Brewery goes green with beer

The Alaskan Brewing company is going green, but instead of looking to solar and wind energy it has turned to a very familiar source - beer.

The Juneau-based beer maker has installed a unique boiler system to cut fuel costs. It purchased a $1.8-million furnace that burns the company's spent grain - the waste accumulated in brewing - to generate steam to power most of the brewery's operations.

Company officials say they are now serving "beer-powered beer".

What to do with spent grain was seemingly solved decades ago by breweries operating in the rest of the US. Most send the used grain, a good source of protein, to nearby farms and ranches to be used as animal feed.

But there are only 37 farms in southeast Alaska and 680 in the entire state as of 2011, and the problem of what to do with the excess spent grain - residual malt and barley - became more problematic after the brewery expanded in 1995.

The Alaskan Brewing had to resort to shipping its spent grain to buyers in other states. Shipping costs for Juneau businesses are especially high because there are no roads leading in or out of the city; everything has to be flown or shipped in.

However, the grain is a relatively wet by-product of the brewing process so it must be dried before it is shipped - another heat-intensive and expensive process.

"We had to be a little more innovative just so that we could do what we love to do, but do it where we're located," Alaskan Brewing co-founder Geoff Larson said.

But the company was barely turning a profit by selling its spent grain. Alaskan Brewery gets $60 for every ton it sends to farms in the Lower 48, but it costs it $30 to ship each ton.

So, four years ago, they started looking at whether they could use spent grain as an in-house, renewable energy source and reduce costs at the same time.

Though breweries around the world use spent grain as a co-fuel in energy recovery systems, "nobody was burning spent grain as a sole fuel source for an energy recovery system, for a steam boiler", said Brandon Smith, brewing operations and engineering manager.

The brewery contracted with a North Dakota company to build the special boiler system after the project was awarded a $500000 grant by the federal Rural Energy for America programme.

Smith estimates the boiler will offset yearly energy costs by 70%, which amounts to about $450000.