RATIN

Grains doing double duty

Posted on January, 18, 2018 at 11:55 am


When Andrea DeCiero arrives at work at the Cock 'n Bull restaurant in Galway on Tuesdays, she knows a special delivery awaits her. In the walk-in cooler, this baker finds a bucket of wet malt-scented grains from Wolf Hollow Brewing Company in Schenectady.

Referred to as "spent grain," this mixture of barley and sometimes wheat, rye and oats is the sugary fuel that causes water and yeast to ferment into beer.

"Spent grain is not an inedible substance," says Eddie Del Castillo, the manager at Wolf Hollow, adding, "it's kind of a circle of life." He estimates the brewery has about 400 pounds of spent grains per batch of beer made (each batch produces 14 kegs of beer, and the grain amount varies based on the type of beer), each batch with its own sugar content and flavor.

That inconsistency could frustrate some, but it's an exciting challenge for DeCiero, who substitutes out 25 percent of the dried flour in her recipes for spent grains. "The spent grains give a really nice texture. You can really tell they are there and each batch is different," she says.

The New York state beer industry has grown in production by 26 percent since 2011, resulting in 1,089,536 barrels of beer produced last year, according to the New York State Brewers Association. DeCiero turns the spent grains into breads and pretzels for both the restaurant and for the Sunday food program at Wolf Hollow, but the grains' use in food is a small dent in the overall reuse of this underutilized byproduct that is a sizable contributor to food waste.

DeCiero has noticed that different types of grains create idiosyncrasies in the dough-making process. Darker grains cause the dough to rise less, resulting in a lower yield, but people seem to like those flavors more. She wouldn't recommend pairing a dark grain baked good with a dark beer made from the same grain, though. "I wouldn't serve a porter with a porter pretzel. It's like pairing chocolate and fruit so it's not too overwhelming." Food made from spent grain, she finds, gives chefs and beer professionals a new avenue to explore for food and beer pairings.

At Indian Ladder Farm Cidery and Brewery, in Altamont, barley grown on the farm is reincarnated post-brewing into pizza dough and crackers. "For us, since we're self-contained, our path forward is to use it all on the farm and it is a good food source for animals and humans," says Dietrich Gehring, a partner in the farm. He sees huge potential for spent grain reuse in New York beyond compost and cattle feed — the two most common uses of spent grain currently — but the infrastructure is needed. (He points to the hop and barley industry, which has rapidly grown in the state thanks to government support and increased infrastructure, as a model for spent grains.)

"I don't know if brewers are really thinking about uses for spent grain. I think the main benefit is to give it away for free," says Paul Leone, the executive director of the New York State Brewers Association. Many farms will pick up spent grain from a brewery as a way to cheaply supplement animal feed, saving the brewery disposal costs. A failed provision in the 2014 federal Food Safety Modernization Act would have made such a transaction nearly impossible by requiring brewers to sterilize the grains by drying them, but today there is little government oversight on spent grain disposal.

"We are aware that there is proactive work being done in the area and that some of [the spent grain] is being used for dog treats or reused by bakers to make bread," Jola Szubielski, director of public information for New York state Department of Agriculture and Markets, said in an email. "I understand a food tech startup in Brooklyn is transforming spent grains into flour." (Brooklyn BrewShop and Rise Products are two companies in Brooklyn turning spent grain into flour or selling the flour.)

Kenneth Lush, the prototype engineer for Ecovative Design in Green Island, says that his company is researching the viability of spent grain as a medium for the mushroom-based environmentally sound packaging it produces. Though details were sparse to protect the research, Lush says that spent grains are a good substrate for mushroom root structure that binds the packaging together, and with roughly 200 breweries within 100 miles of Albany, the availability of spent grains could lead to a boon in the bio-packaging field.

Rebecca Platel spends her days immersed in the craft beer movement as a program manager for the Carey Institute's Helderberg Brewshed project, based in Rensselaerville. She hasn't noticed much attention being paid to creative reuse of spent grains locally.

"There are brewers out west who are already looking at spent grain as an energy source, and in New York City, where the cost to transport grain in and out of the city is expensive, waste disposal is expensive, storage is expensive," she says. Because there is plenty of land to till the spent grains into (for soil nutrition) and farms that will accept the brewing waste, there hasn't been much of a push to explore other avenues.

Curt Andrews Gooch, a senior extension associate for Cornell University, says that brewing grains have potential as biomass for energy digestion systems. Nearly 30 farms in New York state have anaerobic digesters that use enzymes to convert cow manure into biogas to generate power, but Gooch says the nutrient content of spent grain creates higher energy potential for biogas production than the manure. That increased potential becomes a necessity in places with fewer farms than New York. The Alaskan Brewing Company, in the state's capital of Juneau, uses spent grain in a boiler system that converts the waste into steam to power the facility. While New York state has 1.5 million cows (plus an additional 138,000 pigs, sheep, and goats) to consume spent grain, Alaska only has 760 farms and roughly 5,000 cows, according to the 2016 USDA agriculture overview.

Still, some in the brewing industry are looking ahead. The brewing program at Schenectady County Community College is focusing on the afterlife of spent grain as an extension of the brewing process. Working with the baking program, small batches of spent grain are dried and milled into flour for rustic breads and dog treats, though the project is still in the research and development phase. "Spent grains do not have the same attributes as wheat flour," says Jay Larkin, an instructor in the culinary arts program.

"We're hoping to generate ideas for what others can do with that grain. There can and should be opportunities to realize further revenues" from viable waste byproducts of the beer industry, he says. He notes that some companies use spent grain-derived packaging to hold six-packs of beer together to replace plastic ring-holders.

"Sustainability. Ultimately that's what it comes down to," Larkin says.

Deanna Fox is a food and agriculture journalist.

Source: Times Union