Beer Grain Bread

Spent brewing grains

Earlier this week I dusted off my brewing equipment. Brewing beer is a great hobby but it is not an easy hobby while looking after an infant/toddler. Before the little guy showed up, I brewed everything from dry malt extract kits to my own recipes using specialty grains with unprocessed hops. (Processed hops look like the food for the rabbit in your 3rd grade class.) Brewing like most cooking activities produces organic waste. I have to admit that most of the organic waste either goes to our compost pile or to my worms. (Yes, I really have worms in two medium size bins on the patio. It's incredible what they do with kitchen scraps.) Anyway, with beer the hops go to the compost pile but the spent brewing grains get put in freezer and made into bread.

I needed a recipe to use my grains in so I pulled out my favorite bread book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. This is a great book for making the making of great tasting bread easy! Recipes that make you think that you're in France and have just stepped into the street with a fresh paper wrapped baguette from the local boulangerie. Really, it's that good. Unfortunately, there were no recipes that called for spent beer grains though I pondered modifying the peasant loaf recipe to suit my needs.

Next, I turned to brewing blogosphere to locate a spent grain recipe and found a recipe by Jasmine at the brewblog beersatjoes. I like the recipe because it features the spent grains rather than uses them as an adjunct ingredient. Now, I didn't follow the recipe exactly. I left out the egg and substituted water for milk mostly because I couldn't imagine how they affected baker's science. (My wife always warns me when I attempt to bake that baking isn't an art, it's science. ie. follow the recipes!) Once the ingredients were complete and rising, it was time for some serious play at the library and park. A two-year old has his needs.

Spent Grain Beer Loaf

The rise time was probably about 3 hours by the time we finished at the library and park. I punched the dough down and pulled off a nice sized piece for my first loaf. Kneading the dough just long enough to shape it and put it in a silicon loaf pan for a 30 minute rise before baking. The remaining dough was placed in the refrigerator following the model of the Artisan Bread book.

The bread came out of the oven perfectly cooked. The yeast pockets were perfectly formed and the bread had great flavor. I spread a little cranberry cinnamon goat cheese on a slice still warm from the oven!