Corn chips made from a distillery by-product

A Lanaudière company is launching its second food product these days made from cereal residues from the production of alcohol.

Alice & Ambre, established in Saint-Ambroise-de-Kildare, a municipality located a few kilometers northwest of Joliette, has been marketing its Rebon brand crackers since 2020, developed to valorize microbrewery spent grains, i.e. the remains of cereals used as a base for beer once filtered. After two years of research, with the help of the Cintech agro-alimentary firm of Saint-Hyacinthe, the company is now launching a corn tortilla chip, made from distillers’ spent grain.

“Being beer brewers at the outset, we wondered what we could do to valorize spent grains, this by-product made up of cereals, mainly barley, whose sugar was used by the yeasts in the production beer, but in which there is still a lot of fiber and protein”, says Patrick Mougin, co-owner of Alice & Ambre and co-founder of the craft brewery Maltstrom, also located near Joliette.

Most often recovered by farmers to feed their animals, microbrewery spent grain, and therefore beer, requires a lot of precautions in its handling. Because of the proliferation of micro-organisms, it must quickly be put in the fridge and conditioned, at the risk of degrading and ending up in compost or garbage cans.

Recovering it is therefore a challenge for companies wishing to revalorize it for human consumption.

According to Mr. Mougin, the problem will be less glaring with the spent grain from the distillery where spirits are produced and not beer.

“In a microbrewery, the mixture of grain and water, called wort, is heated to less than 70 degrees Celsius,” he explains. On the other hand, in the distillery, it is boiled for several hours in the still, which kills the bacteria. We therefore have a little more time to handle the spent grain before the risk of contamination.

To make the potato chips, Alice & Ambre chose spent corn from the production of Saga gin from the Distillerie Grand Dérangement, in Saint-Jacques-de-Montcalm, also in Lanaudière.

“We are very proud to participate in this project, which seems to be one of the first to promote distillers’ spent grain,” says Louis-Vincent Gagnon, distiller at the Distillerie Grand Dérangement, pointing out that this by-product is quite rare in Quebec since most Quebec distilleries buy their base liquor from large Ontario distilleries.

“So they don’t have spent grain to dispose of. The Grand Dérangement distillery is one of the few that produces its own alcohol, from certified organic corn grown locally by its owner,” he explains.

Alice & Ambre potato chips are also sold under the Rebon brand.


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