It's peach season and that means I've got 5 liters of Maker's Mark ready to soak up copious amounts of juicy peaches and mangoes for 4-5 months. After I drain it and strain it in December, I'm left with a lot of delicious fruit infused whiskey and a big pulpy (also delicious) mess. I hate wasting anything, but most especially food. I save the mess (freezing a lot of it) to make things like hair of the dog baked oatmeal, milkshakes, and adult jelly (pictured below, ugly ain't it? ). These are all surprisingly good, the jelly in particular. So my question is, with the explosion of fruited kettle sours and ipas over the last few years, what happens to all that fruit sludge that is left behind after the brewing process? Do any breweries find a use for it? Unfortunately, I suppose most of it just gets trashed. Does anyone else have misgivings about all that food being "wasted"?
I have no answer to the question but that is an excellent example of repurposing. Lead the way. Cheers.
I'm just guessing, but I think it's likely that it all goes down the drain/into the garbage. The amounts a brewery would have would be difficult to work with.
Farmers pick up the malt waste to feed to livestock, but not sure they would want to get their animals drunk. Kobe beef are given beer but that is more controlled then slopping 50 gal of this sludge to the pigs at a time.
Interesting question! I was just at Jack's Abby for their 10th Anniversary party and they had a brewed-for-the-occasion sour on the menu that they said was made with the leftover rasberries from their (very good) Poive Ras. I tried it and the rasberry flavor was very mild, so they either didn't use much or most of the flavor got leeched in the first use. But that counts as a second use I guess either way. I wonder if staff every bring some of that stuff home to bake with or to do things along the lines of OPs delicious sounding jelly?
I volunteer at a food bank that distributes massive amounts of food to other places that have programs that feed people. We sort through fresh produce to make sure that what gets distributed is good quality. The needy basically get the same quality as what we buy for ourselves. Last week we did fresh, organic strawberries. A dozen of us went through about 6400 lbs (my estimate based on the number pf pallets) of boxed strawberries. The criteria was that if there is any visible mold, the whole box gets tossed. No time to try to weed out the bad ones. I bet we tossed well over 500 lbs of "good" strawberries with the bad. The amount of food wasted in the US is incredible.
I believe pFriem has used some of their spent fruit in a daily special on the restaurant side, but that would be a negligible volume.
One would hope that it would be composted. And I'm sure some of it is. But like @BillAfromSoCal said, the food waste in this country is insane
I suspect that there isn't much waste for some brewers. Drekker fruit sours have so much fruit puree in them that the label advises you to roll them gently before opening so you stir up the sludge that's settled on the bottom. I suspect they trim the fruit ahead of time so they can just leave it in, but I suppose they filter large chunks that wouldn't be edible.
I've had berry pies where the filling was about the consistency of mashed potatoes because the berries cooked down so much. So that's a potential use for spent berries, but maybe not so much for mango, papaya, etc. (I've never heard of mango pie.) Or, how about using the stuff for injecting into jelly donuts? I think it's sacrilege to stuff a perfectly good donut with jelly (cream filling is okay), but I'll suggest it anyway. The big caveat to these (or any) uses would be how this stuff tastes. If any hop matter is in the fruit, forget it. That taste would add a bitter earthyness instead of tartness, which would ruin the fruity taste. However, I suspect most spent fruit comes out of a secondary fermenter, so hop matter shouldn't be present. A grain/beer flavor in it? Compost it!
the food bank waste is composted and used in the garden plots run by the food bank. they sell produce from those plots to pay those farmworkers and to provide income to pay operating expenses for the food bank.
A beer with fruit in added has more than likely been fermented out, cold crashed, yeast dumped and fruit added. When it is packaged usually you pull off the racking arm until you seen yeast pulling through, when you see that you stop and dump whatever is in there down the drain. Sometimes you can even switch to the bottom and empty the whole tank. These beers are usually too low in ph and the yeast has died off so the fruit cannot referment in the can/keg, but you can get a wild yeast in there or an infection and that where you get exploding cans. Most of these fruit beers have the fruit well integrated into solution so not much left over. Cheers.
