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Cervezas Ámbar, sustainability with solar panels
Iconic detail of the old Amber Brewery.
It is just over four kilometres from the Calle Ramón de Berenguer IV, in the neighbourhood of San José de Zaragoza, to La Cartuja on the outskirts of the city. But in this short distance you will find more than 100 years of history in the manufacture of one of the most recognised brands in Spain: La Zaragozana, commercially known as Cervezas Ámbar. To travel this distance takes only ten minutes by car and you have the Ebro as a backdrop. It links the company's old factory, now transformed into a museum dedicated to the famous drink, with the modern one which occupies 86,000 square metres and is equipped with the latest technology.
"Cervezas Ámbar has always been a company with a vocation for innovation," explains the Head of Communication, Institutional Relations and Sustainability, Enrique Torguet, while precisely dissecting every inch of the enclosure where barley malt, hops, yeast and water began to be combined traditionally way back in 1900.
"We were the first to contract a master brewer, for example. The founders of the company travelled to Germany to contract Charles Schlaffer, who was the Messi of the time and came to live with his family at this brewery," he said shortly before listing an extensive series of milestones that have placed the firm at the forefront of the sector.
Interior of the production line at the new Ámbar brewery.
While listing the achievements he stops for a moment at the launch at the end of 2022 of Triple Zero Toasted Amber, the only beer on the market with zero alcohol, zero sugars and zero C02 emissions. For this last zero, there was essential collaboration with Endesa X, Endesa's energy services subsidiary, to power modern brewery in La Cartuja by installing 4,000 solar panels on the roofs of the storage, packaging and filtering warehouses at the industrial complex. "The photovoltaic plant will cover 25% of our requirements with clean energy," Mr Torguet points out, adding that: "The connection will be undertaken in phases until it is fully operational in March 2023 when it will reach its maximum capacity of 3,057 MWh/year, which will prevent the emission of 870 tons of CO2 each year. We have also created the Ámber forests in La Serreta de Aínsa and in the municipality of Peñaflor in Zaragoza to try to compensate for the emissions that we are not yet able to prevent".
Production line at the new Ámbar brewery.
An acoustic signal warns when a part of the army of robots that floods the packaging and storage halls has been set in motion. They follow the orders millimetrically, without deviating an inch from the route they have been programmed to take. Their metallic appearance and repetitive way of moving contrasts with the warmth of the ancestral machines made by Teisset-Rose-Blault that have an impressive appearance in the brewery in the Calle Ramón de Berenguer IV. There all movements appeared to be unique and the data were not measured in bytes but were processed by hand, with chalk on a blackboard.
Enrique Torguet points out that "although the new La Cartuja installations have all the advantages of state-of-the-art technology, the craft manufacturing process that we apply is essentially the same as that in the neighbourhood of San José." More than a hundred years ago we followed the recipes of Charles Schlaffer, now we have with the wisdom of a master like Antonio Fumanal.
Old tank in the first Ámbar brewery in Zaragoza.
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