Brewery Uses Beer For Power (Imagine That)

Let's break this down: A brewery needs power to make beer, so the brewery uses beer to power making beer... mind = blown. 

A new profile from the Associated Press highlights the new green energy effort from Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau, Alaska. The decision to use beer to power the brewery came from economical and practical challenges — what to do with the spent grain from the brewing process. Most breweries tend to send off spent grains to farms to use for animal feed, but the brewery had to start shipping spent grain to the lower 48 states. In addition to being a pricy practice, the brewery would have to also dry out the spent grain (a wet by-product of brewing). Now, the brewery is using its spent grain as fuel for its steam boilers. Explained Brandon Smith, the company's brewing operations and engineering manager, in a press release, other breweries do use spent grain for energy but no one was "burning spent grain as a sole fuel source for an energy recovery system, for a steam boiler." 

Alaskan Brewing Co. believes that the same technique could be used at bigger breweries (the brewery makes about 150,000 barrels of beer per year), but so far no one else has jumped on board. Could "beer-powered beer" be the new wave of green energy? We'll cheers to that.