A New Zealand brewery has teamed up with a gasoline retailer to come up with a new fuel made using natural byproduct waste from beer production. It's called “Brewtroleum” and it's now available at gas pumps across the country.
Brewery DB Export was seeking a way to repurpose the yeast slurry waste that usually gets thrown out during the beer fermentation process, and came up with a way to turn it into ethanol fuel, explains Popular Science.
DB Export approached New Zealand’s leading biofuels retailer, Gull, to see if they could help them make their concept a reality. Gull is now selling the 98-octane high-performance fuel at its stations, but only for a limited time.
To make it more palatable to a wider variety of cars, Brewtroleum is still made largely from gasoline, in a blend of about 90 perfect gas to 10 percent beer-ethanol.
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This is not the first time a beer company has shifted its attention from your glass to your gas: Molson Coors has been making beer-based ethanol fuels since 1996. In 2008, it used an 85-percent ethanol blend to power all the cars at the U.S. Democratic National Convention in Denver.
According to Gull, thousands of Kiwis have already pumped DB Export Brewtroleum into their cars’ tanks, and that if the renewable, slightly cleaner biofuel proves popular enough, they may extend the length of this limited-time offering.
