Sunday, January 06, 2008

Beer and Bread

Looking for an original present for Dear Hubby at Christmas, I hit upon the idea of giving him a home brewing kit. We are barely two weeks beyond Christmas, and hubby has already made one batch of beer - that is happily fermented, bottled and carbonating as we speak. Batch #2 is in the barrel doing its fermenting thing right now.

One of the byproducts of homebrewing is a crapload of whole grain. What starts out as about 2 cups of grain when it is dry, turns into about 8 cups when it has been steeped to make beer. What to do with this soppy, odd-smelling stuff? You make Spent Grain Bread! A quick check of the inter-web yielded several recipes to try. Strangely enough, most of them were connected to home-brewing sites, go figure! This is my first effort. Waddaya think?



Hot out of the oven, it tasted pretty good. I will need to sample a second slice after it cools a bit more to catch the depth of flavor. I'm already thinking of ways to "tweak" the recipe - honey or molasses instead of sugar should compliment the grains better. I'm thinking there may be more breadmaking in my future.

Just the two brief exposures I have had to the homebrew supply store has made it clear to me that baking and making beer goes hand-in-hand. This could be fun!

1 comment:

Tiny Tyrant said...

The bread looks great Alyson.

FYI, yes the San Joaquin Valley bites to drive through. Do it at night.

It's almost as bad as Salt Lake City to Reno during the day in May with no airconditioning. Never again