Philly Beer Scene

Pat yourself on the back, you’ve got another batch of wort and yeast doing its thing in the fermentor. With another brew day complete, it’s time for the cleaning to begin. Besides the brew kettle being grimy with spent hops and coagulated proteins, all-grain brewers are always faced with the sopping elephant in the mash tun. Today, you can blissfully drop those 30 lbs. of mash down the trash chute before it makes your kitchen smell like garum, because the focus here is on the other mash waste product: leftover sweet wort runoff. Even if you let the grain bed run dry, chances are your mash tun has some sort of dead space where residual wort can be found. You may think of these leftovers as a sticky mess waiting to happen, but consider this: it took you just as much time and energy to make those diluted dregs as it did to make the wort that was to be boiled, hopped, and fermented. So put it to use! Since wort is chock full of sugar you prodded enzymes into producing, use it the same way you would use any other sugar water. Put yourself in the shoes of a chef and imagine gastriques, doughs, syrups and sauces. One amazing use for leftover wort, which requires minimal further processing, is to turn it into a brine. Wort brined pickles – a no brainer!

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