“I’m looking forward to that — it will be good,” said Martin, who said he has touted the benefits of beer to sewage treatment in the past. “I wish it could have happened a long, long time ago.”

Bill Hayden, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, said methanol from a brewery or distillery can, indeed, be used to treat sewage.

“It’s feasible, as far as we are concerned,” Hayden said.

Methanol can be used to lower levels of nitrogen, a nutrient that enters sewage plants from human and animal waste and which, if sent downstream in the treated wastewater in high concentrations, can fuel the growth of algae that taint streams.

Most of the nitrogen that goes into a sewage plant enters as ammonia. During the treatment process, microbes convert that ammonia into two forms of nitrogen — nitrate and nitrite.

When methanol is introduced in the treatment process, the carbon in it reduces the amount of nitrogen, mainly by converting most of it into water.

“It’s a fairly simple chemical reaction that uses carbon,” Hayden said.