PANDEMIC PASTIME: Spent grains from home brew make tasty baked bread

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Remember when you couldn’t buy yeast to make bread at the beginning of the pandemic?

Seems like such a long time ago.

Now, cross-country skis and gym equipment are out of stock, backyard rinks are on the rise, but people stuck at home are enjoying spending time in their kitchens.

When my adult son Patrick and his girlfriend Alexa Knautz recently took over my kitchen to make craft beer, I discovered that you could make craft beer and bread with the same ingredients.

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Knowing little about craft beer, I decided to head to the local brewery in Ajax to find out more.

Brewmaster Attili Nyerges, of the Falcon Brewing Company, believes craft beer is different from mass-produced beer because it is “freshly brewed, not processed, not pasteurized, and it’s local.”

Small batches of brews are made with hand-selected amounts of various grains — wheat, barley, oats, rye rice — and then sometimes flavours like chocolate, coffee or fruits are added.

Back in my kitchen, the beer of choice came from a kit called Evil Twin Bikini Beer that cost about $60 (prices may vary). It included all of the essentials such as a glass fermenter, thermometer, tubing and a mixture of grains. Even with a small-scale production such as this, the basic steps are similar to large-scale operations.

“You take your grains, you steep them just like making tea, which turns the starches into sugars and releases the flavours … put it in your kettle, boil it, add your hops, chill it down, put it in your fermenter, add the yeast, which turns it into alcohol, carbonate it and drink it,” Nyerges explained, streamlining the process.

It’s a challenging process for home brewers.

“Trying to keep the temperature of the wort (liquid) was the most difficult,” Knautz said. ” I was constantly increasing and reducing the heat in order to keep the temperature between 63 and 68C.”

This wort cooking on my stove will eventually turn into beer, but what happens to the wet grains left over?

Falcon Brewing Company buys the bulk of its grains from Germany and Alberta. After making the beer, the grains are often discarded. But there are other options.

“You can give it to the farmers for animal feed, add it to your bread, make granola bars or make doggy treats,” Nygerges said.

I decided to make bread with the leftover grains, using a recipe I found online for German Spent Grain Bread Biertreberbrot.

The recipe was easy to follow, but it took a bit of time. After leaving it to rise for an hour, I baked it at 450F (230C) for 15 minutes, followed by 15 minutes at 400F (180C).

The finished product was appealing to the eye due to its shape and colour. The bread was slightly crunchy on the outside, like the crust of store-bought baked bread, and it was soft inside. As an added benefit, this bread is high in fibre, protein and antioxidants.

vhenri@postmedia.com