MIT’s Brewing Green Beer

Well, kind of. But not the green beer you drink on St. Patrick’s day. An MIT mechanical engineering grad has developed a new technology to turn spent grain from the brewing process into natural gas to be used in…well the brewing process. Sounds very sensible. His invention is called the “biphase orbicular bioreactor” and is a type of anaerobic methane digester. Those words alone are impressive.

He’s working with Magic Hat’s Vermont Brewery, which installed his system last year. Here’s an excerpt from the Globe:

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.

Note to self: stop dumping spent grain down the garbage disposal. This also seems like a pretty amazing job opportunity for my fellow classmates who can’t decide whether they want to work in an important field, such as renewable energy, or a fun one, such as beer.