Drink driving is about to take on a whole new meaning for New Zealand’s motorists, with a beer brewery in the country having announced it has created a new biofuel from leftover yeasts used in its fermentation process.

The ‘brewtroleum’, reports the NZ Herald, is made from the yeast slurry that DB Export would otherwise have thrown away or given to farm animals as a feed. Now it is being used to produce ethanol, which in turn is added to petroleum to create a cleaner form of petrol to power a car’s engine.

While the company is not the first to used a beer by-product to create a more green form of sustainable fuel, DB says that it is the first to bring it to the commercial market and sell it to the public.

E10, the name of blended biofuel (of which 10 percent is made of the ethanol produced by the brewery), has proven to be controversial in the past; in the US, a drive to produce more ethanol led to a stark increase in corn prices, and there have been questions raised about the efficacy of ethanol-diluted petrol, particularly when the volume of ethanol is increased to 15 percent.

The ‘brewtroleum’, while mostly a publicity stunt for the brewery, eschews much of the controversy as it is entirely made from recycling beer yeast, rather than from corn which is farmed exclusively for the production of ethanol.

The E10 fuel will now be sold at 60 service stations across New Zealand’s North and South islands. The company produced almost 8,000 gallons of ethanol from the yeast used to bottles 8.8m bottles of its beer. This amounts to about 300,000 litres of petrol, which the company believes will sell out after a month and a half.

You can find out more about how DB Export’s ‘brewtroleum’ works in the video below: