To make that craft beer you love, breweries generate a lot of
food waste. For every five-gallon batch of beer (or a third of a
keg), they expend nearly 30 pounds of leftover grains.
Regrained, a new San
Francisco-based company that makes granola bars from recycled
beer grains, is putting that waste to good use.
Beer has four main ingredients: water, yeast, hops, and grains.
When brewers make beer, they extract sugar from the grains (like
barley and wheat, for example) by soaking them in hot water. The
sugary liquid is then drained, and yeast converts the sugar into
alcohol. But the original grains are usually thrown out – and
that’s where Regrained comes in.
The company goes to breweries and collects the wet grains. The
team then dehydrates them, adds flax and quinoa, and gets them to
stick together by mixing in honey and syrup made from tapioca and
brown rice.
In December 2015, Regrained raised $30,670 on
Barnraiser,
a crowdfunding tool for food entrepreneurs.
Co-founder Dan Kurzrock tells Tech Insider that the company used
the money to develop and improve its two granola bar flavors:
Honey Almond IPA and Chocolate Coffee Stout.
Neither bar tastes like the beer it’s named after, but each
one does take on similar characteristics. The IPA bar is sweet
and spicy with a hint of cinnamon. The stout bar, which
Kurzrock says features ground coffee beans, has a
chocolatey overtone with a slightly smokey aftertaste.
Selling for $2.50 each in specialty food stores around
California, on Amazon, and on Regrained’s site, the bars
(which don’t contain any alcohol) look like traditional
granola. But when I took a bite, I could tell they
weren’t made from normal oats, mainly because they were so
chewy.
Overall, though, both are tasty – I prefer the stout
bar since it has hunks of
chocolate.
To make the bars, the Regrained team collects grains from three
craft breweries in San Francisco: 21st Amendment, Magnolia, and
Triple Voodoo. Other ingredients, like almonds and puffed quinoa,
come from local California farmers, Kurzrock says.
The specific grains that the breweries use to make their stouts
and IPAs will sometimes end up in the IPA and Stout-flavored
bars, but not always, Kurzrock says. It depends on what
type of beer the breweries are making when Regrained picks up the
waste.
Kurzrock says that in order to make a six-pack of
beer, a brewery uses about a pound of grains. Six billion gallons
of beer are brewed annually in the US, which means roughly 36
billion pounds of grain get wasted each year.
Used beer grains aren’t always thrown out, however – some US
breweries pay farmers to take them to use in compost and,
eventually, fertilizer. But over the past few years, more
American craft breweries have moved to city centers to be close
to consumers, which makes it more difficult and expensive for
farmers to collect the grains, Kurzrock says.
For example, about 30 micro-breweries now reside in San Francisco
(or as much as
120 if you count the outer Bay regions). The grains, in turn,
often end up in landfills.
Regrained is currently only making a small dent in this waste,
but it’s a start. In the future, the team hopes to expand to more
US cities.
“Our goal is to help urban breweries to do more with what they
produce,” Kurzrock says. “We’re taking something that’s
typically wasted and turning it into something delicious.”
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