Boiled Barley
We sometimes get the left over boiled barley from making beer at a local brew pub. The smell is lovely, like barley soup – something I love. The consistency is more like oat meal, perhaps a bit drier and not as sticky.
The spent barley is high in fiber, minerals and protein. The process of making beer involves boiling the barley to capture the sugars which are then fermented by the yeast. The left over barley is left over from this process.
Rather than throwing it out as used to be done the pub gives it to us which saves them a lot of money on hauling. It gives our pigs, chickens, ducks and geese a bit of extra protein when available adding to what they get from pasture/hay and dairy.
This is one of the things we are generally able to pick it up on our back-haul which saves on driving by carefully scheduling our delivery route. We deliver meat to the restaurant and pickup their the spent barley from their brewing beer. That way we’re always running loaded.
Six months later we’re back at the brewery with the pork that was grown using that barley, our pastures, winter hay and the dairy we get from a local cheese maker. It’s a cycle that keeps the good food stuffs from going down the chaos slope. Waste not, want not.
To learn more about what we feed our livestock check out the Pigs Page and the articles tagged as Feeding.
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Daily Spark: Jargon is for jackanapes, whereas argot is for auteurs. -Tom Holliston
And THAT, folks, is what it’s all about!
I like that cycle . . . haul pork one way and boiled barley home again. And each trip benefits the receiver.
Waste not, want not. And Use it up or wear it out. I think you were “Green” way before it became politcally correct. As were my depression-era parents. Lessons well taught!
That barley would have to be malted, correct?
My understanding is that it is malted barley which means to the grains are sprouted. I don’t know much about beer making.
The malted barley is not boiled in the brewing process. The grains go through a process called mashing. Hot water is added to the grains, usually around 160, and held at that temp for about an hour. Mashing uses the enzymes in the grains to convert the starches to sugars.
In the next step, the grains are rinsed with hot water to extract the sugars and collected in the boil kettle. This is called wort. The wort is boiled and hops are added to counteract the sweetness of the wort at various times during the boil. Hops added early on add bitterness, hops added closer to the end add aroma.
The wort is then cooled to about 68 degrees F or so, is transferred to a fermenting vessel, and yeast is pitched in. The yeast converts the sugars to alcohol and wham — you’ve got beer.
The early colonists that founded this country often used squash and pumpkins as a source of fermentables in lieu of malted grains. They also used spruce tips instead of hops. Everyone drank beer in those days because it “cleaned” the water.
Hi Jeremy! Long time no see. Thanks for the great explanation. I can see where my confusion about ‘boiled’ came from.
Jeremy,
What would malted grain taste like? especially barley that is roasted up to
a carmalized product..Sweet?
Remember that most of the sugars are extracted from the grains. The grains are highly modified to achieve maximum extraction efficiency, so most of the sweet went into the wort.
I have had pretzels made from the spent-grains (that’s the proper term Walter) in a brewpub once and they were wonderful.
Yes I realize that…I meant before it is used to make wort.
Ha! I was thinking how it would taste to the pigs!
I’ll taste some next time I brew!
Well you certainly are “pig-centric” LOL!
If I am not mistaken there is malts that are roasted to the point where the enzymes are present to create the sugar during worting, then there is malts that are roasted a lot longer and hotter (carmalized) that are used for flavoring. Not sure but I think those malts are sweet.