Once you’ve made beer, what do you do with the grains? If you run your own CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) you can use tanker trucks to deliver thousands of tons of spent grain mash to your metropolis of pigs and cattle. Or more likely you have a single bowlful of this stuff on your kitchen counter. It seems a waste just to throw this away, no?
I portioned this out into roughly 1-1/2 cup measures and froze it for later use. How do you roughly measure 1-1/2 cups? You stick your hand into a warm bowl of beer grain mash like you’re removing a patient’s spleen, then bring out a dripping fistful and stuff it into a ziplock bag. Be sure to spill lots of it on your pants and the floor, including in the narrow channels of the ziploc itself so the bag doesn’t fully close. It’s the Uncle F%*k-Up way!
I gave some of the grain to the chickens who pecked enthusiastically then dug little craters in the leaves and fell asleep. Really that’s all any of us want to do after having a lot of grains and beer. The rest of it I put into my wheat sandwich bread recipe and baked up the best-smelling bread I’ve made in months. I don’t know whether it’s the smoked wheat or the other delicious unknown num-nums in the mash grains but this bread is really, really good. And now I’ve got a half-dozen bags of the stuff ready to add to bread this spring until I make my next batch of beer. I couldn’t even get a picture before the bread was half gone.
Now I just have to wait a few weeks to see how this first batch turned out. My only homework assignment, other than waiting impatiently, is to get a bunch of swing-top bottles so I can bottle this stuff when it’s ready. Should I buy empty bottles or good beer? Ahh, the debates of the home brewer!
Writer, architect, father, husband.
So does that bread encourage longer naps and earlier sleepytime with children…and adults alike??