Spent Grains into Credit
Apologies for the horrible pun in the title, but that's the idea proposed here: How do we turn a byproduct into a net positive?
Allow me to explain.
I drink beer. A lot of beer. The vast majority, when it can be helped, is craft brew. The Paris craft beer scene is a "thing" now, including a handful of actual, honest-to-god, good brewers in the metropolitan area, so most of the beer I drink now is locally made. (This has filtered into our business, where other than special beers from our home in San Francisco or elsewhere abroad, we tend to offer Parisian beers.)
One of these great little breweries is Deck & Donohue, run by cool, beer lovin' guys Thomas (ze French guy) and Mike (the American guy) – part of the city's rapidly growing craft beer community. Since they got their brewery going just outside the Péripherique ring road that surrounds Paris, they've been offering up their spent grains to all takers.
I jumped at the chance to try messing with the spent grains – the hulls of malted barley that have been boiled into the mash and then strained out of the beer-making process. These grains are rough and tasty and sweet and aromatic, and they also contain high amounts of fiber and protein. As many home brewers and other beer fans have discovered, this largest byproduct of brewing has numerous uses beyond typically being turned into animal feed (inefficient) or mulch for growing mushrooms (efficient).
Challenge: These grains are wet.
Obviously, the three kinds of malted barley in Deck & Donohue's IPA have been soaking in liquid. So the first time Thomas brought over a bag of the stuff, I threw it in a plastic bin, waiting 'til I had time to try turning it into a granola or work it into a bread. They went moldy very quickly.
To use them, they either have to be put to work right away… or dried out. Paris is humid. So spreading it out on trays and leaving it out to dry will also most likely result in (undesirable) mold.
The logical solution, then, is to spread them thinly on to baking sheets and oven dry them. (120ªC, convection, 30 minutes seems to do the trick.)
Now that they're dry, they can be substituted for other kinds of whole(ish) grains in other recipes. I immediately used them as a replacement for the (expensive-ass) organic oats that go into our Emperor Norton "cowboy cookies" – and it worked!
There's a bit of roughage, sure, but this way you know you're having spent grains which is a good first step in raising awareness of this kind of "upcycling." The cookies will, in fact, make their public debut at an event at the brewery this coming weekend.
(If you're in Paris and you're into beer, barbecue, and a dessert that will make sure you stay regular, by all means, you should come.)
The cookies are pretty damn delicious, and the net cost savings of not using fancypants organic oats is great, but there's still something bothering me: If you have to dry the barley for a half hour in a giant convection oven, does the electricity used and the heat generated thus chew up the supposedly offset footprint of buying "fresh" grains and having them delivered from central France in the first place?
Alannah and I are dead serious about our post-MAD Symposium MAD Resolutions, so I got to thinking about more efficient use of the spent grains, besides drying them.
One is to just leave the grains wet (and use them immediately – refrigerating them just takes up space and refrigeration and hence more electricity). For the cookies, this just isn't possible: The only liquid in our base recipe is in the 13-15% of our butter that's not fat and the 148g that come from the water content of eggs, so introducing up to 250g of additional water (what the undried spent grains bring to the party) to each dozen cookies is not going to fly.
Thus the cookies for this weekend will use dried spent grains for quality purposes – which do, mind you, keep quite well in storage.
This is fine for the "special occasion" recipe – we're also turning our gears on coming up with a custom granola for Deck & Donohue based on their "Monk" dark beer with oats, just for fun and as a thank you for giving us these grains to play with.
But now I'm turning to possible new uses for the wet grains. Having just been turned on to Tartine Book Nº 3 and missing the fuck out of proper rugbrød from Copenhagen, certainly there will be a loaf pan or porridge bread in the works. Just modify for the hydration keeping in mind that the spent grains are 50% water by weight and we should be good to go… right? (Anyone experienced in this, feel free to chime in.)
The next thought is sourdough: I have no clue how this would work. Being that the spent grains have already gone through one fermentation process, would they be able to become a sourdough starter? Certainly, another flour would have to be added to bring up the (nearly non-existent) gluten level of the grains… But would this even work? Would it be worthwhile? I guess I should just grind down some spent grains, mix in some flour, maybe a little more water, and see if it turns sour after a few days. Then I'll start feeding it more spent grain gruel 'til I have a monster. Or something like that.
The final thought, though, is koji. According to this in-depth 2006 look at the use of spent grains as human alimentation (PDF) spent grains have commercial application as a substrate for koji (a "solid-state fermentation") which my mom, of all people, has been pushing me to try. (Mom, if you're reading this, I promise to make some shiokoji next week for some end of summer pickles.) Furthermore, Jean Dough's recent quest to "Kojify All the Grains" has enchanted me to no end, and I'm jonesing to do some kojification myself.
The hope here is that any of these uses for the wet spent grains would have a net positive outcome, in terms of energy consumption and waste reduction.
I've already reduced my drinking habit's footprint by drinking locally – although the grains, hops and bottles and caps and the paper for the labels come from elsewhere, the final product (e.g. the heaviest, most transport-intensive part) doesn't have very far to go to get in my belly. Now what if we can take the biggest byproduct and go beyond simple ingredient substitution to make something awesome out of it?