Old beer plant now brewing ethanol

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]