JUNEAU, Alaska – The Alaskan Brewing Co. is going green, but instead of looking to solar and wind energy, it has turned to a familiar source: beer.
The Juneau-based beer maker has installed a unique boiler system to cut its fuel costs. It bought a $1.8 million furnace that burns the company’s spent grain – the waste accumulated from the brewing process – into steam, which powers most of the brewery’s operations.
Company officials joke they are now serving “beer-powered beer.”
In the lower 48, breweries for decades have been sending 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 for Alaska Brewing Co., the problem of what to do with the excess spent grain – made up of the residual malt and barley – became more problematic after it expanded in 1995.
The company had to resort to shipping its spent grain to buyers in the Lower 48. 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. And because the grain is a relatively wet byproduct of the brewing process, it needs to 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,” brewery co-founder Geoff Larson said.
So four years ago, the company started looking at whether it could use spent grain as an in-house, renewable energy source and reduce costs at the same time.
While 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,” says Brandon Smith, the company’s brewing operations and engineering manager.
It contracted with a North Dakota company to build the special boiler system after the project was awarded nearly $500,000 in a grant from the federal Rural Energy for America Program.
The craft brewery is expecting big savings once the system is fully operational in about a month’s time. Smith estimates that the spent grain steam boiler will offset the company’s yearly energy costs by 70 percent, which amounts to about $450,000 a year.
Alaskan Brewing Co. makes about 150,000 barrels of beer a year. The beer is distributed in 14 states after recent entries into the Texas, Wisconsin and Minnesota markets. It brews several varieties of beer, but is best-known for its Alaskan Amber, an alt-style beer.
When asked which beer’s spent grain burns the best, Smith joked, “we’re still trying to figure that out. We have our suspicions.”
