Beer Made with Bread
Today I want to talk to you about beer made with bread. Let me tell you how brewers might do this, why there is beer made with bread and I'm going to give you some examples of beer made with bread that you can go and try.
How is Beer Made With Bread?
So how does a brewer go about brewing beer made with bread? The bread can be used to replace a portion of the barley. It will still produce fermentable sugars, which we need to be able to create alcohol within our beer. As a recap of the basic brewing process for you - grains are steeped in warm water to extract starches and enzymes to create fermentable sugars. Part of that grain bill can be replaced by bread and the same process will happen. The water is then removed from the grains, and bread as the case may be, and that is boiled. Hops and various ingredients may be added at this point. Then the liquid, now called wort, is cooled and yeast is added. The yeast will then convert the fermentable sugars that have come from the grain and the bread to produce alcohol and carbon dioxide.
How to add the bread to beer made with bread
When bread is used in the brewing process you can't just take a slice and chuck it in. There is a lot of moisture within bread. So that needs to be removed because it can change the temperature of the mash, which is the point in the brewing process where the grains are steeped in the water. The best way to do this is to dry the bread out. At home, if you'd like to try this, you can dry out your bread in a 90 degree Celsius oven for about an hour. After that time you need to feel the bread and you can feel it's gone quite crusty like a crouton. Once the bread is dried out sufficiently, you want to break it up into large pieces. They need to be a little bit bigger than a crouton because once it goes into the water, it will start to disintegrate. If you break it up too small and becomes quite crumbly and small. This is going to cause what's called a stuck mash and will gum up whatever filter you use to remove the grains from the wort and then you won't be able to extract the water properly. So the pieces of bread need to be a chunky size to be added to your brew.
Why is beer made with bread?
So why would brewers want to produce beer made with bread anyway? One reason is that you can use surplus or stale bread. This is then going to help reduce food waste. Toast is a very well known brewery for using surplus bread. If you go to their website, they have lots of statistics on how this can help the environment. Food production is one of the biggest contributors to climate change and 1/3 of all food is wasted. The use of surplus bread replaces virgin barley, therefore we use less land, less water and less energy to avoid carbon emissions. So it's all very good for the environment.
Toast estimates that from their brews, they have saved 2,072,429 slices of bread by using it in their brewing process. This has saved 42 tons of co2 emissions, it has allowed 175,555 square meters of land to be reclaimed that's not being used to grow virgin barley and they save 257,413 litres of water. That's pretty impressive!
Examples of beer made with bread to try
As we're on the subject of Toast, they have a wide range of different styles of beer. And they are all made from surplus bread. There is a session IPA, a pale ale, American IPA and a craft lager. They also regularly produce collaborations with other companies that are B Corps or that are trying to reduce food waste. Recently they have made a lemongrass lager with Tea Pigs, and they produced a baker's wit which used more surplus bread.
Another brewery that uses bread is Crumbs Brewery, you can find them in Waitrose. They started on their journey to have beer made with bread because they found that a neighbouring artisanal bakery, Chalk Hills had lots of surplus bread at the end of the day. So they decided to try and do something about this by brewing beer with bread.
Finally, one of my local breweries Docker in Hythe started out as an artisanal bakery producing sourdough for the local residents and is also a brewery. They can use their surplus bread in their brews. One of their beers is their session Pale Ale. They produce this, in collaboration with another local brewery called Hop Fuzz. It is a very sessionable beer at 3.8% and is very delicious! As it's got sourdough in it, you can get a little bit of the notes of that.
Does the type of bread affect beer made with bread?
The type of bread used in beer made from bread does affect the flavour slightly. I brewed a Belgian Dubbel from a Toast homebrew recipe and I used wholemeal bread. I did that because you then get more maltiness. Using a sourdough or something else with a larger flavour is going to impact your beer. So think about that if you plan to do some home brewing with bread.
Spent grain crackers
As a final note, you can also go the other way with thinking about your food waste. If you are a homebrewer, you can use your spent grain from your brews to produce bread or pretzels or crackers because that spent grain can be dried out in a similar way to the bread in an oven. It can then be processed into flour – I use a coffee grinder for this. So always think about what you're going to do with your waste products when you're brewing!
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