Producing electricity from beer residues

Turning beer residues into electricity production is an initiative to take advantage of waste and reduce the cost of production of a beer company in the United States.

Alaskan Brewing is a brewing company in the port city of Juneau, Alaska, USA. Like all beer companies, handling beer residues - including the rest of malt and barley grains - is always an important issue for Alaskan Brewing. Elsewhere, most beer residues become animal feed on farms.

Waste in the brewing process is the rest of malt and barley.

But Alaska is a state with a very low population density. So officials only counted 680 farms across the state. Particularly in southwestern Alaska, the number of farms is only 37. Therefore, farms cannot receive all the residues that beer companies emit. The problem of disintegrating residues becomes more urgent in the context of beer companies expanding their production scale.

Alaskan Brewing used to transport it to other places for sale, but the transportation cost was quite large because of the typical terrain characteristics of Juneau City. Although it is an attractive city for tourists, Juneau does not have any way for people to enter or exit by car. All transportation activities must be carried out by sea or aircraft. In addition, due to wet residues, the company must dry before transporting so the waste treatment costs increase markedly. Meanwhile, the company barely made any profit in beer sales.

Engineer Brandon Smith, who manages engineering and transport teams
Alaskan Brewing's brewing system. (Photo: AP)

Therefore, four years ago, Alaskan Brewing management began to look for solutions to utilize beer residues to produce electricity. This strategy not only helped them eliminate the cost of transporting and drying beer residues, but also reducing the cost of electricity. They hired a company in North Dakota state to design a special type of boiling oven to burn beer residues.

In order to own that unique burner system, the company had to spend 1.8 million USD. But Brandon Smith, who is in charge of the technology and operation of the brewing system, insists that the boil oven helps the company save up to 70% of electricity costs (previously the company's electricity costs reached $ 450,000 per year). Smith believes that in the future, his incinerator will appear in many other breweries because of its great benefits.