Brewery to farm to table
Breweries are all about bi-products. Beer itself is a bi-product of yeast, and their feverish consumption of sugar. (Alcohol being the waste of their consumption.) Here is a short list of bi-products:
• Knockdown — 150 degree water from the heat transfer unit
• C02 — from the fermentation blow off
• Trub — heavy fats, coagulated proteins, and (when in fermenter) inactive yeast
• Spent grain — from the mash
The goal for any brewery is efficiency, there is actually a value that can be placed on how efficient a brewery is in the beer-making process.
We do pretty well in our humble set up which allows us to be lean and conserve our resources as much as possible.
One of the heaviest and voluminous bi-product is the spent grain from the mash tun. The grains that are used to provide the sugars for the yeast to eat during fermentation are great at sharing their sugars — but not their proteins.
There is a substantial amount of proteins remaining in the grain for a batch of beer.
Before brewing: Barley malt is roughly 10–12% protein by weight
After mashing: Spent grain still holds about 20–30% of its dry mass as protein, depending on the malt and mash efficiency.
This is where breweries rely on farmers, and conversely farmers on breweries.
We are lucky to work with several farmers on the island:
Stella Maris feeds spent grain to their cows. They sell goat cheese, pork and beef from their farmstand as well as goat cheese at Tacoma Farmers Markets. They are amazing family with absolutely delicious meat and cheese produced on Vashon.
We also work with John Rettmann at Open Gate Lamb and Grazing.
He feeds his adult ewes spent grains from Camp Colvos during the summer and winter months as an essential protein supplement. His Lambs are born and raised on pasture only supplemented with apples and alfalfa. If you would like an introduction to John to get on his email list for lamb – send us a note here: beer@campcolvos.com.
Maybe one of these days we’ll start our own farm with critters to feed, tomatoes to harvest, and grain to thresh!
