For two decades, Lugene Sas has driven a blue, rusty, worn-out truck twice a day, virtually every day, from his Northern Colorado dairy to Odell Brewing Company, a few miles to the south in Fort Collins. Lugene enjoys craft beer every bit as much as the thirsty masses who sun themselves on Odell Brewing’s expansive patio in summertime, but his twice-a-day habit rarely involves sample trays and seasonal releases.
Lugene is just one of the many farmers nationwide who relieve breweries of spent grain and repurpose it as high-quality livestock feed. Happy hogs, hens, and heifers from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine, relish about three million pounds of it annually.
Although the brewing process extracts most of malt’s carbohydrates for fermentation, spent grain still contains plenty of protein, fiber, fat, and other nutrients. At Lugene’s Taft Hill Dairy, about forty Guernsey, Holstein, Jersey, and Brown Swiss cows eagerly devour what the brewer would otherwise discard.