OnTap Magazine

“S pent grain is a bit of a bastard.” As I chat with Christo Worst over a morning beer I soon realise that this has become his mantra. Christo is the founder of Beer Crisps, a company that reincarnates malted barley used in the brewing process and turns it into tasty chips. The project officially kicked off in March 2018, although the idea started to germinate before that. “It really all began when I went for an interview as brewery manager at Darling Brew in 2017,” says Christo. The timing didn’t quite work out and instead, his engineering career took him to Germany. It was there that he started looking into waste products and thinking about how they could be utilised and turned into something useful. “I started looking at spent grain as a possible product to focus on and researched what was already being done with it. I found people doing things like cookies and biscotti but it didn’t really make sense to me,” says Christo. “You don’t think of cookies when you’re drinking beer – I wanted to make something that worked in a beer context.” HANDS ON BEGINNINGS “Spent grain”, as it is known in the beer industry, refers to the grains leftover once the brewing process is complete. These grains have already been milled and then mashed – that is, steeped in hot water for around an hour. Much of the sugars have been extracted to use in beer, but the leftover husks are still nutritious. Most breweries sell or donate their spent grain to farmers to use as animal feed, but Christo was looking for a more innovative approach. “Spent grain has been around for thousands of years and nobody has done anything with it,” says Christo, “which struck me as odd.” In March 2018, he made his first spent grain crisp. “We started on an extremely small scale, doing everything by hand,” Christo reminisces. “We were making individual dough balls and rolling them out with a rolling pin, then cutting them with cookie cutters. It was slow and tedious – we could make about six chips per minute!” And the speed of the process wasn’t the only issue. Making the chips taste good was of course key – and getting them to not break the equipment was an unexpected challenge. “As I said, spent grain is a bastard,” laughs Christo. “It clogs everything up, the dough often doesn’t bind properly and the grain husks are so hard – even after use in the brewing process. They’re still hard enough that they can break your equipment. I suddenly started to see why people don’t work with it!” Once Christo got the recipe to a place where “it didn’t taste like cardboard”, he decided it was time to scale up. The first move was onto the viewing platform above Darling’s shiny stainless steel brewhouse, where the Beer Crisps team worked on equipment bought from a local bakery. Then, in April 2019 the Beer Crisps operation moved to small premises just off Darling’s main street. Here the team – including Adriaan Odendaal, who helped develop the business plan – quickly went from making six crisps a minute to producing 1000 packets per day. SUPPORTING LOCAL, THINKING GLOBAL All of the grain used in the crisps comes from Darling Brewery – about 450kg per week, which represents only a fraction of the total grain used at that brewery. The spent grain makes up about 40% of the dough used for the crisps, with the rest consisting of potato flour, maize meal, maize starch and sunflower oil. Once the dough is mixed, rolled and cut out (by machine - the cookie cutter days are long-gone), the crisps are briefly baked and then flash fried. They’re then seasoned in what is essentially a customised cement mixer, before being packaged. It took a while to get the seasoning right, but eventually all the experimentation paid off when Pick ‘n’ Pay started to list the crisps in their stores in mid-2020. They’re also stocked in a number of liquor stores, including Tops, as well as some breweries and boutique food shops. But Christo wasn’t happy with just getting the crisps out to the South African market. “We want to have a global footprint, because nobody else has done this,” Christo says. “I have searched and I haven’t found anyone doing what we’re doing elsewhere.” A SUSTAINABLE SNACK They began exporting to the UK, and the crisps were embraced during lockdown, when British pubs were told they had to serve a “substantial meal” in order to be allowed to trade. Beer Crisps work well as nachos, a dish that took off in British pubs alongside pickled eggs and simple Does not contain beer. One issue the team has had is getting people to understand the concept of spent grain ontapmag.co.za | Autumn 2021 | 23