From beer filtration to organic food chambers, national labs tout New Mexico's unique business ecosystem

Yahoo

29-06-2025

Jun. 29—It's a warm Friday evening on the patio of a brewery, the sun is setting beyond the Sandias and you order a pilsner to finish off your week — but when your beer arrives, it's black and cloudy.
"Your brain is inherently thinking: wrong. You know the sound from 'Jeopardy,' right? 'Errr!' You know: wrong," La Cumbre Brewing Co.'s Founder and President Jeff Erway said. "Same thing. If someone hands you a really, really cloudy beer when you ordered a pilsner, that's just wrong. It's not supposed to look like that."
Beer clarity is "innately tied" to beer quality, Erway said. La Cumbre and a slew of other local breweries are working with Los Alamos National Laboratory on filtration technology that would clarify beers using silent ultrasonic waves.
The experiment is part of a New Mexico Small Business Assistance program, or NMSBA. NMSBA is a joint venture by LANL and Sandia National Laboratories to offer state-of-the-art federal resources and technology to small companies for free. The labs have done everything from helping create prototypes that can quickly peel the skin from chile to improving medical testing with nuclear magnetic resonance technology.
The companies keep the work as their own intellectual property. The projects can't already be commercially available to get NMSBA program help.
The locally tailored program, paired with other resources available to small businesses in the state, makes New Mexico's business ecosystem unlike any other in the nation, said Julia Wise, manager of regional programs at LANL.
"No other state has taken the time to figure out how to do this with their national labs or thought about connecting their businesses with their national labs in this way," Wise said, adding that NMSBA can act as a model for other labs to follow.
NMSBA started as a partnership between the state and national labs in 2000. Since then, NMSBA has provided $80.6 million in technical assistance to more than 3,200 businesses, according to the national labs.
To qualify for NMSBA assistance, a company must be a for-profit, located in New Mexico, file gross receipts taxes to the state and be considered a small business per U.S. Small Business Administration guidelines.
Then, a company can go after individualized support, getting up to $40,000 in technical assistance, or work with multiple companies — which La Cumbre is doing — to get up to $120,000 in technical assistance on a shared project. La Cumbre is working with four additional breweries — Santa Fe Brewing Co., Beer Creek Brewing Co., Ex Novo Brewing Co. and Taos Mesa Brewing — on its project.
The project itself focuses on ultrasonic wave filtration technology.
Erway said La Cumbre currently uses Stokes' Law for its fermentation process, a fluid dynamics principle that helps breweries understand and predict how quickly quality-degrading components like yeast will fall through a solution — beer, in this case. Then, the company speeds things up by adding specific chemical agents, which Erway said many small breweries do.
But breweries wouldn't have to add those chemical agents under the NMSBA filtration project. Erway described the tech as a "novel way" of forcing yeast and other particulates to fall out of solution much faster, by introducing ultrasonic waves.
The lab described the early stages of the ongoing project as successful, something that could improve both the quality of beer as well as add years to its shelf life.
The experiment only filters about 10 ounces of beer at a time, and Erway would need 4,000 gallons of beer filtered at once to commercially adopt it. Still, if the tech ever finished its testing phase and was available at scale, Erway would want to see if the investment is worth it for adoption.
La Cumbre is already doing great, he said, but he's fascinated by the technology.
"I still, to this day, do not understand how it's possible, except (the lab investigator has) shown me videos of it working," Erway said, laughing.
The technology can go beyond the brewery scene, Erway said. He pondered how it could affect desalination, a way to treat saline water that state and industry officials are exploring as a partial solution to the nation's dwindling water resources.
"It would have enormous uses anywhere," Erway said.
Mighty seeds
Over in Rio Rancho, Sharon-Joy Palmer-Caughren came to LANL asking for help in a different area: optimizing high-tech food-growing module prototypes.
She's worked on the prototypes for years but wanted to take it a step further with NMSBA help. She said the collaboration helped optimize "Mighty SEED," an organic food production chamber.
Now, a patent is pending, and Palmer-Caughren anticipates a commercial launch in September.
"What we're doing with the laboratory, it's really unique," she said. "It's unique expertise in their environmental sciences department."
Mary Monson, senior manager of technology partnerships and business development at Sandia Labs, said the collaborative nature is her favorite part of the program.
"That's what I love about this state — everybody jumps in and contributes what they have," she said.
Like Wise, she emphasized that only New Mexico offers this kind of small business support.
"We're all rooting for these companies," Monson said.