Spent grain sugar shine

[wanderingnunical]

Yesterday I ran my all grain rye wash and brewed a nice fall amber lager…. That left me with 12lbs of “mostly“ spent malt and all of the squeezed grain from the rye. I dumped both into my fermenter, added 5 gallons of water and 3 gallons of backset from the rye run. Surprisingly, i had a gravity of 1.015 and fermentation kicked off within an hour.

Since then, i have added sugar to get the SG respectable.

I have often wondered if I should be double purposing all of my beer mashes in this way. How much flavor should I expect from the spent grains + backset?
The mash smells spot on…

[Bradster68]

Some use em some don't. I'm a real juice patch so I make a sugarhead every time with the spent grains. It's a way of keeping my mits off the real stuff

[NZChris]

I use it, then double distill for use in Genever and anything else that benefits from a hint of grain in the base spirit. The feints from that and the original spirit get refluxed together for neutral for gin etc..

[wanderingnunical]

Well, she sure dies smell great! If you know, you know…. Should be ready to run this week.

[Dancing4dan]

I have often wondered if I should be double purposing all of my beer mashes in this way. How much flavor should I expect from the spent grains + backset?
The mash smells spot on…

This process has worked well for me in the past. Flavour has not been lacking on the ones I did.

A little different but I also have a ferment going that is sugar added to steam stripped malted barley. Added a bunch of sugar and it is still fermenting three weeks later in the cold room.

[subbrew]

I have used beer grains as a cheap and quick way to try new grain recipes. I did a semi sugar head on grain from an imperial stout. I say semi because I also mashed in 30 lb of new corn. But for $20 I got just over 2 gallons of aging spirit. Did something similar with an amber ale.

[wanderingnunical]

A little different but I also have a ferment going that is sugar added to steam stripped malted barley.

Just to make sure I understand, you fermented on the grain, steam stripped, then added sugar back to the spent wash?

[Dancing4dan]

A little different but I also have a ferment going that is sugar added to steam stripped malted barley.

Just to make sure I understand, you fermented on the grain, steam stripped, then added sugar back to the spent wash?

That’s what I’m doing. Fermented well and is still going. Smells great. Golden graham malted barley and chocolate malted barley.

I would like to strip it but it keeps bubbling.

[wanderingnunical]

Mine is terminal today. Tomorrow will be a good day!

[Dancing4dan]

The steam slop experiment is ready to be stripped. Will be interesting to see what happens with tannins. Sure smells good. It is the color and consistency of thick chocolate milk.

[wanderingnunical]

I stripped and ran mine last Friday. Overall I’m impressed with the flavor. Mostly it lost a lot of the corn flavor and picked up a lot of barley.

After cuts and proofing i ended up with 2.5 qts of product on oak.

[Dancing4dan]

The ferment was about 77 L in total. I held back 30 L of liquid beer to run later. Steam stripped the remaining mash and liquid which yielded low wines of 1 gallon at 108 proof and 2/3 gallon at 88 proof.

This batch was an experiment that used spent grains and wash from the last steam strip. I "fermented on the grain, steam stripped, then added sugar back to the spent wash" and topped up with water. The resultant ferment is what is referred to above.

Next time I do a sugar head on top of spent steam stripped grains I will remove the liquid from the mash when it comes out of the steam still, add fresh water, sugar and pitch yeast. Will try and do a side by side taste comparison.

Have 30L of beer left over from the experiment which I suspect will yield more low wines than the steam stripped mash due to the amount of grain remaining after I stripped it.