In today’s world people are always looking for ways to reuse waste from one process and turn it into something useful. Beer is no exception.
To make beer, grains are steeped in water at certain temperatures to allow the enzymes present in the malted grain to convert the starch into sugars. This sugar rich liquid is then removed from the grains and the grains are further washed to remove as much sugar as possible. The liquid heated, hopped and yeast is added to make beer, but what happens to the spent grain?
Until recently, it was fed to animals as a food source (at least in the US). However, a change in the law early in 2014 made this no longer cost effective for small breweries (No more spent grain for animals). A search on the internet will show you that various home brewers incorporate it into their homemade bread, but what happens to all the spent grain from the breweries?
One start up company in the San Francisco Bay area has decided to take these spent grains and use them to produce delicious cereal bars. And why not? There is still plenty of goodness left in the grains and they are now low in sugar. So far there seem to be two flavours available, Chocolate coffee stout and Honey almond IPA.
Both of which sound tasty, although I have to confess I would first like the beers the grains came from.