BREWERY SCENE
by Jeff Rogers
That wet grain is still valuable to some people.
And how “spent” is it really?
It comes from a granary.
It becomes a quandary.
– Anonymous brewer
Grain that has gone through the brewing process and come out the other side is referred to as “spent” grain. Today we’ll look at a question all brewers face: what to do with this and other by-products of brewing their delicious golden beverage that we all love so much?
This article sprang from a social media post by Aaron Share of To Share Brewing, wherein he asked for help finding a home for about 6 barrels of spent grain per week. This is no small thing — Aaron estimated it would take about 3 able-bodied people to lift each barrel into the back of a truck. Imagine six barrels filled with soggy oatmeal.
For most beer consumers, spent grain and other by-products are rarely given the slightest thought. When we’re smiling over a hefeweizen, we don’t for a moment pause to consider what remains at the end of the brewing process. (If you do, that may call for a whole separate column.) But for the beer brewer, these substantial leftovers are the unavoidable remainders of vital steps in the process.
The problem of spent grain arises out of several things: 1) it’s no longer useful to the brewer; 2) it’s heavy and wet; 3) left alone it will spoil and smell awful.
The promise of spent grain comes from “spent” being a bit of a misnomer. While the brewing process extracts starch & sugars from the grain, that grain is still far from exhausted. Many nutrients remain; so-called spent grain still has value. It can be used in food for people, food for animals, compost to produce yet more food, and can even be processed into biofuel. (Alaskan Brewing turns their spent grain into biofuel which then drives their brewing process, and call their product “Beer Powered Beer.”)
No one ever started a brewery because they had a passion to ensure the raw materials of brewing were used and re-used to their maximum potential. But also, no one ever started a brewery because they were passionate to rapidly top off landfills with spent grains, hops and yeast.
For most brewers, their passion is for their beer. But they live in the same world we all do, so of course they want to make their beer with minimal impact on the environment. They also want many people to enjoy their beer, which means the price can’t be too high, which in turn means minimizing the cost to dispose of by-products. And since the by-products of brewing retain significant nutritional value, if that value can be extracted, it can reduce the overall cost of beer production, thus making good beer cost less. Who can argue with that?
Insane Numbers
In 2015, New Belgium Brewing generated 73 million pounds of spent grain, while Goose Island Beer Company generated about 192,000 pounds per week.
For every 6-pack of beer brewed, one pound of spent grain remains behind.
The Brewers Association reported that, in 2021, independent craft breweries produced 24.8 million barrels of beer. They also estimate that on average producing one barrel of beer uses seventy-two pounds of malted grain. That means craft brewers produced 1.8 billion pounds of spent grain in 2021. That’s 900,000 tons, or over 5 pounds for each person in the US.
And the U.S. in general has a bigger problem. It is estimated that 1/3, yes ONE THIRD, of all food produced in the U.S. ends up being wasted. But that’s a problem way beyond the scope of this little column. Let’s get back to beer…
Why Do We Care?
We all live in a shared world and production leftovers affect us all. The EPA says that building a new landfill typically costs a minimum of $1 million, and operating that landfill costs around $600 thousand per year. That money could be better spent elsewhere.
No brewer wants to take their leftovers to a landfill. Aside from environmental concerns, it takes time and effort away from their primary goal: brewing. And it’s not cheap. In Manchester it costs $200 per ton to deposit solid waste in the landfill. So brewers are motivated to find better destinations for their by-products.
Brewers typically embrace their profession primarily because they want to make truly delicious beverages that people will love to drink. This lends a new slant to Oscar Wilde’s quip, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes.” The simplicity of the brewer’s goal is inevitably beset by adjacent necessary chores — like cleaning up the by-products of brewing. Those by-products can be a lot. In 2019, breweries in New York City sent 6,000 tons of spent grains to landfills. Expand your view beyond New York City to all of New York state, then all of the country, and you begin to see the size of the problem.
(If those 6,000 tons had come to Manchester’s landfill, it would have cost the brewers $1.2 million just to leave the grain there. Unsurprisingly, NYC fees are even higher, at $15.89 per 100 pounds, which works out to $317.80 per ton. So collectively these NYC brewers paid $1,906,800 — almost two million dollars — to dispose of their grain. Luckily brewers in NH, even in Manchester, aren’t too far from farmers.)
What’s Left After Brewing?
