I have a friend who owns a bunch of chickens and they expressed interest in my spent grains in hopes to save money on chicken feed. The problem is they live quite a distance away and it may be a month or more before I get to see them. I was wondering if there was an easy or invtentive way to dry out all the spent grains so I can keep them for long term storage.
When I save grain for my girlfriend to make dog biscuits with I throw batches of grain in some cheesecloth and really wring them out as dry as I can get them. Throw them on a sheet pan in a low oven (like 200-250) for an hour or so to dry out then into Ziplock bags for freezing. Even if they aren’t 100% dry why they go into the freezer when they come back up to room temp they aren’t really all that moist.
I wonder if there will be any nutritional value left in them after the mash or if they are mostly just fiber at that point? They might end up with some very regular \ skinny chickens.
Lots and lots of breweries give/trade/sell spent grain to farms. Very common practice. I have to assume there is still some nutritional value.
I don’t have access to my old ‘Feeds and Feeding’ book from college of Agriculture back in the olden days, but I do remember that used Brewer’s Grains are a good source of nutrition for ruminants, horses, pigs and probably chickens as well. Higher in protein than unprocessed grains, and still enough carbohydrate to be a decent source of energy.
Matt- I wonder if instead of drying them in the oven(I’ve done that occasionally to use in bread) if you could spread them in a thin layer outside and let the sun dry them for you. Just trying to save electricity… :cheers:
I work in an Ethanol Plant, grinding 6,000,000 lbs of corn a day. We sell the spent corn as a dry and a wet product to farmers for feed.
As far as feeding chickens they would be fine, they may not be as high in nutrients as regular cracked grains but chickens tend to forage for their own needs if they are not boxed up all day long.
To dry them out the best option would be to toss them on a tarp on a sunny driveway and spread them out and hope you don’t have strong gusts of wind. When I occasionally try to dry spent grains it takes a few hours on warm or up to 200 degrees in the oven in a few cookie sheets. I would guess that if you have a oscillating fan you could try it on a small tarp in a basement during the winter.
Local brewery here trades their grain for slabs of bacon which in turn they you use in a bacon maple porter.
