Brew beer, feed steer

Grains brew beer and feed steer

Helicon Brewing and Cardillo Farm partner to provide cow chow in South Fayette

Story & photos by Andrea Iglar

The musical “Oklahoma!” lyricizes the line, “The farmer and the cowman should be friends.”

Around here, the farmer and the brewer are friends.

Fred Cardillo, left, and Chris Brunetti feed malted barley to the cows on Cardillo Farm in South Fayette.

South Fayette Township resident Chris Brunetti—owner of Helicon Brewing in Oakdale Borough—produces more than 50 tons a year of malted barley as a byproduct of the beer brewing process.

Rather than simply dispose of the spent grain, he gives it to Fred Cardillo to feed 35 cows on Cardillo Farm, a 43-acre hobby farm in South Fayette.

At this point, you might be picturing cows stumbling around a field feeling a bit tipsy. But Brunetti promises: “There’s no alcohol in it."

At Cardillo Farm, a cow eats the nutritious, non-alcoholic grain from Helicon Brewing.

The all-natural malt, already having been used to make beer, contains a bit of starch, a touch of sugar and about 12% protein, the equivalent of mid-grade commercial animal feed. There are no chemicals.

“It’s healthy,” Brunetti said.

Cardillo has taken every malt batch since Helicon opened in late 2016.

The arrangement between the beer brewer and the family farmer benefits both parties.

“This has been a symbiotic relationship with Chris, and it’s been great,” said Cardillo, whose family farm has operated since 1914.

Helicon brewer Sean Eckert, left, brewery owner Chris Brunetti and farmer Fred Cardillo sample oatmeal stout at the brewery in February.

“This grain saves us in so many different ways,” Cardillo said. “We don’t have to plant so much corn, we don’t have to do all the plowing and tilling and fertilizing, and we don’t have to grind the corn, and that gives us more time to do other things.”

Brunetti, meanwhile, saves money on disposal fees, while preventing organic material from entering the waste stream.

Helicon brewer Sean Eckert said most breweries and distilleries partner with a farm or a composting company to dispose of malted grain, but few are as close by as Cardillo Farm—less than a mile uphill from the brewery on Union Avenue.

This has been a symbiotic relationship.

Each year, Helicon buys, grinds and brews 17 tons (or 34,000 pounds) of dry grain, sourced from commercial wholesalers in the U.S. and Europe.

Once the grain becomes wet, the weight increases threefold, so Cardillo hauls away 51 tons (or 102,000 pounds) of spent grain annually.

“I’m not charging the farmer for the grain,” Brunetti said. “Fred is actually doing me a huge favor.”

The spent grains were used to brew oatmeal stout at Helicon Brewing, a mile away in Oakdale.

On a sunny afternoon in February, Helicon worked to produce a 500-gallon, or 30-keg, batch of oatmeal stout, which the brewery describes as a “dark and fullbodied, roasty, malty ale with notes of chocolate and coffee.”

The stout is made with English barley malt, chocolate malt (which is a type of barley malt, not actually chocolate), crystal malts for flavor and color, dark-roasted malts, flaked oats and a bittering hops.

The beer would be ready for human consumption in 3 to 4 weeks, but the malted grain would be ready for the local cows to lap up immediately.

About 35 cows lap up the malted barley from Helicon Brewing at Cardillo Farm.

Eckert, having rinsed the barley and extracted the liquid, proceeded to remove the malt from the grain tank— one of a series of large silver vessels used during the brewing process.

About 3,000 pounds of steaming, pleasantly scented, densely packed grain poured from the tank into a bin attached to a trailer. Once the bin was full, Eckert and Cardillo hitched the trailer to the farmer's pickup truck.

Helicon brewer Sean Eckert shovels malted barley from a tank into a portable container that farmer Fred Cardillo uses to transport the grain to his farm and feed his cattle.

After a quick drive to the farm, Cardillo unhitched the trailer, scooped up bucketfuls of the malted barley and spread the grain around the perimeter of a feeding corral while calling, “Come on!” to the cows, heifers and steer.

Quickly catching on to the special delivery, the Black Angus, Red Angus and Charolais cattle mooed and meandered to the enclosure, where they poked their heads through the posts to feed on the still-warm grain.

Over the course of a week, Cardillo would use the grain to supplement the cattle’s diet of hay and corn.

Fred Cardillo scoops bucketfuls of malted barley from his trailer into the feeding corral at his farm.

While Cardillo does not rely on the farm for income, he enjoys beef cattle farming and takes pride in continuing his family’s 109-year-old agricultural tradition.

The farm is part of an agricultural conservation easement that ensures the property will be farmland forever. In addition, the farm is adjacent to the 217-acre Boys Home farmland preserve that South Fayette Township leases to Cardillo for growing corn and making hay.

Farmer Fred Cardillo, left, and brewer Chris Brunetti chat next to the feeding corral where cows chow down on spent brewery grains.

When other farmers ask Helicon if they can have the brewery's malted barley, Brunetti says he already has a committed grain guy.

For six and a half years, Cardillo has picked up every batch of grain within 24 hours of the brew.

"There's a nice synergy," Brunetti said.

Cardillo agreed: "Yeah, we became good friends."

Cows at Cardillo Farm in South Fayette eat nutritious malted barley, a byproduct of beer production at Helicon Brewing in Oakdale.