clustering in the industry that began around the turn of the millennium.^[104] And these developments, too, were not made possible by water treatment technology alone. Other technologies, especially in process control, automation, and not least packaging, were considered by contemporaries, as in historical reflection, to be the sine qua non of these economic developments.^[105]

As has been shown, the driving force behind this horizontal transfer process, which was as successful as it was comprehensive, was an achievement of medium-sized plant manufacturers. Their market knowledge, flexibility and, in the course of globalization, mobility, made it possible to be successful in a market segment that previously could not be served by large international chemical groups.