I hate waste. I hate wasting things. It drives me nuts. When I lived alone for awhile, I had a hard time finishing all my food before it went bad. It's hard to finish food before it rots when you're a small person with no one around who will help you share. Even now with my husband, we have the occasional food waste that I hope to reduce down to zero. That includes the waste that is produced when making beer.
Beer has waste and it's every brewer's job to figure out how to curb it. Water constitutes the largest ingredient in making beer. Even though water is boiled off to some extent while producing the wort (the sugary, unfermented liquid prior to pitching the yeast), the majority of it remains. Hops added during the boil leave some residue behind, and the yeast, after doing its job of producing alcohol, can be saved and reused. Most of that waste is minimal. But what about all those grains?
Beer requires grains to extract all the necessary sugars for the yeast to consume. Grains are selected, milled, and then steeped in hot water so as to bring out the sugar from the grain without breaking down the starch. But after extracting the sugar, you're left with spent grain and not a lot to do with it.
More often than not, this grain is disposed of via a pig farm (spent grain's nutritional value, which is high in protein, low in carbohydrates, and high in fiber, makes it a decent food option for pigs) or the garbage disposal. As we continue to brew more and more, we started to wonder what we could be doing to be less wasteful.
Reusing spent grain is not a new concept. Multiple breweries across the country find themselves teaming up with other industries to make better use of this spent grain. Breweries face their own challenges, such as space and transportation of large batches of grain or worse, having the grain go bad before it can all be used. But as the homebrewer I am, it's time to encourage other homebrewers to extend their creativity outside of beer making.
I recently attended HustleCon, a conference for "hustlers," with speakers of startups and organizations who started their companies and have no coding experience. The founders of Back to the Roots were there, showcasing their mini mushroom farm, where coffee grounds are used as nutrients to grow oyster mushrooms. Surely there must be something that we can do with spent grain, right?
So we'll be experimenting not only with beers but with spent grain. We've used the grain from our Rose Water Ale to make sourdough bread! A little dense (I may not have let it rise enough after it's second punch), but not bad when toasted and served with soft brie. Stay tuned to hear what we do next with our grains.
