Could Wort Serve as a Viable Soil Amendment?

Could Wort Serve as a Viable Soil Amendment?

Summary

The current project is on hold to Spring of 2018. 

Carriage House Farm has accumulated the infrastructure to manage the project and has a site that has been prepared.  The location of the plot, though not visible on this map is located here:  https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1520824,-84.7935533,417m/data=!3m1!1e3

Problems
The two partnering breweries for this project had massive issues in providing the large amount of wort we were requiring for the project. 

MadTree Brewing Company was a simple logistic issue of not being able to allow for the foot print of a 375 gallon IBC container.  This company had expanded its canned, distributed line of beers, requiring additional storage space originally intended for the container to collect wort.  Compounding this was both their expansion to a new space and the departure of our direct contact with the business leaving us in a state of confused communication for 90 days.

Rheingeist Brewery had odd problems that we are still unclear about.  They are the largest brewery we are working with and had introduced new systems of a scale that exceed our capacity to work with.   In the two attempts to pull the wort/waste liquid from their waste stream (cohabitated with their grains) the brewer found that the original system they had incorporated to remove liquid prior to the corkscrew press that they relied on to “dry” the spent grain for cattle feed was incorrectly plumbed resulting in a costly delay of production, causing work stoppage for 13 and 18 hours respectively.

These delays proved devastating for the first year of research.  The delay caused the planting of the peppers and basil plants used in the research to be pushed back to a date much later than intended and pushed the final yield and tissue tests so late as to be pressured by frost dates.

It was decided to delay and work with the breweries to correct the issues or if unable to correct, find alternative sources of wort from other breweries.

Solutions
We have been working with another brewery, Woodburn Brewery, and we feel that will be an excellent replacement for the larger Rheingeist.  MadTree Brewing will complete its relocation in February of 2018 and will be able to reliably work with Carriage House Farm in providing them wort.

Objectives/Performance Targets

Current/proposed objectives remain unmet.

Accomplishments/Milestones

Better understanding of the complexities when dealing with brewers.  Both brewers had every intent to work with us, but business growth with both companies we had planned to work with interrupted our intial attempt to secure wort to use as a source of nutrients for the test plants.

New brewery has been located and groundwork laid for upcoming 2018 trials.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

None as of yet.

Collaborators: