Bread Beer

[smcc]

Has anyone tried this? I live in Germany and just bought a 12 pack of a beer from Knärzje – Das erste Bio-Brotbier Deutschlands its in German but its basically a pale ale style made with bread plus some malt for the enzyme activity. Its really as good as any pale ale I have tried. I mean most bread is made out of wheat and malt anyway. Here in Bayern we have a big bakery tradition rather than buying loaves from supermarket. And so there are tons of bread daily which are basically wasted or fed sometimes to livestock.

I am keen to give it a go myself but I have no idea what kind of extraction you get per kilo of stale bread, I think I read the crust is better for the flavour aspect as its darker

I know Brewdog do a Planet A beer with bread and malformed apricots which I am also keen to try.

Would love to hear from anyone who has given this a go.

 

[chthon]

One thing I have seen when using bread as fermentable, is to toast them lightly before adding them to the mash.

 

[UKSkydiver]

Not read the detail, but this may help:

Toast Ale - Raise a toast. Save the world. Cheers

Their lager is quite nice.

 

[smcc]

nice thanks, I was looking into it a little more and seems that a lot of breweries are using upto about 25% bread which in a 20l batch would be about 1-1.5kg which I think I will try. We have amazing bread here so a mix of some lighter and darker ones be interesting to see how the colour comes out I will just use maris otter and see how the darker bread affects colour. I think I would try something like their APA as I like that hop combo.

 

[PhilBrew]

Hi @smcc

I am keen to give it a go myself but I have no idea what kind of extraction you get per kilo of stale bread, I think I read the crust is better for the flavour aspect as its darker

... my experiences suggest you get similar extraction rates as you would otherwise get from Flaked/Torrified Wheat ... certainly when I've built recipes adding in one or other of those but subbed the same weight of stale breadcrumbs into the grist, I've got out wort at the gravities the recipe calculators have predicted. Of course, some bakeries will add more or less sugar than others, so YMMV.

I'd also suggest you treat bread like you would unmalted adjuncts like Flaked/Torrified Wheat when preparing your recipes, bearing in mind that it'll not have any diastatic power, so make sure you have enough malt to provide that into the mash. Then, just as for those considering using breakfast cereals in their mash, you need to consider what additives may or may not have been added in the production e.g. if you worry about water chemistry, bear in mind that the bread will very likely be adding Chlorine ions, in the form of salt (NaCl).

Good luck with it,
Cheers, PhilB