What exactly are the by-products of brewing beer? They fall mostly into 3 areas:
- brewer’s spent grain
- residual brewer’s yeast
- trub (pronounced “troob”)
Spent Grain
Of the three areas, spent grain is by far the lion’s share (approx. 85%). The grain used in making beer is soaked in water then removed before the boiling process. This residue contains grain husks and other parts of the grain, and is rich in proteins, fiber, lipids, vitamins & minerals, amino acids, carbohydrates, and phenolic compounds. Dried spent grain is typically approximately 28% protein, 8.2% fat, 41% carbohydrates, 17.5% cellulose, and 5.3% minerals.
Residual Yeast
Residual used yeast is the second largest by-product, at about 15% of the total. It is recovered by sedimentation and filtration of the beer before full maturation. This yeast can actually be reused in the brewing process, though its effectiveness will eventually degrade. It is one of the most expensive ingredients so many brewers exercise care to capture it for reuse. Some folks, like brewer Mike Neel of Candia Road Brewing Company, also find the yeast produces better results after a few uses.
Trub
Trub (pronounced “troob”) comes from the German word trübe (sometimes spelled trüb), which means cloudy. Trub refers to the sludge, slurry, or sediment that remains in the bottom of a vessel after the wort has been boiled and cooled. It will typically contain hop debris, coagulated proteins, and inactive yeast.
How Brewing Generates Leftovers
To help us understand all this, let’s take a look at the beer making process. Of course every brewer will have their own takes or variations on this process, but this should be a pretty good general outline.
Early in the brewing process, malted grain is added to hot (but not boiling) water where it soaks for a specific time at a certain temperature, or series of stepped temperatures. This is called “mashing.” At the end of that period, the grain is removed from the liquid, called “wort.” The wort continues in the process, while the grain is now “spent,” and cast off.
In the next phase of the brewing, the wort is boiled and hops are added. The hops lend several things to the beer: bitterness, flavors, aromas. Following the boil, the wort is allowed to cool, and will leave behind the slurry called “trub.”
After the wort is cooled, yeast is added and the fermentation takes place. Following the fermentation, yeast is captured and removed from the wort for subsequent reuse.
At this point the wort is essentially beer. It is aged, or matured, then it is ready for kegs, bottles, or cans.
How to Recycle, Repurpose, and Reuse
- Feed for Livestock
By far the most common reuse of brewing by-products is using spent grain by farmers as livestock feed. This requires minimal special treatment or handling by the brewer. The grain can be shoveled directly from the tank (where it was separated from the wort) into bins, barrels, or trailers which can be set aside, waiting for a farmer to pick them up. The duration before spoilage begins will depend on weather, but will usually be at least a few days.
Livestock generally cannot eat a diet of only the spent grain. But it can be mixed with conventional feed in a way that can reduce the farmer’s feed cost by about 50%.
At Spyglass Brewing in Nashua I spoke with cofounders John Wagner and Joe Kidder, along with head brewer Isaac Boucher and brewer Chris Brzezynski. They tell me that Spyglass works with a group of 4-6 farmers that take their grain. Spyglass has an on-line spreadsheet where they keep the farmers updated regarding any changes to their standard brewing schedule. (For example, one time their yeast delivery was late. No yeast, can’t brew. Can’t brew, no spent grain that day.) The farmers can all see this schedule, and can coordinate as to who will pick up grain on any given day. When I visited Spyglass, they had one trailer and two large totes out back filled with grain, awaiting pickup.
Night Shift Brewing in Everett MA (where Isaac and Chris both once worked) had a larger system than Spyglass. It had an automated conveyor that would take the spent grain directly from the wort-grain separation tank into a silo located adjacent to the brew building. The farmers could then retrieve the grain from the silo.
At Candia Road Brewing Company, brewer Mike Neel says they give all their spent grain to one farmer. They’ve had a good relationship with the same farmer for a while and it seems to work well for all parties concerned. They generally give the farmer 600-1,000 pounds of grain per week. The farmer reports that his pigs love it.
Aaron Share of To Share Brewing also works with one farmer, communicating by text message. Aaron keeps the farmer up to date on planned brewing days and availability of spent grain. He tells me they’ve been working with him for quite a while and it has always worked out well. But there have been occasional mixups, so Aaron tries to have some backup grain destinations.
