Brewer to turn beer suds into car fuel

EFuel100's MicroFueler, a home ethanol maker now being used by brewer Sierra Nevada.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET Networks)

The inventor of the EFuel100 MicroFueler home ethanol maker has signed on Sierra Nevada Brewing to make ethanol from beer dregs.

E-Fuel on Tuesday said that the beer company will start testing EFuel's refrigerator-sized portable ethanol refineries in the second quarter of this year using discarded beer yeast as a feedstock for ethanol.

E-Fuel last year unveiled its $9,995 home ethanol machine which ferments a mix of water and sugar into ethanol. Ethanol is mixed into gasoline at 10 percent. Flex-fuel cars can run on E85, an 85 percent blend of ethanol and gasoline.

Sierra Nevada every year generates 1.6 million gallons of "bottom of the barrel" beer yeast waste, which it now sells to farmers as feed. The MicroFueler will be able to raise the alcohol content in that mix to 15 percent and remove water.

Initially, Sierra Nevada plans to use the ethanol in its own vehicles. Once it has excess fuel, it will look to supply employees and distribute through E-Fuel's distribution network, a company representative said.

In a statement, Sierra Nevada Brewing president and founder Ken Grossman said the MicroFueler has the potential to improve the environment by reducing waste and to make fuel domestically.

[karpenterskids]

Very cool!<br /><br /><br />Finally something useful and smart coming from beer.... :)

[Get_Bent]

Here's their new logo: Drink more beer, America needs the gas.

[grendelton]

Yeast is not a feedstock, it is a creature that eats sugar and craps alcohol.<br />The feedstock is sugar; making lots of alcohol requires lots of sugar. Relatively speaking very little yeast is needed..

[pcsaav]

Ya, we all know yeast is not a feed stock. I can't stand people like you who take a nice story about a great company trying to do something cool with spent material. You have completely missed the point of the article. So the author made a mistake about the process of making beer. Who cares? Get a life and quick trying to be the smart kid in class.

[A_Wave]

If the beer waste had been used as cattle feed this is nothing more than using food to power trucks. Why not use some American ingenuity to turn starving people directly into fuel and skip the middle man?

There's plenty of food fit for human consumption fed to livestock already--one of the biggest problems with mass-produced meat. This takes something people can't eat and uses it to make fuel. Like making biodiesel from waste vegetable oil (like Kettle Foods and others), this takes waste and turns it into something useful.<br /><br />If you're really worried about cattle feed vs. the human food supply, eat grass-fed beef or none at all, but don't stop drinking Sierra Nevada!

[iamarcin]

A_wave they already are turning people into fuel... its just called the lottery and taxes... More indirect and wasteful but at least it appears humane.

[greasyfitting]

Let's see. $10k to buy a portable still... I think there's some backwood boys in Kentucky who can do it cheaper.

[AlternateRoute]

I thought the dead yeast from beer making was used to make Vegemite. I hope it doesn't mean less Vegemite in the world!

[Joe Real]

That contraption requires permit and will never be approved in the residential areas of our city.<br /><br />Furthermore, how can you justify a $10K plastic from China? There are very efficient fermentation and distillation setup that can be bought for under $300.00, and even then, it would still be illegal without the necessary permits.<br /><br />The inventor of this contraption is the guy who short selled his gadget to Nintendo Wii. Now he is over-reacting and wanted to fleece $10K for such impractical setup that is hard to get permits for.<br /><br />I think it would be money well spent if you get a license and use it to make Vodka, Rhum, Brandy, Gin, Tequilla, etc., in the tap! Then it will pay for itself very quickly, but fuel alcohol, heavens, no! <br /><br />Assuming the very unbelievably high overall efficiency rate of 14 lbs of sugar to produce one gallon of ethanol, the last time I checked at CostCo, sugar is at $0.43/lb. That brings the material input cost at $6.02/gallon of alcohol. Plus the cost of electricity to separate alcohol from water. <br /><br />And so you want to import cheap non-edible sugar, and how much would the shipping costs be?<br /><br />Only the ritzy fools will buy this contraption to make fuel, but it would really make more sense to make your own drinks out of this one, and still, there are excellent alternatives, at 1/33 th the price.

[make_or_break]

It's still creating a fuel that BURNS. So the carbon relief is what?

[AmbientShadow]

Ethanol burns cleanly (read: no carbon monoxide) and can give as much as a 50% boost to fuel economy in cars designed for it. That's where the carbon relief is. There are also other materials that can be used to make ethanol - not just plain old sugar (corn is a standard, but there are other materials that can make this process even more efficient). That aside, if the machine could handle scrap high-sugar foods, all the wasted food from restaurants and your home could be thrown in there and turned to fuel. (Grandma's old pie that you've freezer burned to death? Feed it to the yeast!)

[Joe Real]

As currently designed, it won't handle food scraps from the kitchen or the restaurant. It would surely be one smelly pungent affair, fouling the whole neighborhood if you tried to do that, and it will destroy the contraption. You would need different setup to handle food scraps to produce alcohol.<br /><br />But there is already existing very cheap biogas digesters that can be installed at home. The small scale biogas digesters are cheap, about $0.5-$2K, depending on design, and can handle food scraps, yard wastes, and are not smelly. It produces biogas which you can use for cooking and heating, or if you can filter the biogas some more, you can use it to power fuel cells, or modified generators to give you electricity and heat.

[galeso]

Ethanol has 90% the energy of gas and most cars are designed to get all 90% when up to 10% to 20% ethanol added to gas. The carbon relief is that the food that the yeast eats pulled its carbon out of the air so it is carbon neutral. <br /><br />How does Sierra Nevada Brewing get to 15% alcohol when they only get 6% out of their beer? It seems like the yeast has eaten all of the food already and that they should just distill the dregs and put it into whiskey barrels.<br /><br />E-Fuel Corporation says "The cost for processing discarded liquor can run as low as $0.10 per gallon of ethanol produced. A typical bar or restaurant discards thousands of gallons of alcohol annually! Beer and wine beverages can yield between 5 to 20 percent ethanol and distilled drinks upwards of 40% ethanol for liquor. Even greater benefit may be seen by wineries, breweries and distilled spirits refineries where it is not uncommon to discard over a million gallons of alcohol per year."<br /><br />That would indicate $1 per gallon of ethanol from beer. This makes sense, the article method does not make sense. At $2 per gallon gas prices, sugar would need to be under $0.17 per pound. While I found it for $0.07 that was in Brasil and the USA has import restrictions that keep the price much higher here. I do not see them adding sugar.

[TimFeidler666]

The only problem with this whole theory is that you need one of these "special" cars just to run this fuel and then not every has money to go get these cars or too convert there car they have now so in the long run you will make money but it the short term thing it is going to be hard to take off cause of the amount of people that can use the fuel in there car today is very slim.