Alaskan Brewing Co. has opted for green energy, but instead of searching for solar and wind energy, it turned to a very familiar source: beer.
The brewery located in Juneau has installed a unique boiler system to reduce its fuel costs. It purchased a $1.8 million furnace that burns spent grain, waste accumulated from the beer production process, producing steam that powers most operations in the brewery, reports the American TV network Fox News. Company officials now joke that ‘beer powers beer.’ The question of what to do with spent grains seemed unsolvable a few decades ago, and American breweries mostly sent the spent grain, a good source of protein, to nearby farms and ranches where it was used as animal feed.
However, in 2011, there were only 37 farms in Southeast Alaska and 680 across the entire state, so the problem of what to do with the surplus spent grain – composed of leftover malt and barley – became increasingly problematic after the Juneau brewery expanded production in 1995. Alaskan Brewing Co. had to sell its spent grain to customers in the contiguous U.S., incurring high transportation costs. The price of a ton of spent grain was $60, and transportation was $30 per ton, which the brewery paid. The spent grain was a relatively wet byproduct of the beer production process, so it needed to be dried before delivery – which further increased the cost of the process.
