The Secondary Alchemy of Spent Grain

By Dick Cantwell

Grain is big in the news these days, and not so much because of ever-rising craft brewing sales. With fuel production sweetening the mash of the agricultural marketplace, corn is all the rage. I remember reading a year or so ago about an almost literal mountain of corn somewhere in the Midwest—tall enough, no doubt, to constitute the highest geographical eminence in a few states I can think of—with nowhere to go, covered with acres of tarps in fear of spoiling rain. These days that could fuel a fleet of SmartCars. Those of us with Cold War memories can recall silos of grain along Lake Superior withheld from the Russians, having recently offended our part of the world by waging war in Afghanistan. That stockpile too seemed destined for nowheresville.

We’ve known all about the virtues of grain for some time, of course; it’s one of the things with which we work our magic. Our primary concern with it is evaluation and employment of its various qualities, contributing in turn to the quality and character of the various beers we produce. But then we’re faced with another challenge: getting rid of its used-up mass in a practicable, reliable and responsible manner. Simply dumpstering it all, as we used to do at my first brewing job, was none of these things. It’s a difficult lift up to the lip of the average dumpster, demanding a certain reliance on passing kitchen or bus people; it isn’t cost-effective or particularly responsible in an environmental way; and all other considerations aside, what if the dumpster is full already? In those days, as newcomers to town, we were not particularly well connected; it wasn’t until my next job that I was within the spent grain loop, the cadre of local farmers eager to get their hands on all that free feed for their cows or pigs.

But it still wasn’t easy. At that second job ours was a gravity-flow system, resulting in a lot of spent grain sitting up at the top level of the proceedings. What we did next was cumbersome and frankly dangerous, winching full drums down to street level in an area cordoned off against unwitting occupation by brewers or passers-by, then running them up a pair of makeshift ramps onto a flatbed truck with the help of the farmer. This particular farmer was an ex-cop who wore a lot of cologne (probably against the redolence of his occupation), and he once leaned in close, conspiratorially, to tell me a fairly tame dirty joke. It was such an unpleasant experience that I have never put any of my co-workers from that time through the shuddering brutality of repeating it. Even with this self-sacrifice, and as chancy and labor-intensive as this system was, it worked, and with a variation or two on the basic theme and cast of farmers and brewers relative calm reigned for a number of years.

But now we have more, bigger and busier breweries in Seattle. Gas is a lot more expensive, making it more of a financial commitment to come into town from whatever island, peninsula or other rural backwater the cows and pigs call home, and we’ve had to start paying some of these people to do what they used to be willing to do for free. I’m certain we aren’t alone in the fragility of our spent grain disposal systems. A couple of cottage industries have come up with various creative things to do with spent grain. Remember that weird thread on the Forum about growing mushrooms? In Seattle eight or nine years ago we had a bakery actually called The Spent Grain Bakery which took spent grains from a number of breweries, produced signature loaves and packaged them with stickers from the breweries on the bag. Unfortunately it didn’t last. As compelling as some of these ideas often are, they’re more about novelty than volume. And boy, do we have volume. With something over seven million barrels of craft-brewed beer produced last year, I figure we’ve got around seven hundred million pounds of spent grain to dispose of, just in our segment.

Several years ago, before a couple of micro-distilleries began operations, there were just two licensed distilleries in the state of Washington. One was held by Weyerhaeuser, I suppose for some kind of wood pulp processing, the other by the Olympia Brewery, for alternative fuel production. I know this is not uncommon, but perhaps it should become more so. Just how much potential fuel there is in a drum of spent grain I have no idea, and the feasibility of its extraction is an even bigger question mark.

I am heartened by recent developments here in our area for the incorporation of spent grains into a restaurant food waste collection program for composting. It’s in the formative stages right now, but it could be a boon for us, especially as we work on a new location in a highly urbanized and historic district where there’s literally no such thing as vacant alley space for temporary spent grain storage. The plan is for these people to come every day, if necessary, to trundle away appropriately sized totes for eventual controlled decomposition and organic re-employment.

It’s funny how things like this occupy us, but as we grow so do our responsibilities. Things that it was okay to put down the drain in teensy, cute-little-brewery-sized quantities are definitely not all right on an industrial scale, which is what we’ve gotten to when cute little breweries install fifty- and hundred-barrel (and larger) brewhouses to maintain and expand production demand. Spent grains are only one of the issues we are forced to confront when it comes to efficient use, and re-use, of resources. Maybe Al Gore could do something with this for his next movie.