Spent Grain Bars

I take an afternoon break every work day and walk down to the coffee shop on campus to refill my reusable mug with 16 oz of burnt bean water and talk to the baristas (or Sagistas, as it's the Sage's Cafe). Then I walk back to my office to enjoy my coffee with a granola bar. Sometimes I forget my granola bar when I pack my lunch so I have to buy a bagel or cookies, but I have been purchasing a big box of 48 packages of Nature Valley granola bars for years, and in the past two have been enjoying them with coffee in the afternoon. In an effort to "save money" and "use all the parts of the animal," I've decided to use the spent grains from brewing to make my own granola bars. I've made two batches now, and so this post discusses that process.

Brooklyn BrewShop's Beer Making Book has a few food recipes for each season's worth of beer recipes, often using the beer you make. One such recipe is for spent grain dog biscuits, which I've suggested to homebrewing friends who have a dog and wanted to make their own treats for her. In the BrewSmith podcast episode with Amelia Loftus  on "eco-brewing" she discussed "using the whole animal," so to speak. Amelia mentioned a recipe on her website for spent grain energy bars, and wanting to move away from buying granola bars wholesale at Costco I printed out the recipe and gave it a try.

Drying out spent grains on a cookie sheet in the oven.

The first step is to measure out the needed grains after the sparge and dry them in the oven on low heat for a few hours. The recipe calls for 2 cups of spent grains, and I wanted to start with a double batch so I took 4 cups from the pounds of grains I use in a 2-gal batch after the sparge, and tried to dry them using just my largest cookie sheet. That was a mistake as the layer of grains was too thick and so instead of taking 1-3 hours, it took nearly 5 hours to dry out all the grains, and I may have even had to split the grains onto a second cookie sheet to finish the drying. When I dried the grains for my next two batches I split the amount onto multiple cookie sheets and the drying went much faster. So take note! Dry wet grains in (a) thin layers to expedite the drying time.  I've found that the dried grains keep for weeks in a gallon Ziploc bag on the shelf. At least the first batch of grains I dried did so and no one complained about the taste when they enjoyed the heck out of the first set of bars.

Equal parts dried spent grains and oats.

The spent grains make up about 40% of the dry ingredients, with another 40% being an equal amount of oats. Nuts, dried fruit, and chocolate chips can make up the remaining dry mass. I've used craisins and semi-sweet chocolate mini-morsels in the two batches I've made. All of this gets stirred together and once the wet ingredients are prepared the two are mixed until it becomes one large warm mass of proto-bar goodness! Combining the dry ingredients is probably the easiest of the entire process.

Oats, grains, semi-sweet chocolate mini-morsels, craisins.

The wet ingredients are peanut butter (I use natural PB), honey, butter, salt, and malt syrup. I knew what they all were except for the malt syrup. I looked throughout normal grocery stores for it but couldn't find it, and had a sneaking suspicion that I did know what it was: liquid malt extract (LME). This is the first runnings of a mash, boiled in a vacuum chamber until it becomes a thick, sticky syrup, and is what brewers use to avoid mashing milled grains. It's often sold in 3.3-lb (1.5-kg) cans, but I only needed 1/2 cup. With that conundrum, I chose to buy the 3.3-lb can of malt extract and save it between batches. After using the small amount I needed for the first batch I poured the rest into a plastic container, let it cool down (I had heated it to make it easier to pour), covered the surface of the syrup with plastic wrap to keep the air away from it, affixed the lid, and put it in the fridge for next time. The next time I used it I couldn't easily place the plastic container in a heated pan of hot water to warm the syrup, so I pulled it out with a spoon and used my kitchen shears to cut it. Yes, I used scissors to cut syrup, it's that thick.

All the ingredients: natural PB, honey, malt syrup, butter, dried grains, chocolate chips, craisins, oats.

The extract and the rest of the "liquid" ingredients are melted together in a pan on the stove, shown below. The recipe calls to melt the ingredients together while stirring and to bring it to boil for 5 minutes. This is poured into the oats, grains, and other "dry" ingredients, a bit at a time to thoroughly mix the wet and the dry, and when this is done the warm mass of proto-bars is pressed into wax-lined pans and left to cool. For my first batch, a double batch, I used two 7"x11" pans, and for my second batch, a triple batch, I used one 9"x12" pan and one 7"x11" pan.

Melting together the "liquid" ingredients.

Syrup ready to be stirred into the dry ingredients.

The pressed bar mass in their pans take a few hours to cool, and when cooled can be cut and packaged. I cut them into 1.5"x3" bars, wrap them in 6"x6" pieces of wax paper taped closed, and bag them 6-7 to a sandwich Ziploc, and as many of those bags into gallon Ziploc bags that go into the freezer for longer-term storage. The recipe claims that the bars don't last more than 5 days on the shelf, so I freeze them and have found that it does not damage the bars.

Pressed into pans, cooled, and cut. Ready to package.

These bars are great and I really enjoy them. They're like Chewie Quaker Oats bars, but healthy! I still have some Nature Valley crunchy granola bars from the last box I bought, and they're a nice textural change-up from the softer, chewy spent grain bars. I'm going to try to switch over entirely to my homemade bars, and as I brew often enough to provide the spent grain, I might be able to pull it off!

Have you "used the whole animal" in your homebrewing?

Until next time friends, happy brewing!