Against The Grain

Big shout-out to Tara Lee and the teams at Inside Vancouver & Destination Vancouver for spotlighting local craft-brew crews - like us, Strange Fellows and Faculty - who are getting creative in the ways we upcycle spent grain and better embrace and promote sustainability.

As Lee points out in her piece, beer production consumes considerable resources, such as water, and leads to waste, primarily in the form of spent grain. It’s estimated that breweries across Canada produce more than 400,000 tonnes of spent grain per year.

Down here on Main St., a local farmer comes once a week to pick up our spent grain and leftover organics, such as orange peels, and uses the grain for feeding his cattle and pigs. What he can’t use himself he gives to neighbouring farms, and composts the organics on his property.

“It’s neat to find other ways to utilize [spent grain],” our head brewer Azlan Graves told Lee. To wit, Wagging Tail Dog Treats makes dog treats with it that we sell here in our retail store, and our neighbours at Side Hustle Sandwiches have used it as a coating to keep in moisture when roasting meat.

Graves himself has repurposed the byproduct to make sourdough bread, and has also seen others use it to make a crumble. He’s also coming up with new beer recipes that incorporate previously used hops.

“Dry hopping beer is a huge part of cost but it’s also a pretty inefficient process. A lot of times you’ll have hops that still have a lot of potential,” says Graves, who is also in the process of partnering with Langley’s West Coast Plastics Recycling to recycle our soft plastics, such as bags for grain.