Don’t throw away your spent grains after a brew day, turn them into bread!
Spent grain gives your bread a huge boost of added flavor. There are three different ways to use spent grain in your bread baking: 1. using wet grain; 2. drying the grain; 3. drying and then turning the grain into flour.
Wet Grain
After mashing is complete, take a few cups of your spent grain and throw them in a storage container. We recommend adding up to 15% by weight of spent grain. For example, if you’re using 1,000g of flour, add up to 150g of wet spent grain.
If you don’t plan on using the grain right away, it will keep in the freezer for several months.
Dried Grain
Drying your spent grain is an easy way to keep it in storage for a long time. You can add the dried spent grain to just about any bread at about 15-20% of the weight. The dried grain will give an extra boost of fiber and flavor to whatever you’re baking.
We’ve tried adding it to cookies, banana bread and traditional sourdough loaves!
Spent Grain Flour
Grinding your dried spent grain into flour gives you so much versatility when it comes to baking. We use a coffee grinder to pulverize the dried spent grain into a flour. We’ve kept this flour in an airtight container in the pantry for over a year.
You can use spent grain flour up to 20% by flour weight, but we found that 10% is the ideal amount.
Spent Grain Tutorials
One of our club members has put together an extensive bread baking blog and he has many different recipes that use spent grain.
How to make dried spent grain flour
This tutorial shows you how to take freshly mashed grains and turn them into flour which you can use in all of your different baking adventures.
Standard spent grain loaves
This recipe uses traditional bakers yeast for a quick and easy couple of loaves that are packed with the whole wheat flavor that spent grain lends.
Sourdough spent grain loaf
This recipe uses a traditional sourdough schedule to create an extremely complex loaf where the whole wheat flavor of the spent grain combines with the tartness of the sourdough culture.
Lazy sourdough spent grain loaves
If you don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to a traditional sourdough baking schedule, use this ‘lazy’ method that has an 8 hour bulk ferment and a 17 hour cold proof in the fridge.
Sangre de Cristo Craft Brewers 