BSG Refinery: Recycling protein and amino acids from brewer´s spent grains

Protein is an essential part of any diet and therefore, it has extensive use as ingredient in the food and feed industries. With the growing population, the global demand for protein in 2030 is expected to exceed the current production capacities. The global amino acids market is also expected to grow significantly over the next decade, driven by the increased demand for nutraceuticals, animal feed products, and amino acids fortified foods. Finding alternative sources of protein and amino acids is therefore a topic of great interest today to meet the future demand of the population for these components. In this sense, exploiting and utilizing natural sources of protein, particularly crop and cereal by-products and side streams, has been considered of great relevance since they can be potential sources of protein. Brewer's spent grains (BSG), for example, an agro-industrial by-product resulting from the beer manufacturing, is rich in protein, which corresponds to approximately 20% of its composition in a dry weight basis. The BSG Refinery project is focused on the development of sustainable process t echnologies to convert BSG into valuable products. Different pre-treatment strategies have been evaluated to recover protein and amino acids from BSG. Important results were already obtained, which revealed the influence of process variables on the recovery yield as well as the range of values more suitable to increase the product yield. The necessity of defatting BSG previous the extraction process was also evaluated. Finally, as different protein sources may provide different amino acids composition, the amino acids recovered from BSG were also identified and quantified