spent-grain thin mints

I'm a big fan of the chocolate-mint flavor combo, and my wife is kind enough to indulge me. She recently made a batch of the Spent Grain Thin Mints featured in the Brooklyn Brewshop recipe site. The comments on that page are kind of mixed, but the cookies my wife made turned out great--very minty and chocolaty. There was a slight grittiness from the spent grains, but it actually added pleasant texture (and helped to slow me down a bit--I've been known to go through a half dozen thin mints before I even realize it).

spent grain veggie burgers

My wife likes to try to use the spent grains I have left after brewing. Her most recent creation was veggie burgers. She based the recipe on one posted by the Spent Grain Chef, but she didn't use bbq sauce, and she added in some other vegetables, garlic, veggies, pepper, ginger, sunflower seeds, and some Shoyu (soy sauce). The burgers were actually pretty great--I didn't think the grains would be all that palatable without being further ground-up, but the burgers were delicious!

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?

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.