Matt Brewing begins anaerobic-digester project

UTICA — The F.X. Matt Brewing Co. is “greening” up its brewing process by installing an anaerobic-digester system at the Utica brewery that will use waste products from the brewing process to generate electricity.

“We’ve been actively working on this and talking about it for three or four years,” says Nicholas Matt, chairman and CEO of the brewery. The result of all the company’s research was the decision to install a five-tank digester system in a 

$4.5 million project.

The system will take wastewater from the brewing process and send it through an anaerobic-digestion process to produce methane gas. That gas will then be used to generate energy at the brewery, Matt says.

“We’re not only cleaning up our wastewater,” Matt says. “In addition to that, we’re going to generate 30 to 40 percent of our electricity.” He expects the system will reduce the company’s wastewater by about 80 percent to 90 percent, which, in turn, reduces the strain on Oneida County’s sewer system.

The brewery is in the process of installing the five 35-foot-high, 14-foot-diameter, digester tanks along Court Street, just down the road from the brewery’s tour center. The system also includes two small rooms — one that serves as a control room and one to house the methane-storage system. The entire system is located on the brewery’s “new campus” that spans from its parking lot on Court Street to Schuyler Street. The brewery purchased five parcels along that stretch in recent years to prepare for the project,
Matt says.

Matt Brewing is working with Environmental Management Group of Philadelphia on the project.

The digester system should be up and running sometime in September, Matt says. “We’ll be generating electricity, hopefully, before the snow flies,” he says.

The brewery will receive an array of incentives for the project, Matt says, including a grant and incentives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, a federal tax grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and a grant from National Grid. After all that, Matt says the brewery will spend between $1.5 million and $2 million of its own money on the project.

However, Matt Brewing should recoup its investment within four or five years, he adds, which is why the company opted for the digester system.

“We’ve looked at other types of renewable energy,” Matt says. The brewery has numerous buildings with flat roofs, making them an attractive option for solar power, but the 12- to 14-year average payback on solar systems is too long to make good business sense, he says. 

The digester system is the perfect combination of an option that has a speedy payback and a “green” effort that will provide benefits for the company and, hopefully, make it more attractive to environmentally conscious consumers, Matt says.

“It will be a unique aspect to this brewery that we’re doing something like this,” he says. Consumers of craft beers, such as the brewery’s Saranac line, typically want to do business with “good people doing the right thing,” Matt says. “There’s probably some significant PR value that comes out of something like this.”

The digester system is not the company’s first foray into green technology. The brewery installed a geothermal heating and cooling system when it rebuilt its warehouse after a May 2008 fire.

Sales at the brewery for both its Saranac and Utica Club lines have been growing about 15 percent annually, he says, and Matt expects those numbers to continue. He declined to release revenue totals.

Headquartered at 811 Edward St., Utica, the F.X. Matt Brewing Co. (www.saranac.com) employs 125 people.