Is ethanol for fuel being produced the same way as alcohol in beer is made?

Tens of billions of gallons of extremely cheap "beer" are going to be produced this year, but not for college students. It is used for ethanol production, the newest hope in alleviating foreign oil dependency and reducing pollution.

Although it lacks malt, the primary ingredient is hops, the most well-known brewing ingredient. Many of the processing techniques are similar as well.

Ethanol production in the U.S. primarily relies on corn.

The method of processing this corn to form a sugar-rich solution, known as wort in a brewery, is very comparable to the function a brewhouse performs to malt, adjuncts and hops, according to www.ethanol.org.

Both facilities must mill their raw ingredients and then a series of heating steps follow to allow enzymatic action to work on the complex sugars.

Finally there is cooling of the hot liquid and fermentation by yeast.

Thus, at this point, an ethanol plant has what a brewery might call 'green beer', or beer that has not yet matured by aging.

From this point, the two intermediates take very different paths to their final destination.

Beer would be aged, filtered, and packaged for consumption. The ethanol plant only wants the alcohol. It distills this 'beer' and uses a final dehydration to remove the last traces of water.

An ethanol plant is working for the most efficient use of its ingredients -- to get ethanol -- whereas a brewery has numerous taste, quality and regulation points to achieve.

Thus ethanol production is much faster and scaled up many times.

For comparison, a typical half barrel keg (15.5 gal.) of beer, containing less than a gallon of pure ethanol, would wholesale for about $50.

A gallon of fuel grade ethanol would fetch about $2.

Although in two completely separate businesses, there are two interesting ties.

The Coors facility in Golden, Colo., converts waste beer to ethanol through an agreement with an energy company.

A recent addition will double the plant capacity to 3 million gallons of ethanol through use of otherwise worthless yeast, and some spilled, off-spec, or waste beer, according to www.detnews.com.

In addition, after the former Rolling Rock facility in Latrobe closed this past summer, at least one company considered converting it for ethanol production.

Chris Straub is a senior majoring in chemical engineering and a Collegian columnist. He is also the great-great grandson of the founder of Straub beer. His e-mail address is cts150@psu.edu.