Stout Bread, spent grain bread

 

 

Note: Also posted on my new Blog  “Peabody Pico” 

 

As a home brewer, I read several sugestions as to what t0 do with the spent grains after brewing beer. Most  the spent grains from brewed recipes, I drained well after sparging and bagged them and sent them to the freezer. Some of them I transferred to 1/2 sheet pans and put them in the oven (with a standing pilot) overnight at least to dry. Depending on the progress, I would raise the heat to a slow oven setting to quicken the progress and fold them as needed. I usually have enough from a 1 gallon recipe to fill two half sheet pans.

Now as dried spent grains there are many recipes to use them as is, but I wanted them ground for an addition to white all purpose bread flour. Since I yet to have a grain mill, I could try the coffee grinder to at least grind a small amount.

Setting the grinder, a Cuisinart model, to fine grind I did a small amount at a time giving the motor a break and ended up with about 2 cups of fine grind grain. The dryness of the grain made the grind easy on the coffee grinder Given the nature of the beer grain bill, from a beer that I call Prime Stout, a variation of an Imperial Russian Stout, the resulting flour is very dark.

Enough with the details, lets’ look at the results !

I started off with the standard e-z mix  bread dough recipe of flour, sugar, salt, and yeast

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The Spent grain before and after grinding.

I figured about 3/4 cup of ground spent grain

Mixing up the base of the dough

Addition of the ground spent grain

Adding the remainder of the white flour. A dark dough resulting !

Let the dough rise

Form  into loaves and let rise again

The finished product, one loaf inverted.

The dough was a bit on the wet side , but still airy and not heavy.

The crumb, lighter than I though it would be and the taste reminiscent of pumpernickel.

NO ! It does not taste like beer!

(maybe I should have added some hops?)