Tips for homebrewers and advice from innovators
Brewing your own beer at home can be a lot of fun and immensely satisfying. There’s nothing like sharing a brew you are proud of with friends and family. It means more to those you share your craft with and adds greater significance to your enjoyment. But what if you are concerned about the environment and you want to extend that thinking to your favourite hobby? Ruvani de Silva tackles this issue head on by focusing on the waste products from home brewing, talking to innovators in the field about how you can repurpose your own spent grains.
A travel-loving beer writer, with a host of bylines, Ruvani blogs about beer in Central Texas and beyond, as Craft Beer Amethyst. A vocal advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in beer. As a British South Asian woman living in Texas, Ruvani brings a unique voice to the world of craft beer.
Spent grain is the name given to the grain that is drained out and leftover after the mash and the sparge. Having been heated to extract its sugars and other flavours, the grain is no longer required once the sparge is complete and the sugar and nutrient-rich wort is transferred to the boil. Spent grain is usually barley, wheat, or a mix of the two, but can include specialist grains, depending on what you are brewing.
If you have tried your hand at homebrewing, you will be familiar with this wet clumpy porridge-like byproduct on your brew day, but the name ‘spent grain’ is misleading. Just because the grain is no longer required in the beer-making process, it is far from redundant. In fact, there are many different ways in which spent grain can be repurposed at home, and plenty of very good reasons for doing so.
As with reuse and recycling, repurposing spent grain is good for the environment. Throwing away spent grain is wasteful, as there are many ways in which it can still be used. As per research cited in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, every gallon of beer produced nets about 1.7 pounds of wet spent grain, all of which can be practically repurposed. Reusing spent grain is an important way to reduce food waste and protect our natural resources in response to the ongoing climate emergency. Fortunately most breweries nowadays are aware of the potential for spent grain reuse and will recycle their spent grain rather than send it to landfill. Many breweries offer it to local farms for animal feed or compost, and some partner with local bakeries who will dry it and make spent grain flour, and there are plenty of ways homebrewers can be equally environmentally friendly.
There are also significant benefits to cooking with spent grain. It is low in sugar and rich in fibre, protein, biotin, folic acid, riboflavin and minerals such as calcium and magnesium. Adding spent grain to baked goods has been proven to increase their nutritional content, and it is easy and extremely versatile to cook with. Cooking with spent grain requires little to no specialist equipment, and as well as minimising brewing waste you can add exciting new flavour dimensions to your favourite baked goods. By reusing spent grain, you are also saving money. Instead of purchasing extra flour, oats or cereal, you can swap them out for your spent grain which is in effect a free replacement, which makes for an all-round win.
There are plenty of ways that homebrewers can reuse their spent grain with little or no effort at all, all of which are better than throwing it into the bin or the waste disposal. Spent grain makes for excellent compost, so you can either put it into your composter or directly onto your garden for some extra nutrients in your soil. If you live near a farm or know anyone with livestock, you can recycle your spent grain as animal feed. However, cooking with spent grain is the best way to maximise its potential.
Spent grain can be used wet in recipes for brownies and cakes, or easily dried in the oven or a dehydrator, ground into flour and incorporated into anything from sticky buns to pizza dough. Cooking with spent grain is becoming increasingly popular, and there are plenty of dedicated spent grain recipes sites to inspire you. You can even make it into different types of doggie treats. Another known use for spent grain is growing mushrooms, for which its chemical makeup is very well suited. However, this in itself is quite a complicated process so it’s worth researching thoroughly if you want to start experimenting.
It is important to either use, freeze or dry spent grain immediately after extracting it from your beer. It can spoil and turn sour in a couple of hours, so acting quickly is key to getting the most out of your spent grain. There are many recipes that involve fresh wet spent grain straight from the mash. These can include pizza dough, brownies, and some dog treats. If you don’t want to start baking in the middle of your brew day, you can freeze wet the spent grain and defrost it for cooking when you’re ready. It’s best to divide it into small cup-sized portions which you can defrost individually and bake with.
