Wednesday 22 September 2010

The connection between beer and pies

The connection between beer and cheese has been pointed out by some writers, as both are ultimately based on grass. But there's an even closer connection between beer and pies. The spent grains from the brewery are fed to cows, so next time you have a pint with a steak pie it could be that the ale and the steak came from the same grains. 

8 comments:

  1. Possible but statistically unlikely that both came from the same actual grain.

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  2. Cookie, can you never be romantic about anything?

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  3. Yep, need to do a beer and pie night sometime in the future

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  4. Also pigs. Our spent grains go to the piggies. Lovely piggies. Delicious piggies.

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  5. We make and sell steak pies made from Red Poll cattle fed of our spent grains. I think two other local brewpubs do the same. Apparently the female cattle prefer the lighter malt where as the bulls like the spent malt from our mild. Now all we need to do is use manure from the cows as fertiliser on our Barley! http://www.edwardstonewhitehorse.co.uk/index.html

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  6. It just keeps getting better :-)

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  7. Indeed, wild cattle/pigs coming to eat the used grain thrown out by ancient brewers is believed by some to have been a significant step towards their eventual domestication.

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  8. Interesting, I'd heard that growing grains for bread and/or beer was why people settled in one spot but I hadn't heard that spent grains may have lead to the domestication of cows and pigs.

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