John, Aaron & Mike also told me that there are companies that will pick up their grain and take it away for a fee. They’re not entirely clear on how it gets used after that, possibly for compost. But understandably they hesitate to pay a fee to get rid of their grain when farmers will pick it up for free. They do not charge the farmers and the farmers do not charge them. The breweries get rid of their grain, the farmers get a free supplement for their livestock feed, the grain gets used productively for a good purpose. Seems like a win all around.
Of course, New Hampshire brewers are not alone in dealing with spent grain. Sierra Nevada in California is surrounded by dairy farms, and uses a third party to pick up the spent grain and deliver it to area farmers.
New Belgium Brewing in Colorado has many farms near their brewery and contracts with one farmer who picks up their spent grain several times per week. Meanwhile, their North Carolina brewery works with an alliance of local farmers. The brewery’s consistent system in both locations means that 100 percent of their spent grain gets recycled.
- Other Uses
Urban brewers may have a more difficult time getting their grains reliably to farmers, leading them to more creative approaches.
Whiner Beer Company in Chicago generates energy from their waste using a device called an anaerobic digester. These take in bacteria and organic wastes (not just grain, but also yeast and hops). Inside, the bacteria break down the organic wastes and produce gaseous methane. The methane can then be used to power a boiler in producing more beer. Or it can drive a turbine generating power that can be fed back into the local power grid.
In 2013, 125-year old Matt Brewing Company in Utica NY (the brewer behind Saranac beers) also installed an anaerobic digester, partly to reduce load on the municipal wastewater treatment plant. Previously, the brewery’s by-products of beer residue, inactive yeast, residual wort and other solids ended up in the county’s water treatment plant. Now that wastewater goes through five anaerobic digester tanks, 40,000 gallons each, where anaerobic bacteria create methane.
“This cleaned up our brewery’s wastewater by 80 percent,” says CEO Nick Matt. “We also generate energy for 35 or 40 percent of the electrical operations,” he says. “So one, we clean up our wastewater and, two, make energy for ourselves.” Because this is a form of renewable energy, they received some funding from the state of New York. They also qualified for a federal tax credit. This helped offset the $5 million cost.
Alaskan Brewing Company in Juneau opened in 1986 as a very small brewery, and donated their spent grain to a community garden. By 1994 they’d grown 10-fold in production, yielding far more grain than a small garden could use. For a while they sent grain to a farmer in Washington, but cost of shipping by barge eventually made that unprofitable. In 2008, Alaskan’s owner Geoff Larson, a chemical engineer by training, struck upon the idea of using a mash press filter instead of a traditional lauter tun in his brewing process. (Lautering refers to the process of separating the wort from the grain.) This meant his spent grain emerged not as a heavy wet mass, but as dry granules, weighing less and requiring less space. With a little more grinding, the spent grain could then be burned to power a steam boiler, further powering the beer brewing process. This alternative fuel replaces about 50% of their fossil fuel use, saving them 65,000 gallons of diesel fuel each year. So now, as mentioned earlier, they describe their product as “Beer powered beer.”
Alaskan’s approach is not feasible for everyone. Their mash press filter and custom spent grain burner are extremely expensive pieces of equipment that require high levels of maintenance. For many brewers, making a large capital investment in something that does not actually improve the quality of their beer is hard to justify.
But lower-scale operations can work. Reuben’s Brews in Seattle donates their spent grain to Tilth Alliance, a group of Washington farmers and gardeners focused on a sustainable, healthy and equitable food future.
The famous and historic brewery Brasserie Cantillon in Anderlecht, Belgium, just outside of Brussels, has sent some of its spent grain to Eclo (formerly Le Champignon de Bruxelles), which specialized in high-quality exotic mushroom substrates for European mushroom growers.
The high cellulose content of spent grains makes them an ideal growing medium for mushrooms, which feed primarily on cellulose. They’re even more ideal if they can be collected directly after the brewing process, before exposure to bacteria and spores from undesirable fungi (which might out-compete the mushrooms). This suggests growing mushrooms right next to a brewery.
In 2016 a Chicago urban agriculture specialist named Jessica Zeigler was able to test this out, with an indoor mushroom farm under the same roof as the earlier-mentioned Whiner Beer Company. They found that mushrooms colonized the spent grain 2-3 time faster than a traditional growing medium. Following the harvest of mushrooms, the remains can enter the compost stream.
