At Green Field Solutions, we work with third-party service providers to bring in truckloads of spent brewers yeast from our brewery clients every year. That’s more than 40 million pounds of by-products that may have otherwise gone to the landfill, been landspread or sold as a low-value animal feed. Since our sister company, International Ingredients Corporation, opened its Cleburne, Texas facility in 1994, spent brewers yeast has received the economic and environmental upgrade it deserves.
Beer By-products: Process & Infographic
In our brewery recycling infographic, we outline the lifecycle of spent brewers yeast. What doesn’t make it to the tap gets distilled, then dried into a powder for pet food or extracted and sold as high quality ethanol. Instead of a by-product problem, Green Field Solutions makes spent brewers yeast profitable for its clients, tasty for our furry friends and environmentally friendly.
How it works: The thousands of truckloads of spent brewers yeast we receive goes through a stringent process. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that alcohol cannot be evaporated into the air, so the entire contents of the trucks goes through a distiller to remove the alcohol and kill the yeast. Next, the slurry of yeast and water is dried in huge drum dryers. The dried product is then ground into a uniform powder and packaged in bags and totes.
Brewery Recycling: Small Scale, High Quality
GFS manufactures millions of pounds of finished product, which is mostly sold for pet food products that can be found at your local pet store. In addition to the pet food ingredients, the distillation process creates more than 300,000 gallons of high-quality ethanol. At 200 proof, our ethanol is a really high quality. So much so, it is sold to the ethanol industry to enhance the quality of product for other ethanol producers.
