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‘GREEN’ BEER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Photo
In this Jan. 26, 2011 photo, Eric Fitch holds a Magic Hat glass in front of the digester building at the brewery in South Burlington, Vt. The Vermont brewery is giving new meaning to the idea of green beer. Magic Hat Brewing Co., of South Burlington, is the first site to use a device that turns spent grain from the brewing process into natural gas that is then used to fuel brewing operations. The 42-foot tall anaerobic methane digester, installed last summer, extracts energy from the spent hops, barley and yeast left over from the brewing process.
Invention turns brewery waste to fuel
Associated Press
SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt.
Before he started “saving the earth, one beer at a time,” all inventor Eric Fitch knew about home brewing was that it could make quite a mess.
Once, he accidentally backed up the plumbing in his apartment building by dumping into his garbage disposal the spent grain left over from his India Pale Ale home brew. The oatmeal-looking gunk choked the pipes in his Cambridge, Mass., building, flooding the basement.
These days, he’s doing something more constructive, fulfilling the dream of beer lovers everywhere by recycling the stuff: The MIT-trained mechanical engineer has invented a patented device that turns brewery waste into natural gas that’s used to fuel the brewing process.
The anaerobic methane digester, installed last year at Magic Hat Brewing Co. in Vermont, extracts energy from the spent hops, barley and yeast left over from the brewing process — and it processes the plant’s wastewater. That saves the brewer on waste disposal and natural-gas purchasing
The 42-foot tall structure, which cost about $4 million to build, sits in the back parking lot of Magic Hat’s brewery, where it came online last summer.
Fitch, 37, is CEO of PurposeEnergy, Inc., of Waltham, Mass., a renewable-energy startup company whose lone product is the biphase orbicular bioreactor, which is 50 feet in diameter, holds 490,000 gallons of slurry and produces 200 cubic feet of biogas per minute.
Brewers big and small have wrestled with waste issues since the dawn of beer-making. In recent years, they’ve turned to recycling — both as a cost-saver and for environmental reasons.
PurposeEnergy says its digester is the first in the world to extract energy from the spent grain and then re-use it in the brewery, and all in one place. At Magic Hat, the big brown silo is about 100 feet from the main complex.
After getting the idea in 2007, Fitch pilot-tested it in Florida, taking spent grain from a Yuengling & Son brewery in Tampa, Fla., trucking it to a farm and putting it through a 400-gallon methane digester. That helped refine the design of the facility. Then he scouted New England breweries that might agree to a pilot project and got a bite from Magic Hat, which had been looking for ways to reduce its waste-treatment bill.
“They [PurposeEnergy] laid out what we could save, and how the digester could benefit things from a ‘green’ standpoint, and it was too good to pass up,” said Steve Hill, social networking manager for North American Breweries, which owns Magic Hat.