Ten-thousand years worth of cooperation between farmers & beer makers about to get zinged by the FDA

Plot Device

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Ten-thousand years worth of cooperation between farmers & beer makers about to get zinged by the FDA

Here's the way things used to be:

-- Brew master makes a batch of beer in his brew house.
-- It requires that he brew a half ton of grain.
-- After he gets his beer, the spent grain is of no more use to him.
-- Local cattle farmer sees the spent grain as an excellent form of cattle feed.
-- Local farmer gladly takes all that spent grain off the brew master's hands.
-- Brew master is glad he doesn't have to deal with the mess and expense of grain disposal.
-- Money rarely changes hands here. It's an even swap.
-- Maybe at Christmas time, brew master sends a giftwrapped case of beer, and farmer sends over a giftwrapped case of sirloin. Other than that, pretty much no monetary exchange happens.

>>> Lovely symbiotic relationship dating back many thousands of years.


Then along comes the FDA.

The FDA has proposed a new ruling whereby the spent grains should be regarded as "animal food" and must therefore be regulated.

Brew masters and cattle farmers across the USA are aghast, insisting these rules will financially break this longstanding symbiotic system, possibly driving many brewers and even farmers out of business.

My feeling is that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.



http://m.sunjournal.com/news/busine...ding-ties-between-beer-makers-farmers/1508954


New FDA rules may cut long-standing ties between beer makers, farmers

by Nick McCrea, Bangor Daily News -- Monday, Mar 24, 2014

BANGOR — America’s booming brewing industry and farmers alike are bothered and befuddled by a proposed U.S. Food and Drug Administration rule change that could alter a partnership that dates back to Neolithic times.

In Maine and across the country, brewers and farmers have formed handshake agreements: Brewers brew beer, producing barrels or truckloads full of heavy, wet spent grains. These grains have been heated up to extract sugars, proteins and other nutrients that go on to make beer. The process is called mashing. The spent grains are a byproduct — with no real usefulness purpose left for the brewer.

To the farmer, spent grains are a valuable dietary supplement for their livestock. It’s common for breweries to reach out to local farms to offer up their spent grains as animal feed. Most often, farmers are happy to oblige, picking up the spent grains themselves a few times per week. Little or no money exchanges hands during these deals. Brewers are glad to get rid of the grain, and farmers are glad to take it off their hands....
 
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Don

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Agorism FTW!
The FDA has so many better and more important things to go after.
From my viewpoint, this is a perfect FDA project. They can create a whole new industry of middlemen who broker the grain, a whole new sub-sub-department of inspectors to inspect the grain to make sure it meets the new standards that will have to be implemented, and since it will now have to have a per-unit cost associated with it so the middleman can get a cut, barter's out the window and Uncle Sam'll have a whole new class of product to tax.

All they forgot is the intermediate processing requirement, so all the brewers would have to ship their waste to some corporation that could genuflect over it and collect another slice of the pie.

Somebody's gonna get a promotion for this one. :sarcasm
 

Don

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Here's the real meat to this story.
Most small and medium-sized brewers wouldn’t be able to follow these rules without significant investment.
I'm curious as to which large breweries have the investments already in the planning stages, and which large breweries have made large political donations lately.

This is another poster child for crony capitalism.

Note to self: read the whole linked story before commenting.
 
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Synonym

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Both of your points probably have merit Don.

The proposed rule is aimed at “ensuring the safety of animal food for animals consuming the food and ensuring the safety of animal food for humans handling the food, particularly pet food,” according to the FDA.

Where they came up with 'pet food', I have no idea. Cows and pigs on a farm aren't usually pets. So, that's lame. Handling and consuming cooked, wet mash isn't exactly dangerous either.

The only thing I can think of is the old law against feeding hogs garbage due to trichinosis. Then we're right back to the fact that the mash has been cooked--which kills the larvae.

The last thing I can think of is the possibility of mold, which would require the mash to sit around for quite a while. Farmers work on a very tight margin; sick livestock are an expense that they would avoid. As far as I can tell from the interview, whatever they get from the brewery is fed within a few days.

For all practical purposes, this sounds a lot like overzealous FDA employees with little practical experience interpreting the rules. Don't ever let a good rule languish.
 

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This is a related subject, or a derail. Take your pick. :)

A bit of inside information from my son, who happened to come home for a visit this weekend. The company that he works for sets up computer controls and related electronics for various manufacturers. He's currently working on a job for a new dog food manufacturing plant.

First, when planning to build something like this, it takes time. What the company planned for, and intended to build this spring, has been deemed non-compliant by new rules issued in January from the FDA. Now they're scrambling to incorporate the new requirements and the added costs to fit into the construction schedule. (Most of us don't have to worry about these kinds of headaches, but it serves as a reminder of how new regulations can throw a wrench in the works, while creating delays and more costs.)

Second, which might be a little TMI for those who are squeamish, wet dog food (canned, in other words) has to be processed in a way that's considered safe for human consumption. I'll let you figure out why that might be...
 

Cyia

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Legit question, not snark -- has brewed grain with edible remainders really been a thing for 10K years, or is the title hyperbole? I thought that was a much more recent (as in within the last millennium) thing. Brewing's nothing new, but I'd be surprised if the methods were sophisticated enough to preserve the edible stock grain. And I'm just edit-fried enough to wonder.
 

Plot Device

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Legit question, not snark -- has brewed grain with edible remainders really been a thing for 10K years, or is the title hyperbole? I thought that was a much more recent (as in within the last millennium) thing. Brewing's nothing new, but I'd be surprised if the methods were sophisticated enough to preserve the edible stock grain. And I'm just edit-fried enough to wonder.

Without my having looked it up, my layman's understanding is that agriculture (ie, planting rows of crops for cultivation) has been around no less than 4,000 years, possibly 6,000, and at an outside stretch 10,000.

That same layman's understanding tells me that herding tiny flocks of sheep and goats has been around for easily 10,000 or longer.

As for brewing beer, I believe the Egyptians might have been the first to do that.

Now ... layman's understanding aside ... I'll go check Google to vet all of my above statements.



::ETA::


FIRST BEER: possibly 7,000 years ago in ancient Sumeria.

(so says Wikipedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer


==========================

FIRST ROW-CROPPING EFFORTS: possible 12,000 years ago

(so says History Channel)
History Channel says it's possible that the first concrete evidence of actual beer dates back to ancient China 9,000 years ago.

http://www.history.com/news/ask-history/who-invented-beer


And yet also, they insist that its origins may have emerged concurrently with the first instances of row-cropping, an agricultural practice which they say began 12,000 years ago.

January 8, 2014

Who invented beer?

If you’re searching for an original brewmaster to toast the next time you knock back a cold one, you might be out of luck. It’s difficult to attribute the invention of beer to a particular culture or time period, but the world’s first fermented beverages most likely emerged alongside the development of cereal agriculture some 12,000 years ago. As hunter-gatherer tribes settled into agrarian civilizations based around staple crops like wheat, rice, barley and maize, they may have also stumbled upon the fermentation process and started brewing beer. In fact, some anthropologists have argued that these early peoples’ insatiable thirst for hooch may have contributed to the Neolithic Revolution by inspiring new agricultural technologies....
.



EARLIEST HERDING PRACTICES: anywhere from 6,000 years ago to 30,000 years ago.

I found dozens of different positions by different sources --huge date ranges. But 6,000 years seems to be the most recent start of herding livestock that anyone is willing to stand by.
 
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