Using spent grains for distiller

jmcnamara

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i recently heard of someone wanting to use spent grain from beer in order to distill some liquor.
I know there's some sugar still left in spent grain, but it just doesn't make sense to me. at least, using only spent grain doesn't make sense.

I did a quick search, but couldn't find anything really. it was all about baking bread or dog treats, or what the FDA says a commercial brewery has to do with it.

I'll look into it more later, but i was wondering if anyone here knows if this is even possible or advisable?
 
Sounds strange to me. The goal of an all grain homebrewer is to get all the sugar he can get from the grain. Is there another reason that spent grains might be useful to a distiller, say maybe for filtering or something?
 
the only reason I can think of is to add it to sweet feed or any cheap grain for distilling and use it just because you have it, I personal cant store spent grain, I live in a very humid area and it sours in hours
 
those were my thoughts exactly jeff, as far as efficiency. I don't see how you wouldn't need more grain for the distillery, unless you're horribly inefficient on the beer side.

ozarks, maybe that's what they're after? sour the spent grain part of the mash, but blend that in with the regular mash runnings.
 
I saw a recipe that uses a sour mash for moonshine, most of if not all of the taste will be gone in the process so it really doesn't matter as long as bugs aren't crawling in it
 
The deer love it, like hot oatmeal.
 
So do the rabbits. I hear you can make cookies out of it. I don't intend to try.
 
Eh, the dog biscuits I've made were a bit bland but a decent start to a cookie. Throw some sugar in and more peanut butter, some chocolate chips. Raisins even.

Also, something about kvass using rye bread as an ingredient, and then the beer can be used to make the bread. Makes me feel that somehow, somewhere a monkey's presenting a lion cub high above the land
 
My dog begs for it, he ambushes me several times during brewing just to remind me to put some in his bowl
 
Those poor distillers! Nobody wants to talk about them!!
 
Living in an apartment, I have no way of drying the spent grain, but I think it would make great cat litter. For a while some local chicken owners were willing to dry it to feed to the birds but now they just compost it. Poor unloved spent grain -- used and then dumped.
 
A friend of mine recently made chocolate cookies out of some spent grain, but they're pretty bland cookies as far as cookies go. All I can think is maybe they're healthier than regular cookies for some reason. I would hope most spent grains would be fairly devoid of useable sugars if the brewers have done their mashing correctly.
 
all I can say is "spent grain" think about this, its spent of at least 75% of its sugar soo if you make anything from it you need to add 75% more sugar than normal
 
But it does have lots of fiber.
 
In German the word Treberbrot means spent-grain-bread. flour, spent grains, beer, salt and yeast. I've never made it though.
 
Hey all, new guy here... but I believe when someone makes "sweet feed" whiskey the sweet feed is made of un-malted grains, so you dont really get any sugar conversion. They all add large amounts of sugar to the batch 10-20lbs for conversion. I believe the grains are just to impart some flavor, maybe the used quality grains more than good horse feed?
 
First of all, welcome!

I've never heard of that before, I'll have to check it out.
I may have to go to the original guy who said it, I was getting it secondhand from my drunk, Irish brewing buddy. He's been known to...exaggerate
 
coming form a farmer back ground, I buy sweet feed from the local farm supply for my horses especially in the winter when the grass gets thin, its mostly molasses mixed with a variety of unmalted grain including corn which works great for moonshine "so Ive herd" lol as far as spent grain though its malted grain thats been used for brewing but usually discarded
 

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