Sustainable Natural Solar Drying of Microbreweries Spent Grains: A Comparison with Common Electric Convective Drying

Abstract In recent years, local microbreweries are increasingly capturing the consumer’s interest with a wide range of different types of beer. Because of the insertion of microbreweries scattered around the country, large amounts of spent grains have been made available locally to be used, for instance, as animal feed. However, those spent grains, which are mainly formed by malting barley (or malt), are materials suitable for further valorization. Turning the spent grains from waste to a raw material that can be later used to produce non-traditional flour requires a thermal treatment, i.e. a drying process. A natural convection solar dryer (NCSD) was evaluated as an alternative to a conventional convective electric drying system for the dehydration process of local microbrewer’s spent grains. Two types of breweries’ spent grains-BSG-(Golden Ale and Red Ale) were dried at different daytime hours. Sustainability indexes, Specific Energy Consumption (SEC), and CO2 emissions of the conventional dryer were calculated and used to determine the environmental benefits and drawbacks of the NCSD.</jats:p

Geographical Origin Identification of Moldavian Wines by Neutron Activation Analysis

Access full text - https://doi.org/10.1007/s12161-017-0913-3To get more data regarding the elemental transfer from soil to wine, the neutron activation analysis was used to determine 35 elements in vineyard chernozem soil and 18 elements in wines from Romanesti and Cricova, Republic of Moldova. Soil elemental content allowed evidencing more similarities between considered soils and the Upper Continental Crust and the World Average Soil as well as to calculate the soil-to-wine transfer factor for 18 of investigated elements. From all 28 trace elements evidenced in soil, only 13, the soluble ones, were found in all wine samples, which finally allowed determining the corresponding transfer factors whose values varied between 0.02 mg/l (U) and 38 mg/l (K). In this regard, all sorts of wines showed a significant concentration of potassium, varying from 370 to 700 mg/l. A subsequent discriminant analysis allowed discriminating all wine samples according to their types: red and white as well as their origin