Spent Malted Grain Disposal Question

Hello everyone! So I have a fairly obscure predicament. I have just started AG brewing and cant decide what to do with my spent grain. I will produce about 45 lbs a month and was thinking about calling a local animal shelter to see if they had any use for it. Is there anything I should know about spent malted grains (i.e they will kill a puppy or choke a parrot.....)? If not what does everyone else do with their biproducts when they are finished cooking?

I add them to my mulch.

Is there a local farm around?

Mine goes out on rocks in the front yard. It's gone by the next morning every time.

Mine goes into the composter.

Allan

i used to place mine in the easement out back of my house but the smell of rotting spent grains can be a bit much. i have a plastic barrel with the lid on it and that's where i store all my spent grains. i thn take them to a friend's house and he mulches them into his compost pile

i know a microbrewery that grows shiitake mushrooms on their spent grain...that could be cool...heh

I visited Harpoon brewery in Boston a couple of years ago, and brewmaster said farmers truck grains it out for animal feed - an impressive weekly quantity, I forget how much.

I do not know if the grain is altered that much, but it must be better than most other feeds, coming from who knows where...

I love those deer in EdWorts picture, wonder if the ones on the golf course here would like some munchies next time. My composter is full after three brews, but if the deer don't eat it up fast it will smell horrible.

Ed, do you think those deer have bad gas the next day?

LOL, I could only imagine what a deer fart would smell like. Acorns and spent grain, pheeeewwww.

Cheesefood said:

Ed, do you think those deer have bad gas the next day?

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I know my Lab did... he left little grain piles all over the yard.

My dog ate a bunch then chunked it up. I have seen a couple of all-grain dueces in front of the lawn mower before.

wortmonger said:

all-grain dueces

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LOL!!!

I'm thinking of just getting a bigass trashcan and using that as a composter after drilling holes in it and propping it up on bricks considering that this house produces spent grain and rabbit pellets as waste. Up until now I've just been dumping grain in an empty flowerbed.

I have been calling around trying to find a horse rescue or something. I live in downtown Portland Oregon so there are decidedly few farms in my vicinity. I called a .... get this.... ferret rescue mission..... and they seem interested.
that could be bad though.... don't ferrets already stink?

Spent grain goes pretty fast in the composter, I am just running out of room. I was thinking of a large secondary composter/storage until there is room.

Yea unless you have a giant compost heap you will need to compost some grains at the landfill.

I have spread them before in the yard and had a yard full of birds. I did it a couple of days prior to mowing, but it still kinda stunk.

I line my 7 gallon pail with two heavy duty garbage bags and then scoop the grains in, tie em up and it's out to the side of the house with them until garbage day.

Hey...I never said I was PC. Plus, at 10-gallons a week, I gotta be practical.

If it makes any difference...I recycle my yeast.

LOL, you could leave them in the trash bags for a week or two then dump them in someones car you don't like, lol.

I'm actually debating using it as food for a mushroom growing project I would liek to start. I love ****ake and hope it loves spent grain.

I am sure you would still need to compost.

I tried putting it out for the critters like Edwort, but all I got was flies. From now on it goes in the trash.

wortmonger said:

I'm actually debating using it as food for a mushroom growing project I would liek to start. I love ****ake and hope it loves spent grain.

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LOL, too funny $hitake. Let's see if that one gets *******

Wortmonger - have you found anything about growing mushrooms on grain? Our chickens get my spent grain now but wouldn't mind some mushrooms

GT

Henryinoregon said:

Hello everyone! So I have a fairly obscure predicament. I have just started AG brewing and cant decide what to do with my spent grain. I will produce about 45 lbs a month and was thinking about calling a local animal shelter to see if they had any use for it. Is there anything I should know about spent malted grains (i.e they will kill a puppy or choke a parrot.....)? If not what does everyone else do with their biproducts when they are finished cooking?

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It won't use up 45 pounds a month, but try holding back some spent grains for the Spent Grain Whole Wheat bread from the Bread thread. Good stuff.

Chad

Sounds like you are set up perfect for this type of thing. Here is a link. Here is the video that got me excited about owning a greenhouse one day. It tells the whole story too. Very interesting stuff. You should also take a look at the sewage management stuff from Ocean Ark International. John Todd is one cool dude.

Pretty much any farm will be happy to take the spent grains. This town is chock full of brewpubs, you could always ask them what they do with their spent grains.

Henry, I can give you my ex wife's address in Gresham you can dump your spent grains on. It's a blue car, and go ahead and put them all over the hood and into the air vents in the middle of the night....

/not bitter

LOL, way to funny to not comment on. LOL

My tomato plants loved the stuff, but they didn't have the normal acidic tang they normally do. *shrug*

Can we flag this thread as a "Best of" like craigslist, I don't think I've laughed so much on these forums.

Awww If only I had the problem of figuring out what to do with my spent malt, , I'd have to actually go AG first XD.

Got Trub? said:

Wortmonger - have you found anything about growing mushrooms on grain? Our chickens get my spent grain now but wouldn't mind some mushrooms

GT

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Sounds like you are set up perfect for this type of thing. Here is a link. Here is the video that got me excited about owning a greenhouse one day. It tells the whole story too. Very interesting stuff. You should also take a look at the sewage management stuff from Ocean Ark International. John Todd is one cool dude.

I don't go through nearly as much as you, but I live in a row-home apartment now with limited backyard access. I used to dump my grains in my composter at my old apartment, but now I take them out my back window and up to the roof where I dump them for the birds....

If you dump them with enough regularity, they'll quickly learn to eat it all the time, which means it won't last long. The first time I dumped it on my roof, it took almost a month to get noticed. Now it disappears within a day or two.

kvh.

I feed it to SWMBO's horse.

eviltwinofjoni said:

Pretty much any farm will be happy to take the spent grains. This town is chock full of brewpubs, you could always ask them what they do with their spent grains.

Henry, I can give you my ex wife's address in Gresham you can dump your spent grains on. It's a blue car, and go ahead and put them all over the hood and into the air vents in the middle of the night....

/not bitter

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already done sir!

I think Ed has posted that pic before, and the first time I saw it, I started spreading out my spent grains in an effort to attract deer. To this day (probably 2 years later) I have yet to see a single deer anywhere near it. Our neighborhood has deer EVERYWHERE ... you cant drive through it at night without seeing them. The only place they DON'T seem to be is near that stupid spent grain, every morsel of which is still in my back yard.