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Selling Mining Heat to a Brewery
Gary Testa of Engineered Fluids shows how idle immersion miners can heat a brewery's pasteurization water, cover the power bill and keep hashing.
A brewery heats a thousand liters of water to 60 degrees Celsius to pasteurize two barrels of beer. Gary Testa says a Bitcoin mine can do that job and keep hashing while it does. Testa is President and CEO of Engineered Fluids, the immersion fluid company. He spoke at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, held June 24 to 26, 2024.
Bitcoin traded at $61,272 then. It is $81,433 now. His talk was aimed at miners sitting on the sidelines: operators whose power costs climbed, whose margins vanished, and who hold machines and tanks they cannot sell. Not everyone can move to cheap hydropower, he said.
So he offered what he called a secondary business plan. In his words, "I want to talk to you about a secondary business plan." The plan starts with physics. Miners turn almost all of their electricity into heat, and an immersion tank holds that heat in the fluid at about 60 degrees Celsius. That happens to be the temperature beer is pasteurized at.
So Engineered Fluids took a brewery that makes about 30,000 barrels a year. It had been heating its pasteurization water with giant electric water heaters or gas, one of its biggest single costs. Testa's team added a water pump, a liquid-to-liquid heat exchanger and two pipes to a miner's existing immersion system. The brewery was paying for that power anyway.
Now the same power ran the miners, and their heat did the pasteurizing. His figures: 16 barrels an hour on 80 miners, saving the brewery 40,000 dollars on that run. He admitted those numbers are not big, but said they beat idle equipment. The brewery and the miner split the profits 40-60, with the miner taking 60 because it kept operating.
He added, "not to mention the free beer." The first system was small. Then the owners, who run 30 breweries across the United States, asked for it at all of them. Testa also sees a political win. Mines struggle to get approved, he said, because a zoning board hears that mining burns useless electricity.
Telling that board a mine will cut a local brewery's costs is a pitch it understands. He pointed to 80 separate applications for the heat, from hospitals to a fish farm raising tilapia in warm water. And he had one request for the hardware makers: higher exit temperatures, so miners can serve hotter industrial processes. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.