Summertime Blues

Heyya folks...sorry it's been awhile since I posted, but it's summertime and sh*t happens.

So, y'all know I've been brewing a lot more this year, and I've been a little concerned about how much spent grain ends up getting pitched in the garbage after each brew date. So, I snagged a recipe for spent grain dog biscuits from a great site called 17Apart. (They have additional dog treat recipes, among other interesting things. Go check them out!)

Anyhow, this was nearly as much fun as making meatloaf! Y'all know the only reason I do anything in the kitchen other than brew beer is because I love playing with my food...and nobody says "stop that!" when it looks like you're cooking!

The recipe from 17Apart is pretty simple:
4 cups spent grain
2 cups flour
1 cup peanut butter
2 eggs

The 4 cups spent grain was almost exactly what I had on hand from brewing up my Wild as Rome Watermelon Wheat. (I used a Boundary Waters Wheat Beer Extract Beer Kit  from Midwest Supplies as my base for that watermelon wheat. It included 1/2 lb. Caravienne and 1/2 lb. Carapils® specialty grains. Handy! :-)

Chunk it all in a mixing bowl and it's gonna look something like this (the peanut butter squidbillie takes some finesse, however!):

Once you've got it all mixed well, roll it out on a floured surface, and get out the cookie cutters! The three sized of dog bones and the fire hydrant came in one set, while the rabbit and carrot came in another (with a flower, not pictured here.)

  Here's a pic of the various shapes before baking:

and after:

These were baked at 350 degrees for half an hour, then reduce heat to 225 and bake them two more hours. The idea is to dry them out as completely as possible, without burning them and setting off your smoke detectors. Once they've cooled off, you may want to clean them up a bit before bagging them. They should keep for a couple of weeks or several months if you freeze them.

Once they were finished, I solicited the opinion of renowned biscuit critic Seamus Shamrock. He gave these biscuits Two Paws Up!

I mentioned earlier that the spent grain for these dog biscuits came from a wheat beer kit I cooked up as a base for my Wild as Rome Watermelon Wheat. To counter the sweetness of the wheat and avoid it turning into a Jolly Rancher Watermelon brew, I added an ounce of dried chipotles, which I also snagged from Midwest Supplies. Midwest offers a wide variety of dried peppers for folks interested in making their own hot sauces, but these can also make great additions to homebrew if you want to add a little heat and/or smoke. Wild as Rome is going into bottles tonight, so we'll give the FG test sample a taste to see what we might be looking at soon. It's a wheat, so it won't have to sit too long--couple weeks to carbonate and it should be good to go.

In the meantime, I managed to see Switchmen and Shooter Jennings at Busters. I'd never heard Switchmen before, but they put on a great show: solid straight-forward rock'n'roll! I'd been looking forward to seeing Shooter, as I've always enjoyed his songs. Love listening to his show on SiriusXM's Outlaw Country channel!

In addition to the Switchmen, I also got a chance to hear Billy Don Burns do a coupla songs and heard Josh Morningstar for the first time. Extremely talented singer/songwriter. Expect great things from this guy!

As if all that excitement wasn't enough, the following week I got a chance to catch the Restless Leg String Band down at Cosmic Charlie's. My favorite Lexington music venue, and RLSQ did some fantastic picking! Very hippie crowd, lots of great folk having a great time listening to some fantastic bluegrass. Saw a girl in her pajamas dancing like I haven't seen since Jerry left us! Really impressed with this band and looking forward to catching them again!

 Well, that's enough babbling for one post, even if it has taken me a month to jot these rambling notes down. It's summertime, go try something new! I'll still be here when you get back!