The Man is Brewing... what to do with the spent grain? A&S Project #11!

My lord brews.  Currently, he's got a batch of ale which is doing something sinister in the dark room under the stairs (he says it's going to be ok.  I don't drink beer, so I have to trust him on this.  Besides, he sanitized the kitchen today so he can bottle tonight, so there's lots of benefit to ME in this whole brewing fiasco!).  I'm hoping to convince him to make some mead one of these days. ;)  For those of you who understand beer lingo, he likes his beer "hoppy."  I call this "hand-licker," because I think it's bitter and nasty, and you have to lick your hand to get the taste out of your mouth!




Uisdean, stirring something that still smelled good at this point! (pre-hops)


There are some side effects brewing.  One is I'm getting some actual home-grown yeastie-beasties to play with.  I'm so excited!  A new kitchen experiment!!   The other is... I have almost five GALLONS of spent grain to play with, too.

Now, I'll be honest.  By the time he's done with the grain, there's not a whole lot of value to it.  I mean, the brewing process pulls most of the "good" stuff out of the grains.  I don't have pigs to feed the leftover grain too, though, and I can't bear the idea of throwing it away.  So, I decided to try adding it to a batch of bread dough!

So, knowing that the grain I was getting was mostly just roughage, I decided to do a  nice multi-grain loaf.  This was the perfect excuse to finally grind up some buckwheat I've had sitting in my cabinets for a while.  buckwheat is a hard little grain, and I used my new, uber-heavy mortar and pestle to crunch it up into a coarse flour.

Buckwheat (see?) made by my people!

Here's the buckwheat about half-way through the grinding process.  (It took me about 30 minutes to grind up one cup of grain)



 I also added barley flour, and regular old all-purpose wheat flour.  Once I had that mostly kneading into a basic dough, I added two cups of the spent grain.  It smelled funky, I'm not going to lie.  Not like beer, but rather like wet grass clippings.  My lord rolled his eyes at me and told me it was HOPS, not grass clippings.  I remain unconvinced, but hey, grain's grain.  So, I added it in and worked it into the dough, which took on a somewhat grainy texture (pun fully intended!)



Dough with spent grain dumped on top

 So, you know the drill by now,  loaves go into oven, Solveig finds something to work on (embroidery, research, accounting homework, whatever) until the smell of baking bread fills the house, loaves are pulled out and left to cool for a little while.

We served this at dinner at our business meeting last weekend. The loaves turned out really nice.  It was definitely a more "peasant bread" look, and the crumb was larger, but it was still light, and there wasn't any real icky hoppy taste in the bread, thank goodness! ;)  Good news... I have enough spent grain to make about 500 more batches!  (Most of it is out in the freezer in freezer bags... even I can only make so much bread at a time!  Shhh... don't tell!)



Loaf shaped, risen and slashed!



Peasant bread, mixed grains, with spent grains mixed in for texture and fiber.