Brewery Uses Own Beer To Generate Energy - PSFK - 0 views
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shared by Nicole Stevens on 08 Feb 13
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Brewery Uses Own Beer To Generate Energy
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‘Beer Powered Beer’
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The Alaskan Brewing Co., located in Juneau, Alaska, has started a process of reusing brewing ingredients as fuel, making their brewery more self-sustaining in an attempt to cut costs.
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Most breweries, including Alaskan Brewing Co. until recently, ship this residual grain mash to farms and agricultural operations, that then use the grain as a protein source in feed for livestock.
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So they turned to an in-house recycling process. With the help of a nearly half-million dollar grant from the Federal Rural Energy for America Program, Alaskan Brewing Co. set out to create a special boiler system that ran entirely on spent grain for fuel.
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The system, which cost $1.8 million and was developed with the help of an industrial furnace company in North Dakota, burns the dried spent grain to create steam. The steam, an often underutilized renewable energy source, then powers their entire facility.
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The boiler system, which is expected to save the company $450,000 annually, will offset their energy costs by 70% and pay for itself in under five years.
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there are many forms of renewable energy that are still largely untapped.
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So I'm a beer person. I brew with 'Brew FIU' team and I'm a TA for Professor Gump. This story just makes me smile. Leave it to beer people to find another reason to make more beer. In the brewing process malt, barley and other grains are used as a sugar and flavor source. It's what makes beer, well beer. After the grain has been used it's considered spent due to the fact that most to all of the sugar and starch has removed. At this point it's common to dry the spent grain and turn it into flour for cooking or send it to a farm for animal feed. Which is a green thing to do as is. But the Alaskan Brewing Co. decided to turn it's spent grain into fuel. Now their entire facility is run off of spent grain. How cool is that?!