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Beer Earth

Insects Could Help Turn Beer Waste Into Beef (yahoo.com) 59

Posted by EditorDavid from the getting-a-buzz dept.
"People do not like eating insects. Livestock are less picky," writes the Economist. Of course, the insects need to eat, too. To date, they have mostly been reared on leftover chicken feed. But the supply of that is limited, and if insect-reared meat is to take off, new sources will be needed. In a paper in Applied Entomology, Niels Eriksen, a biochemist at Aalborg University, suggests feeding them on the waste products of the beer industry. The world knocks back around 185bn litres of beer every year. Each litre produces between three and ten litres of wastewater full of discarded barley and yeast . The mix is rich in protein but deficient in carbohydrates, especially compared with chicken feed.
The Economist reports that the researchers found brewery waste was "happily consumed" by insects they tested, which "grew equally well on either food source." This suggests the possibility that other plentiful and protein-rich food wastes could also become "reasonable targets for nutrient recycling by insects," including waste from other fermentation industries (like bioethanol), slaughterhouses, and sugar-beet waste.

Thanks to Slashdot reader echo123 for sharing the article.
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Insects Could Help Turn Beer Waste Into Beef More

Insects Could Help Turn Beer Waste Into Beef

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  • ...for all that Bud Light beer waste they get to consume.
    • All industrial beer belongs in the drain. Better yet, on the shelf in the shop, forever unsold. It's foreign owned, filtered to the edge of its life then pasteurized to remove the remaining life.

      Proper beer is a living thing. Beer is wonderful. It's the foundational beverage of pretty much every society. Water, malted grain, hops and yeast. So simple, but the source of so much variety and complexity.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )
      I came here to say that.

    • I think they can thank all the assholes who had a problem with more people enjoying the same beer as them.

  • Cockroach fed beef. It's what's for dinner. Why couldn't Jesus design better looking insects?

  • Beer waste is already largely reused (Score:5, Informative)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @05:22PM (#63649504)

    It is mixed in with all sorts of feed for various animals on farms. Large breweries already have little to none of their waste actually get wasted.

    • I used to work in a historical theme park, and one of the historical stories was that people who brewed beer also used to have pigs, because the waste of the brewing process made good pig food. So people know this for centuries.

    • Large breweries already have little to none of their waste actually get wasted.

      Vegemite anyone?

  • Just supplement the distiller's grains (the industry term for this stuff) with cereal-based carbohydrates and then feed it to the cows directly. That's what they currently do with it. There is little, if anything, to be gained by feeding it to bugs and then trying to coax cows into eating the dead bugs.

    • Just supplement the distiller's grains (the industry term for this stuff) with cereal-based carbohydrates and then feed it to the cows directly. That's what they currently do with it. There is little, if anything, to be gained by feeding it to bugs and then trying to coax cows into eating the dead bugs.

      This. There are so many uses for the spent grain that it beggers the imagination to call it waste. https://modernfarmer.com/2015/... [modernfarmer.com]

      Pastry, bread, fish food, generating energy, treating sewage to reduce nitrogen, compost and fish food.

      Even the leftover wort that's too weak to make decent fermentation has a use. This isn't waste, it's a fine product all by itself. So drink beer - it's good for the environment!

      Seems like the Stinky Soldier Bug people might have some problems with getting enough waste f

  • Could the beef eat beer waste directly? That seems more in line with its herbivore nature than eating insects.

  • People love to eat bugs though. (Score:3, Informative)

    by braden87 ( 3027453 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @06:01PM (#63649596)
    People do love to eat bugs. Lobster, crab, shrimp, etc are all Arthropoda. All true insects (Hemiptera) are Arthropoda, but not all Arthropoda are Hemiptera. People eat (and pay out the nose for) creatures that are very close to true insects. I think the reservation people have towards insects is cultural and not something permanent, we could change it.
  • Some of us humans like beer waste too

  • Each litre produces between three and ten litres of wastewater full of discarded barley and yeast . The mix is rich in protein but deficient in carbohydrates, especially compared with chicken feed.

