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Magic Hat: a brewery that runs on beer

Posted on March 11th, 2011 by Daniel

If you’re like most folks at happy hour, you probably never think about what it took to make that beer in your hand… some could care less about the quantity they consume, but that’s another topic… anyway, did you know that one of the best breweries out there is running its operations on beer? No, they’re not getting drunk off their own supply, instead they’re running their facility by turning their excess beer and other organic waste into natural gas.

A typical brewery produces plenty of organic waste during the brewing process by using large quantities of hops, barley, yeast, etc.. Some of the spent grain is usually sold or given away to farmers as cattle feed, and some of it may end up as wastewater in the watershed, after being treated on site. But thanks to Purpose Energy‘s biphase orbicular bioreactor (or B.O.B.), the brewery’s organic waste can be turned into biogas, which can then be used to power the facility.

The man behind Purpose Energy and B.O.B. is Eric Fitch, a 37 year-old mechanical engineer by training, and home brewing extraordinaire (he once clogged up the pipes of his Cambridge, MA, apartment building when he dumped the oatmeal looking organic waste from his brew into his garbage dispenser). Fitch initially tested out his invention by taking away the waste from Yuengling’s brewery in Tampla, FL, to a local farm, where he dumped it into a 400-gallon methane digester. With his refined B.O.B, he went back to New England to approach several breweries for a pilot project, and Magic Hat agreed.

Magic Hat’s 42-foot tall silo structure is what houses Purpose Energy’s B.O.B. system. The B.O.B. has a 50-foot diameter, can hold 490,000 gallons of waste slurry, and produces about 200 cubic feet of biogas per minute to power the brewery’s operations. The whole thing cost about $4 million to build, and just 100 feet away from the main Magic Hat facility, it’s like having your own power plant in your backyard. The system can save up to $2 per barrel of beer, and with Magic Hat’s medium-sized operations delivering 154,000 barrels of beer per year, they save approximately $25,000 every month!

Like its company slogan says, Purpose Energy is “saving the earth, one beer at a time.” And we say cheers to that! (via boston.com, treehugger.com)

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2011 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Featured Content, Green Business, biofuels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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