baking with spent-grain flour

My girlfriend recently used some of the spent-grain flour she'd made, which I mentioned in a previous post, in a batch of spinach and cheese hand pies. She based the dough on the "Spent Grain Apple Hand Pie" recipe from the Spent Grain Chef page of the Brooklyn Brewshop website (a great recipe resource), though she modified the recipe some. The spinach she used was grown in our garden, and the pies were delicious!

I think it'd be awesome to open up a cafe like the Cerveceria de Mateveza that focused on small-batch craft beer and spent grain hand pies. What else do you need in life?

Hawaii Nui declares bankruptcy

On Friday the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that Big Island based brewery Hawaii Nui has filed for bankruptcy, and that the lender who has provided the money to keep Hawaii Nui operational during bankruptcy is aiming to acquire ownership.

Current Hawaii Nui president Andy Baker said the company went into bankruptcy because "double-digit distribution growth over the past six months" made it difficult and expensive to acquire sufficient bottles and packaging. The company estimated the value of it's assets between $100K and $500K, and debts between $1 million and $10 million.

The article also mentioned that the brewery has "about a dozen employees" and produces "about 5,200 barrels a year." In 2009 Hawaii Nui acquired Mehana Brewing Company, another Hilo-based brewery.

Now, I'm sure that there's a lot more to know about the situation than what can be gleaned from the Star-Advertisers relatively brief article, but I'm still pretty stunned by the facts on hand. First of all, the looseness of the numbers is pretty alarming--between $1 million and $10 MILLION of debt? That's a HUGE difference. They can't narrow it down any more than that?

But even if you go with the best available numbers--the company is worth $500K and its debt is $1 million--the resulting situation is still baffling, especially when you read that the company president attributes the current disastrous situation to "growth." They're selling more product, and because of that they're losing more money?

There's something very wrong with a business plan when selling product costs more than it gains. And when you've got debt that is potentially 100 times greater (assuming the worst case scenario of $100K assets and $10 million debt), and it all happened in the last six months, something is very, very, outrageously wrong.

Oh well. The beer itself is actually pretty good, even if the people involved seem to have royally botched the business side of things. Hopefully the beer will remain as is, and the new owner will fix the rest of it.

Spent Grain flour

Usually I just compost my spent grains, but I'm always keeping my ears open for other ways of using them. Baking with spent grains is a pretty well-known option, but a lot of the recipes I've seen use the grains while they're still wet, which means you've got to get them into a baking project shortly after they're taken out of the mash (otherwise they'll start to stink pretty quick; spent grains still have residual sugar, and are a fertile environment for bacteria). Since I'm usually busy with the brew at that time, and not eager to get into another project just after finishing a brew session, I normally don't try the wet-grain baking option.

My girlfriend, on the other hand, is a baking enthusiast. She's been interested in finding ways of using the spent grains too, and recently she decided to try preparing the grains in a way that would lend them to longer-term storage. She decided to make them into flour.



First she dished a few pounds of the grains onto two cookie sheets, until the grains were about a quarter inch thick.

Then she put them in the oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit, and left them in until they were bone dry and slightly toasted (which took a few hours).



Then she dished the dried grains into the food processor and ground them into dust.



She's planning on using the flour soon, blending it in 50/50 with whole wheat flour for dough. I'll let you know how that turns out.