    WRONG! I have brewed beer off and on for almost four decades. There is NO discarded barley or yeast. This should be the end.

    As a brewer, I have two choices. The easier is to use malt extract, which is the sugar taken from the barley malt. The other is to extract the sugar myself from the barley converted to sugars. Either method uses yeast to convert the sugars into beer.

    And there are NO carbohydrates left over. There may be proteins in the beer.

    At the end, ALL the sugars are converted into alcohol.

    • Re:Wrong. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by gtwrek ( 208688 ) on Saturday July 01, 2023 @07:48PM (#63649786)

      WRONG! I have brewed beer off and on for almost four decades. There is NO discarded barley or yeast. This should be the end.

      All-grain home-brewer here - there's all sorts of waste in the beer making process. A common metric for all-grain brewers is mash efficiency, and most recipes assume 75% - meaning that the average home brewer is throwing out 25% of the sugars that are left in the mash. Pro's chase mash efficiency for costs, and even some homebrewers can get a little obsessed with it. Actual efficiencies can be 10's of percentage points higher or lower.

      As the article states, there's protein losses too, as wells kettle and fermenter waste commonly called trub. Any way one can reuse this waste is a good thing. Although as other's have noted major breweries, and even most craft breweries likely already have a customer for the spent grain. It's likely not wasted very much even today. But more potential uses for them can't hurt.

    • Then you are definitely doing it wrong.
      You are supposed to waste as much as possible.
      Thermodynamics and such, you know?

      How you can produce 1l of beer without throwing away 10 of waste water: is beyond me ...

      BTW, on a more serious note: you should perhaps look into burning Whiskey. You sound like you might have a hand for that.

  • Turn it directly into beef.
    • American "beer" is beer waste. Let the cows drink it. You get rid of the "beer", the cows get a buzz, you get beef, everybody wins!
  • Wasn't BSE a problem that came from feeding beef processed slaughterhouse waste? I don't think feeding beef with insects that are in turn fed slaughterhouse waste is a good idea.

    • Well, in this case what you're looking at is a feedback loop, where a bovine disease was incubated in more cows. What you'd need here is some sort of zoonosis that can transfer from insects to cows, and even then, there is no feedback loop.

  • Given that we've been raising cattle and brewing beer for hundreds of years, why did it take this long to figure out the beer -> bug -> beef connection?

  • Erm... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stankalonius ( 3834227 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @01:13AM (#63650294)
    Fucking duh. Brewing has been recycling its waste forever. When I worked at a brewery, the spent grain we used went directly to cattle in the locality. Maybe we start sooner?
  • I read this as "Insects could turn waste into beer", and thought "Interesting!"
  • Feeding a food chain with nutrient deficient food sources just has to result in nutrient deficient animals at the top of the chain. We've already proved that with people.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mbunch ( 1594095 )
      Sure, there's no way you can start with air, water and some minerals and end up with a steak.
  • Insects are just the land version of sea arthropods like shrimp, prawn, lobster, crab, etc.. People will seek out & pay a pretty penny for sea crustaceans. Are land arthropods really that bad?

    And yes, I have eaten some roasted insects, when they were in fashion for a short while. They weren't bad.

  • Spent grain? (Score:3)

    by wisnoskij ( 1206448 ) on Sunday July 02, 2023 @08:05AM (#63650750) Homepage

    Each liter produces between three and ten liters of wastewater full of discarded barley and yeast

    Do they mean spent grain? So they propose to take the food out of my livestock's mouth, ship it across the country, feed it it bugs, fry up the bugs, ship the bugs back across the country, and feed the bugs to my livestock?

  • They can turn beer waste into beer. Beer all the way down

  • I guess the cows don't mind eating industrial food waste teeming with bugs but beef is unhealthy enough without the added step.

  • Considering the climate change impact of meat ag, it would be wiser to ban it altogether than rehabilitate it with greenwashing half-measures. There's no popular, voluntary way to end meat ag. Unfortunately, we have to be adults and make hard choices if we want to avoid preventable suffering and possible extinction.

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