By Jim Cavan

Chances are the last time you enjoyed a beer at breakfast was probably in college. But if you ask Doug MacNair, head brewer at Red Hook Brewery in Newington, you may have already had a little in your cereal this morning.

That’s because the folks at Red Hook divert close to 150,000 pounds of “spent grain” from their brewhouse to a number of New England dairy farms every week. The refuse, which would have otherwise ended up in a landfill and includes leftover hops, protein bi-products and even yeast, is instead given to the cows as feed.

For the farmers it’s a no-brainer: it’s cheap and proven to be just as nutritious as traditional forms of feed, including grass. Meanwhile Red Hook can rest assured that their famed brew’s organic refuse isn’t going to waste.

The program has also been a staple of the company’s cornerstone Seattle and Woodinville breweries in Washington since shortly after Red Hook’s founding in 1982.

According to MacNair, many breweries across the country do much the same thing; it just tends to go unnoticed. “We’ve been diverting the spent grain since the beginning,” says MacNair, who began his career with Red Hook’s original Seattle brewery before heading East to help jumpstart the New Hampshire operation in 1996. “But we just started adding the yeast a few years back, and as far as we know that’s pretty unique, because until recently most people thought it was bad to feed to cows.”

As it turns out, feeding yeast to cows is actually harmless.

According to Caroline Ferry of Milky Way Farm in Westport, Massachusetts -- the chief benefactor of Red Hook’s efforts -- having access to cheap and healthy food for their nearly 800 cows has proved a boon to the family business. “Unlike other farmers who do something like this, we have our own truck, so it ends up being a lot cheaper, and we even end up selling a lot of it to other farms in the area” explains Ferry. “It’s great for the cows, and we’ve gotten nothing but great milk because of it.”

In addition to their extensive organic recycling program, Red Hook has also spearheaded a number of other efficiency-minded projects, including switching from plastic to corn-based cups in their restaurant, recycling all CFL light bulbs, and coming close to cutting their wastewater in half with the help of an on-site water treatment facility.

The brewery is also exploring harnessing excess methane from the water treatment facility to help augment the power supply.

Red Hook joined the Seacoast-based Green Alliance last fall in an effort to bolster their sustainability efforts.