Grits. Brewer’s grits are solid cereal adjuncts used by brewers as a malt replacement to make alcohol in beer. The grits are cooked to gelatinize the starches and then added to the mash. A brewer may use grits to make a particular style of beer, to soften the taste of a particular beer, or to decrease the cost of raw materials. Grits are widely used in mass-market beers worldwide, and their use is largely responsible for the lightness of malt flavor in such beers.

Grits have also been used by brewers to dilute nitrogen content when using malt that is very high in protein. As such, German brewers under the Reinheitsgebot law have historically been allowed to use adjuncts, such as grits, to minimize protein haze formation in export beers, but not for beer to be sold in Germany. See reinheitsgebot.

Grits can be made from many different cereals, such as sorghum and rice, but the most common come from corn (maize). See corn. Corn grits are made by millers who usually employ a tempering (conditioning) and degerming process. In this process corn is cleaned and then tempered with steam to around 20% moisture. The moist kernels are then degerminated, whereby the starchy endosperm is separated from the outer covering and the germ layer. After degermination, the starchy endosperm is dried and cooled then sent through a series of mills and screens to obtain fractions of grits, meals, and flours.

Corn meals and corn flours are used for making snack foods and bakery mixes, while the larger grit fractions are used for breakfast cereals and brewing. The use of corn grits by brewers has decreased over the years and been replaced by corn syrups. This has been a cost-driven change since it is cheaper to purchase highly fermentable corn syrup than to liquefy or cook corn grits in a cereal cooker and convert them to a fermentable form. In recent years, some large European producers of mass-market beers have moved away from the use of corn grits (and syrup) out of concern that genetically modified corn might end up in the brewhouse. This is not presently a concern to the American consumer, but GMO (genetically modified organism) crops are increasingly anathema in Europe. This has led to ironic attempts to use all-malt mashes with enzymes to recreate the light flavor previously attained with the use of corn grits.