It is possible this is the first step a new wave of action by the macro-brewing industry to make life difficult for small brewers. Lord knows Big-Ag has been using the regulatory agencies for decades to shutdown family farms.
It may just be the FDA doing their job but it seems close to not passing the sniff test to me. I apologize if my paranoia is showing.
Paul
Your paranoia is showing. FDA has been on a huge crusade to regulate every aspect of food production that impacts food safety in response to foodborne illness problems of recent years.
Don’t worry, doesn’t mean their not all after you. 
Does that mean they are going to start looking into the practice of feeding chickens to chickens and pigs to pigs and cement to steer at feedlots?
I’m all for food safety but there are so many places where our mass food production system is in need of attention before we should start worrying about whether the spent grain we send to the hog or chicken farm has too much bacteria in it.
I was reading about cheese making today and the author was talking about an effort by the FDA to ban all raw milk cheeses in the US. In response to these concerns the CDC did a study of all cheese related illnesses in the US between 1993 and 2005 and found ~70 cases in that time. Turns out nearly 50 of them were all tied to a single Queso Fresco factory in CA which was using Pasteurized milk anyway.
Yeah that raw milk thing is wack man…
Well spent grain makes great compost so that is one way of disposal. Or it can be dried and fed into the furnace firing the steam kettles for a brewery.
I’ve seen the neighborhood cats horking down my spent grain after dumping it on the compost-pile. They are still around. Mostly.
I agree. I would think they’d address that issue before worrying about spent grain.
I’m not sure how many small breweries are selling their spent grain. Everyone I know off gives it away for free (or gets occasional trades) or have to pay someone to take it.
Yeah, it’s always been my understanding from brewers I’ve talked to that they give it away to farmers so that they won’t have to pay to have it disposed of - a significant chunk o’ change for small breweries.
Please be careful if you mash hop. I have read that hops are as bad for cats as they are for dogs. If it is anything like chocolate, could be worse.
Hmm, I might have to pull some old hops out of the freezer for my cat
Or pull some old cats out of the freezer for your hops…
I don’t mash hop and hardly think it is a common practice.
Cats love hops except for Citra. They just spray on Citra.
Yeah, knew this was coming. Very unfortunate. Totally the FDA searching for a problem that doesn’t exist. That said … I have seen my dog get deathly ill from eating several day old spent grain. But I hardly see where this could affect the human food chain.
Yeah, trying to picture that too. I’m no expert.
Cattle might get ill from eating spent grain I suppose.
But why is the FDA protecting the farmer? I need evidence on how a sick cow can affect me when I eat it.
Spent grain is a challenge to mget rid of without the farmers. I’m with the poster who said this may be a big brewery ploy to throw a wrench in the small craft brewery machine. I mean, I don’t want to go all twilight zone here - but it really is a cut throat business. Think Founder’s and New Belgium are the good guys? You couldn’t be further from the truth. They want to move in and take all the local taps they can. And BMC wants to stop their declining sales.
Yeah I just said all that crazy stuff but now a warning not to dive into politics. Pretty please. Thanks! 
Beer politics or industry politics? Might be a topic for the BA. Still, I am certainly not surprised this is going on.
They would be more concerned with contamination caused by feed produced in an industrial setting. There are plenty of things in a brewery that cows should not eat.