Westerly brewery adopts a more environmentally-friendly beer-making process

WESTERLY, R.I. (WPRI) — A Rhode Island brewery has slightly changed their beer-making process, and environmentalists are probably pretty “hoppy” about it.

Grey Sail Brewing in Westerly is now capturing carbon dioxide instead of releasing into the atmosphere.

“Last year, we brewed 9,000 barrels of beer,” Alan Brinton of Grey Sail Brewing said. (For reference, there are two kegs of beer in each barrel.)

Alan and his wife, Jennifer, run the brewery out of the former Westerly Macaroni Manufacturing Company building on Canal Street. They brewed their first batch of beer in 2011.

“Captain’s Daughter is really the beer that put us on the map,” Alan said.

The brewery makes at least a dozen different kinds of beer, including a coffee stout and their Rising Hope IPA.

Grey Sail said all of the proceeds from Rising Hope are given to the National Pediatric Cancer Foundation.

I’m almost sure the entire Anheuser-Busch family that produces 125M barrels a year, or Molson Coors whose Golden Colorado brewery produces 29M barrels of beer a year by itself, when hearing a brewery in Rhode Island is being so important to capture CO2 while they make 9000 barrels a year, are on the floor laughing. The added cost to produce the product in the numbers they do would be astronomical. And the only way they would be able to do it is to jack up the price so high, the public would start attending AA meetings.

Not to mention in time, how many of the 30K that work for Budweiser and the 20k that work for Coors at just their base breweries would be out of work due to the increased cost of collecting and disposing of CO2.

And it has uses. Carbon dioxide is essential for internal respiration in a human body. Internal respiration is a process, by which oxygen is transported to body tissues and carbon dioxide is carried away from them. Carbon dioxide is a guardian of the pH of the blood, which is essential for survival.

And ONE PROJECT Rayner and colleagues from across the U.K. are working on involves catalytic processes for reducing CO2 to formic acid (HCO2H). Formic acid has potential to power fuel cells for electricity generation and automobiles and as a precursor for other fuels and commodity chemicals, including polymers, he said. Hydrogen will be needed for the conversion and would have to be sourced from elsewhere, Rayner explained. “But compared with using hydrogen alone or methanol, we believe formic acid has much greater potential.

So it has other uses, and some good ones. I don’t know about the car charging but the production of home use electricity could be a boom. But at what cost. Something about nose/face?

y69

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