99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall? Why Not In Your Gas Tank Instead?

Living quite close to the massive MillerCoors brewery in Golden, Colorado, I can attest to the fact that the hoppy scent of beer wafts throughout the streets and down the road for what seems like miles before finally dissipating. Even if you're not a beer drinker, it smells oddly distinctive, kind of sweet and somewhat seductive. On a recent tour of their facility, I asked what they do with all of the grain and hop "waste" once it runs through the entire brewing process, and a representative explained that they recycle 98% of their brewery waste via local cattle farmers who feed it to their animals. While it's comforting to learn that the material is being recycled in some manner, that's just one brewery in one town.

Just a few miles away, the Estes Park Brewery has been struggling with the issue of what to do with their spent grain for well over a decade now. The small microbrewery famously ended up dumping their malted barley into a trailer behind their facility, which throughout the years has lured hundreds upon thousands of eager elk to feast like there's no tomorrow. It seems like a perfectly practical choice to me, but local officials were up in arms since one too many elk were crossing the road in their quest for sweet grainy goodness and meeting their untimely demise via car. They put the kibosh on that recycling method just a few years ago, a quandry that countless other brewers across the world are faced with on a regular basis.

The industry as a whole is incredibly energy intensive, involving the full gamut of heating, cooling, packaging and shipping processes, so it's clearly not the greenest biz out there. Plus, of the millions of tons of grain brought into breweries all across the world in any given week, an almost equal amount will ultimate exit each beermaking facility, but where? While augmenting the diet of cattle is one consideration, how good is that for their gastrointestinal systems and could we actually be generating twice the volume of hoppy methane clouds everywhere? Also used as a source of fertilizer and nutritive compost for European farmlands in the past, the practice is diminishing as regulations become more stringent and meat production rates decline.

German biomass company BMP Biomasse Projekt recognized the opportunity in this plentiful resource, thinking that since they had already used atmospheric fluidized bed combustion systems to transform Chinese and Thai rice/sugar cane waste into biogas on site, that they could probably do the same for beer breweries with grain and hops. By partnering with German and Slovakian developers, they have in fact succeeded in developing a hybridized beer making waste-to-fuel process that is poised to turn countless breweries into self sufficient systems capable of generating their own steam and biogas. According to the BMP Biomasse Projekt, the endeavor is well worth the investment of brewers installing it themselves since it recaptures 50 percent of the energy used to make beer, enabling them to significantly defray their operating costs. Another viable option would be for waste management companies to take on the expense and then just sell the energy back to breweries. 

There are already a few pioneering companies that have already sniffed out this heady fuel alternative. California-based Sierra Nevada Brewing, for example, has partnered with home ethanol system provider E-Fuel, to convert 1.6 million gallons of beer yeast waste into ethanol fuel and Coors currently creates E85 from their beer dregs. However, the BMP Biomasse Projekt is the first to create an all-in-one option that could potentially transform breweries around the globe into highly sustainable systems. Let's all raise a glass to that!