Young Henry's Brewery in Australia is using green algae to make an environmentally friendly beer.
Green beer. Not like the kind served on St. Patrick's Day, but the type that's doing its part to help the environment.
Young Henry's Brewery in Australia is using green algae to make an environmentally friendly beer.
But despite the tanks of bubbling algae, brewery co-founder Oscar McMahon stresses that the algae is just part of the production process.
"It never touches the beer. This is not green beer," he said.
So why algae? During the beer's fermentation process, carbon dioxide is released, and the algae stops the greenhouse gas from going into the atmosphere.
"Basically, the CO2 is then ingested by the microalgae, which uses it to photosynthesize. That creates more algae, releases oxygen, and the world is a better place for it," McMahon adds.
"For combating climate change, algae capture CO2 up to 400 times more efficiently than a tree," Professor Peter Ralph from the University of Technology in Sydney explains.
Traditionally the carbon dioxide emitted by fermenting just enough hops to make one six-pack of beer can take a tree one to two days to absorb.
Young Henry's beer doesn't stop here at fighting climate change. They're also working on another way greenhouse gasses are released into the atmosphere.
For example, the grain leftover from the brewing process currently goes out as cattle feed. Putting algae into food for cows reduces the methane gas cattle release in burps and farts.
And according to Dr. Ralph, many will see more algae or other substances being used in products to "eat" carbon.
"I think that's going to be the future, where industries want to use recycled carbon, not fossil carbon."