Back in NH, at Throwback Brewery in North Hampton chef Carrie Dahlgren often uses spent grain in recipes for pretzels, buns, and bread. She grinds it into flour and uses it in chocolate chip cookies. They can be seen in the on-line menu:
Spent Grain Chocolate Chip Cookie $3
a wonderfully soft spent grain cookie made with dark Belgian chocolate and lots of love
(Now I want a cookie!) Their menu also contains several mentions of spent-grain buns. It is probably no coincidence that Throwback is the first craft brewery recognized by the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services (NHDES) with an award for outstanding environmental leadership and sustainability efforts.
Kyle Fiasconaro owns Brewer’s Foods in Somerville MA and is passionate about reducing food waste. He reuses grain from Lamplighter Brewery in Cambridge to make chips, cookies, and crackers.
Daniel Kurzrock discovered homebrewing and baking with spent grain while a student at UCLA. He then wondered, “What if all the grain from our brewing could make bread?” In 2012 he started a company, ReGrained, focused on turning spent grain into food for people, including flour, bread, English muffins, naan, pasta, and cookie dough. They use the slogan “from waste to taste.”
Daniel features prominently in possibly the single best video about the reuse of spent grain. It is under 3 minutes long and can be seen at this link.
Daniel also did a very informative TEDx presentation at Indiana University, though a bit longer at 18 minutes.
- Animal Treats
David Crane founded Doggie Beer Bones in 2010, a small business that uses brewer’s spent grain to make healthy dog treats. Crane has always loved both dogs and beer, and when he discovered the shocking amount of spent grain being produced, gears started turning in his head. Early on he partnered with Stone Brewing Co. to make dog treats to sell in Stone’s taproom. Today he uses nearly 500 pounds of spent grain monthly, from breweries including Societe, Harland Brewing, Anderson Valley Brewing Company, Second Chance, Culture Brewing, and Westbrew.
- Yogurt
The scientific journal Food Hydrocolloids reported in 2022 results of a study that added spent grain during yogurt fermentation. The quality of the yogurt was evaluated by determining color, acidity and the amount of lactic acid bacteria after 1, 7 and 14 days of storage. The study found that addition of spent grain shortened the fermentation time, increased viscosity, and improved the quality of the yogurt. The added grain provided nutrients to enhance survival of bacteria during the 14 days of refrigerated storage.
- Soap
Several folks incorporate spent grain into their homemade soap recipes. It makes a great exfoliant.
Safety Warning: Many soap recipes use lye, which is caustic and produces a hazardous gas. Please use safety gear and caution, and consult an online source such as https://www.poison.org/articles/is-it-safe-to-make-soap for basic safety tips!
The American Homebrewers Association published a recipe for Chai Milk Stout Soap in 2013. This recipe comes from Adam Draeger, head brewer at The Yak & Yeti Brewpub in Arvada, Colorado. Adam notes that soap making is not hard and takes less time than home-brewing a batch of beer. He was happy with the outcome, but felt it would have turned out better if he had first dried the grain more thoroughly.
Skye Devore of Tractor Brewing Company in Albuquerque found many soap recipes on Pinterest, then added her own enhancements. Her first step was to oven-dry her grain for an hour at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. She felt her 2nd recipe turned out best. See details here.
- Composting
Spent grain is a great material for your standard compost bin or pile at home. But here’s another approach: the ancient Japanese technique of bokashi is a form of anaerobic composting that transforms all kinds of organic waste into fertile soil for gardens, yards, or potted plants. Compared to conventional composting, it saves space and accepts a wider variety of waste—many things not allowed in traditional aerobic compost bins work fine with anaerobic bokashi composting — things like cooked food scraps, meat, bones, dairy, baked goods (bread, cookies etc), egg shells. It’s also much better smelling than aerobic composting. There is still an odor, but it’s tart and lactic rather than rotten — much like sourdough starter. Spent grains are an excellent material for this use.
In Summary
Nationwide there is less reason than ever for spent grain to go to a landfill. Here in NH that should rarely happen. Most of the grains used here for brewing should end up at farms. If you’re curious I encourage you to talk to your favorite brewer. Let them know you care about this kind of thing, ask what they do with their spent grain, thank them if you like their solution. Let them know you appreciate their extra efforts, congratulate them if you think they’ve found an especially creative or effective solution. Or ask if you can take some spent grain home to try your own recipes. You might find something you really love!
You can reach Jeffrey Rogers via email jeffreycrogers@me.com
