We look at any and all press releases which appear on April 1 to be sure that we're no fools when deciding on whether to report on them. We've pasted one after the break issued by the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) in the U.K. which suggests that there is CO₂ to be saved in the transportation of beer. One catch: it needs to be freeze-dried. There's not much in the aforementioned press release to make us think that this is a joke, with the exception of this quote, "Freeze drying has successfully delivered excellent coffee for millions of people over nearly half a century." At the risk of sounding like coffee-snobs, we must chuckle a bit when we read the words "excellent coffee" and "freeze-dried" in the same sentence. Perhaps you'd be surprised to hear that freeze-dried beer is not a new idea. Additionally, we're no freeze-drying experts, but we're not certain that the alcohol would be left intact throughout the process.

April Foolery or not, the idea of brewing beer, dehydrating it, freezing it, shipping it and re-hydrating it before it ever gets served sends freeze-dried chills down our collective spines. Still, saving some CO₂ is something we could raise our glasses to... filled with beer we brewed in our basements.

If you want to be kind to the environment at your next social, look no further than Hammacher Schlemmer's 14 mph ridable cooler. Able to carry 24 12 oz. cans of cheap beer soda pop and 8 lbs. of ice, plus as much as 300 lbs. of you for a maximum range of 15 miles, perfect for a couple round trips from the dorms to the party house to the community picnic or block party. It is also equipped with a conveniently placed cup-holder for the enjoyment of the rider. He/she controls the 'vehicle' via handlebar-mounted throttle and brake levers. The handlebars and footrests are removable for trunk transportation, and though made of the same lightweight aircraft aluminum, it tips the scales at 74 lbs unloaded. Not the easiest thing to fit in the back of your car. Interestingly the seat (as shown above) is a $29.95 option. Since the entry and departure angles are so shallow, the only off-roading you'll likely be able to do is a short drive over your well-maintained lawn, but the disc brakes should be able to bring you to a swift halt should you suddenly realize your route was chosen under impaired judgment. At 'only' $499.95, it makes a perfect holiday gift for your underage deviant legal upstanding treehugging college student.

[Source: Hammacher Schlemmer]

I like beer. Whiskey? Sometimes, but beer is always good. It would be even better if the leftover grains could be turned into biofuels in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Any distilling process leaves behind by-products, including the distillation of corn into ethanol. Currently, much of this leftover material is used for animal feed, and is not worth a great deal.

According to Professor Graeme Walker from the University of Abertay Dundee, "Our research will be looking at the far more complicated process of turning waste products from industry into bioethanol as an example of a second-generation biofuel. These products are currently disposed of or processed for animal feed and turning them into fuel would be an attractive use of the resource. At the moment many technical challenges remain to converting waste biomass into fuel. We will focus on finding more efficient and cost effective processes."

Just so long as they don't mess with my beer, everything will work out alright.

[Source: University of Abertay Dundee]

News from Amtrak has us thinking that offering $100 in free alcohol to passengers taking an overnight train ride could not only entice more people to take mass transit but could also get some drunk drivers off the road and on the rail. Well, maybe not... but more people on the train is good news, right? Think of it this way: if the Amtrak train is going to be going somewhere, it is best to fill it up with passengers, right?

Now, it might say something about our social lifestyle if the best way that Amtrak can figure out how to fill their seats is by making them drunk, but that is not for this website to ponder. I wish that Amtrak could put some of their money towards making faster, more efficient trains.

Is this anything like the Coors Light train from the commercials?

[Source: CNN]

The reason carbonated beverages have their name is the bubbles of carbon dioxide that are emitted. One of the byproducts of the beer brewing process is carbon dioxide gas. Now an environmentally- conscious brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado, New Belgium Brewery is hooking up with nearby Solix Biofuels to make use of the waste CO2. The 5,000 metric tonnes of CO2 that New Belgium produces annually will be piped over to the Solix facility and pumped into their bioreactor to grow algae. The algae will then be processed into biodiesel fuel. The beauty of the normally scummy algae is that can yield up to 10,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre compared to 50 to 100 gallons per acre for soybeans.

[Source: Rocky Mountain News]

Recycling beer bottles just isn’t what it used to be. The New York Time has a story about an old Miller Lite brewing facility in New York state that shut down over ten years ago is getting ready to brew some more alcohol, but this time the fermentation tanks and kettles that used to brew beer will be used to make ethanol. The project makes sense, as the fuel will be produced near where it will be used. In a nice bit of human interest, one of the people spearheading the project worked at the plant for 15 years making beer until it closed in 1993.
The owners of the plant, Northeast Biofuels, will be taking willow tree byproduct from nearby paper mills and turning it into ethanol. The large scale of the project using willow tree bits is untested, but the plan is to have the ethanol rolling out the door by 2008. Hopefully by then there will be gas stations in the Northeast that sell E85 or some other ethanol-gasoline blend. [Source: New York Times]

Ray Holan is an accomplished auto mechanic, biofuel advocate, author of the book Sliding Home: A Complete Guide to Driving Your Diesel on Straight Vegetable Oil and regular feature contributor to AutoblogGreen.



Compared to a VW Jetta TDI, this truck's a monster.

One look at the Great Lakes Brewing Company's Freightliner tractor trailer and it's immediately evident this is no diminutive VW. This baby is serious hardware. The Cleveland-based company's rig can haul a trailer stuffed to the double doors with 22 pallets of vegetable oil (OK, or 22 pallets of bottled beer). At 60 cartons per pallet (each about 4.54 gallons), that works out to 6,000 gallons of salad oil – enough to fuel about 15 converted Jetta TDI's for a year.

But it's what's up front that counts. The Freightliner not only hauls vegetable oil - and the occasional load of brewski's. It has been converted to run on vegetable oil as well as diesel.