Brewing and upcycled-food clubs collaborate on exotic fall beer

Cornell has more than 1,000 recognized student organizations and, as the students swoop back onto campus for the fall semester, two of them are putting their heads together for something potentially delicious.

Big Red Brewing is the female-founded, graduate student brewing organization begun in 2019. The Upcycled Food Club, started last year, aims to spread awareness of the growing number of foods made from products that would normally go to landfill, or that are designed to use waste streams from the food industry. Together, they are brewing an ice cream-flavored beer - yes, ice cream - that features milk permeate powder, a dairy industry byproduct.

The collaboration between brewers and dairy is not new. Historically, breweries were located near where grains were grown - the same grains used to feed cows, pigs and other livestock. Breweries use a lot of grain: Every six-pack of beer uses about a pound of grain, and the U.S. produces about 20 billion pounds of brewers' spent grain annually. Rich in amino acids, protein and fiber, spent brewers grains are primarily used as dairy cattle feed.

These two clubs share more than a history of industry synergy. Dean Hauser '17, a doctoral student in the field of food science, started the Upcycled Food Club and is the incoming president and outgoing brewing coordinator for the beer club. In fact, many club members are connected to both, and on Aug. 23 they gathered in the Product Development Kitchen in Stocking Hall, as a hands-on part of the university's food science orientation program.

Their mission: a Persian ice cream-inspired lager. Think saffron, with hints of cardamom, a whiff of rosehip, and a subtle dairy richness imparted by milk permeate powder, a byproduct of concentrated milk products such as protein shakes and sports drinks.

They nibbled samples of upcycled food products as they got to work. The consensus: The Fancy Pants upcycled cookies were tasty; the Flock chicken skin crisps were just a little weird.

This isn't the first time the two clubs have collaborated. At the end of last spring, they held "Big Bread Brew Day" in Stocking Hall, brewing a summer farmhouse ale infused with honey, basil, coriander and a bit of yeastiness imparted by stale bread. The bread was the upcycled bit: With an estimated 40% of food wasted, teaching people how to channel food away from landfill is an enormous tool in the fight against climate change.

One of Big Red Brewing's aims is education, but fun is also front and center.

"We have about 100 members," Hauser said. "We've had trivia nights and had speakers come, and we've done collaborations with breweries like Personal Best in Ithaca and Brewery Ardennes in Geneva."

For this new project, the assembled team first mashed in, adding the grain "grist" of mostly malted barley with some malted wheat and flaked oats to water and heating the porridge-like mixture, holding it at specific temperatures to break down starches. They had to be patient: Lagers are more complex than other styles of beer, the whole process taking place over weeks, Hauser said.

After about 70 minutes, Hauser and outgoing brewing club president Andy Kalenak did the mashing out and sparging: The former is a process that involves bringing to mash to around 77 degrees Celsius to stop the conversion of starches into fermentable sugars by enzymes and to reduce the viscosity of the wort to make it easier to separate from the grain bed. Sparging entails running hot water through the grain bed to more fully extract the sugars attached to the grain (a bit like swishing a teabag in water).

After that, another wait - this time for the sugary liquid to boil, for up to two hours, the hops added in at the start. Near the end of the boil, they added the milk permeate powder and cardamom (the other flavorings go in later), cooled the wort and poured it into a fermenter and added the yeast.

Will it taste like Persian ice cream? That question will be answered when the beer is unveiled at Big Red Brewing's Oktoberfest event planned for Oct. 3.