Drying out spent grain makes it even more versatile. If you don’t have a dehydrator, you can dry the grain easily in your oven. Set it on its lowest setting (approximately 75c/170f), spread the grains on a baking sheet and leave for around seven hours, tossing intermittently to ensure they dry out evenly. Once your grains are dry, you can use them to make granola or energy bars, or grind them into flour using a coffee or spice grinder. Spent grain flour can be swapped out for portions of regular flour when baking cakes, bread, pretzels and even home-made pasta.
One of the best online resources for spent grain recipes is the Brooklyn Beer Shop blog. Erica Shea and Stephen Valand are passionate homebrewers whose desire to make homebrewing accessible to even the most space-strapped city dweller inspired them to create the simple, fun stovetop homebrew kits they are now well-known for. The dearth of information on spent grain cooking they encountered when they started their business led them to create over 50 original recipes using spent grain, from fried chicken to thin mint biscuits.
“When developing and testing a new beer recipe we go through a lot of spent grain, and we just felt uneasy throwing it out all the time” says Shea, “we live in Brooklyn — nowhere close to a farm, so cooking with spent grain was our way of reducing food waste and recycling it into something tasty.” Shea and Valand’s recipes are lovingly developed to get the most out of spent grain’s unique and interesting flavours. Shea describes spent grain as tasting: “A little nutty and malty — it’s not very sweet because brewing extracts all its sugars. It adds texture and a good amount of fibre to whatever you’re cooking.”
Founded in 1986, Alaskan Brewing in Juneau AK have also had to respond to their environment with a unique, purpose-built way of recycling their spent grain. A beautiful landlocked fjord with no industrial agriculture, Juneau is only accessible by boat or plane. With no means to easily dispose of their spent grain Alaskan began to experiment with building a spent grain-fuelled boiler. As co-founder Geoff Larson explains, this was a difficult and protracted process. “Spent grain is difficult to burn” he says, “Its high protein content means that it clumps together.” Drying out the grain helped, but it wasn’t until their fourth attempt that they got the boiler right.
Alaskan now use all their spent grain to help power their brewhouse, just one of many environmental initiatives the brewery employs. “Necessity has been the mother of invention” says Larson, “We now have four different patents on the boiler to cover its unique attributes.” Alaskan is the first brewery to build an emission-compliant boiler that runs solely on spent grain fuel, creating game-changing technology for the industry.
The Culinary Institute of America was another early adopter of spent grain reuse. They opened their on-site brewery, a co-operative partnership with nearby Brooklyn Brewery, in 2015, and have been finding ways to repurpose their spent grain within the institute since then. “Our students are always very interested in the idea of repurposing our spent grain and finding innovative ways to use it,” says CIA Head Brewer Hutch Kugeman, “It really fits the “whole hog” approach that the CIA takes to food…by that I mean finding a way to use everything and reduce waste.” Spent grain is dried, ground into flour and used in the school’s High Volume Production kitchen to feed other students, served in their on-site farm-to-table restaurant, American Bounty, and made into sourdough starters for their Apple Pie Bakery Café.
Closer to home, Pip Young, Brewery Manager at Salt Beer Factory and founder of 30six Brewery and the Coven Brewsters, has started her own programme of spent grain flour milling, Flour 2 the PPL. “Sustainability is a major passion of mine, and as I also love beer it is natural for me to look at ways to make the industry better” she says.
Working with local brewery Nightjar Brewing, Young plans to offer breweries the opportunity to convert their spent grain back to food in the same way homebrewers can, and how the Culinary Institute of America is. “Breweries however have time and space against them” says Young, “This is where I come in — I have perfected a system of recapture, drying and storage that can be easily implemented with minimal effect.” Young is also working on a programme growing mushrooms in spent grain, Shortcut 2 Mushrooms.
In the US, companies like ReGrained are championing upcycled food technology with their spent grain snacks, flour and compostable packaging, while in Singapore, scientists have recently discovered a new process to convert spent grain into a beer-yeast-growing nutrient. The future is bright for spent grain – don’t let yours go to waste.
Learning resources start from fifty pence each, or you can Join CAMRA for unlimited free access!