Spent Grain

The Food and Drug Administration has proposed a rule to impose a regulatory network on the procedure of monitoring and testing of spent grain and other by-products of brewing. The Beer Institute - the national trade association representing brewers, beer importers and industry suppliers - believes this rule would be unnecessary.

Now here's a job that just about anybody would love... A chief administrator of a beer Institute, but I digress. Beer Institute Vice President of Communications Chris Thorne says the proposed rule stems from passage of the Food Safety and Modernization Act - particularly the animal feed section. Thorne says the regulatory checkpoints FDA has proposed would interrupt the brewing process and impose additional costs to the process. "Your average large Brewer will seek costs as high as $13.6 million annually in order to comply with these. We did the deep dive on the costs and went into all of the processes of the brewing right now and what the rules would propose, some of the costs would be one time costs, some of them would be continued costs but on an average we are looking at about $13.6 million." The Beer Institute hopes to work with FDA to ensure the relationship between brewers and local animal producers is not interrupted.