so,you go to your local brewery.....

[timbo41]

...and say " any chance of having a big bucket load of your spent grain mate. Oh and perhaps another little bucket of those under utilized hops you've just whirl pooled out?"
What's the expected response do ya think?
In line of experimentation,I'm thinking to remash said grain and use hops for Mash hopping
Into cooler mash tun,fairly high mash temp,as big a volume as I can get but only expect about 2 gallon runnings. Add either a few mil of hop extract for bittering,or some hopped maltspray. Maybe heat up a bit to steep some leftover crystal.

Yes I know its reverting back to.an old idea, but I'm slowly revising the plan and this way wont.cost.me.much.

[boingy]

I think any brewery worth its salt will be pretty good at mashing and sparging and won't have left much in the way of fermentables behind.
Unless you can find one that's doing a no sparge type thing.

Mind you, if you look desperate enough they might give you some unused ingredients!

[bigdave]

I think many breweries mash efficiency is in the low to mid 80s with some as high as 90% so spent grain really will be just that, spent.

[jimp2003]

I must be just missing the point here but why are you wanting to do this?

[timbo41]

Its sort of in line with my sig, and also my latent tree huggy attitude...
No to be honest the idea of the old " small beer" appeals to me. I wonder why breweries don't seem to do it now. You know, the " son of snpa " sort of thing. Plus the idea of leaving nothing to waste appeals, particularly when used to balance up the amount we all waste. I'm thinking here of water wastage through chilling,cleaninh,disinfecting

[super_simian]

They don't do it, because with modern efficiency, "small beer" doesn't work. Plus they usually sell it on to farmers for stock feed. My advice? Get a new idea. Although the water thing is an issue.

[Zephiacus]

Even if there was extract left in the grains which is unlikely the enzymes will have been denatured at mash out, and by mashing again you'd just be pulling tannins and other undesirable s from the grains. If you recycled trub you could get some extract from spent hops, but I really don't see the point in this sort of extreme scrimping.

Look at what the big industrial brewery's do, they don't reuse their grain, and tend to recycle only a portion of their trub. Now if those guys aren't scrimping to this level o don't see why homebrewers need to.

[Barley Water]

My initial thought when I read this thread was "sort of reminds me of a homebrewer's version of dumpster diving".

[seymour]

Hey guys, shut up! We want him to try it, so we can all hear about the pro brewers' reactions.

Is anyone willing to take along a video camera?


Just teasin' you, Timbo.

[timbo41]

Bunch of cynics. Oh well back to drawing board ....with my big crayons!!

[Cozzyb]

lol I actually read this and though it was an ingenious plan to get an idea whast grains and hops they used, then I read on lol.

on a serious note, only good thing you can get from a kind brewery is advice, maybe free yeast, possibly cheap grain if they will sell you some. My local breweries have been fairly arsy on the advice side of things so not bothered to ask about yeast. But both Thorn bridge and Steel City brewing were great for advice.

[Rookie]

only good thing you can get from a kind brewery is advice, maybe free yeast, possibly cheap grain if they will sell you some. My local breweries have been fairly arsy on the advice side of things so not bothered to ask about yeast. But both Thorn bridge and Steel City brewing were great for advice.

There are a couple of brewpubs across the river in Portland that give away excess yeast, but the time and expense to get to either one makes getting yeast from my LHBS cheaper.