ADDING STUFF TO BEER, PT. 2
Hallo,
Last week we delved into the melding of fruit and grain, which was quite simple; yeast eat both, so there aren’t many wrong answers. This week, however, we delve more deeply into Sam’s hellscape with a beer addition that’s both surprisingly traditional and crack pipe-level insane. Which is to say, we’ll be talking about the addition of milk and baked goods to beer.
As we touched on in a blog post way back, what may have started innocently enough as a foray by some enterprising brewers into the world of Brownie Stouts and Fudge Porters has evolved (devolved?) into the quixotic pursuit of the edge of insanity, featuring such Cronenbergian “beers” as Lucky Charms Hazy IPAs and Fruity Pebbles-laced Imperial Fruited Sours (which, in fairness, sounds insanely good). Or to quote a meme I saw recently, “[we] live outside of god's sight and by consequence out of his love.”
The Easy Story: Lactose
Because of its use in a lot of the same beers that get the pastry treatment, and because it’s an animal product, I thought I’d include Lactose in this post. It’s also a convenient starting point, for two reasons: first, lactose is a far more “normal” beer ingredient than, say, whole donuts; and second, in some sense Milk Stouts were, and are, a prototype for modern Pastry-laced beers.
Fortunately, it’s also a very simple addition, since lactose is a very simple compound not terribly unlike the simple sugars found in wort. In particular, it’s a disaccharide (literally “two sugars,” a sugar molecule consisting of two common monosaccharides, fructose and galactose) that, quite conveniently, most common yeasts can’t metabolize (read: eat). The result is that this sugar makes it all the way through fermentation and into the finished beer, adding a subtly sweetness and silky mouthfeel to things like Milk Stouts (traditionally), as well as to fruited or fruity beers in recent years, like Milkshakes IPAs and Shebet/Sorbet sours.
From a practical perspective, adding lactose is easy - you just dump it in during the boil (most often), just like you would any other sugar. In theory, you should be able to add it at pretty much any step, but you’d be throwing away some (small) percentage by adding it in the mash tun, and I’d be concerned about some portion not dissolving in a fermenter (since it’s not, you know, boiling hot in there).
As a bonus, here’s a wild factoid (which is of course a historical one): the isolation of lactose goes back to the 17th century, which is...more centuries back than I would have suspected. In fairness, the history of another famous old milk drink, Milk Punch, goes back about as far, and has also been blowing up the cocktail world recently (read: for the last few decades).
Baked Things
While we will get around to Pastry Stouts, it behooves us to start with a brief overview of the anatomy of a baked thing.
From an ingredients perspective, ignoring enriched breads (which is to say, eggs), the core ingredients are the obvious ones: water, flour, yeast, and optionally things like sugar, fat, fruits or nuts, icing, etc. The first three of these are found in beer, and as such are a totally legitimate addition.
In fact, bread as a base (partial or entire) for beer is a surprisingly common concept, from the ancient beers of Egypt and other regions (which, to my understanding, accomplished a rudimentary pseudo-malting/mashing), to traditional beers like Kvass still brewed today, to food waste-minimizing stale bread-based beers like those from the stellar brewery Toast. The distance from grain to bread isn’t terribly great, so as long as you have some enzyme source with which to break down bread’s starches into simpler sugars, you’re good to go.
After that, you have fat (and a secret ingredient: melanoidins), which is more or less bad news bears. Fat is not so kind to head retention, its chief drawback, and as such is best avoided in most brewing contexts, but hey, once in a while it makes for a catchy-if-insane YouTube video. While yeast will uptake some portion of this fat in all likelihood, I suspect that something like a fatty donut or enriched Brioche (or, you know, Brioche-based donut) would push against, and probably past, that limit.
Melanoidins, on the other hand, are a bready boon. Melanoidins, which are the same compounds found in classically “malty” Munich malt, are present in all breads to some degree, and are particularly notable in deeply-browned baked goods (like dark artisanal loaves). These Maillard-reaction-produced compounds are likely to deepen the flavor of maltier beers (though I struggle to think of a style where they’d hurt all that much), and on a related note, the rich flavor of heirloom grains used in such artisanal loaves add their own dimension. A rye-based sourdough batard would make a phenomenal contribution to the malt bill for a Grisette, for instance.
Beyond that, additional ingredients fall into, say, two categories: sugar and “other.” Sugars, such as those one finds in the icing on donuts or the ganache in cakes (yikes; we’ve arrived at the debauchery), tend to be of the Cane or High Fructose Corn Syrup varieties, both of which are readily and entirely consumed by yeasts. In fact, many moonshine recipes use white cane sugar as a portion of the fermentables, so it’s not an outlandish concept. And since “other” could be anything, from Caraway to Cranberries, we’ll simply say that water, being a very good solvent, tends to pull flavors from things you put into it.
Which is all to say that, as concerns the core ingredient of baked things, cereal grains, you’d do best to include them in your mash so that the enzymes from your malt can go to work breaking the starches in your baked goods down into yeast fuel, while the sugar and flavors of your pastries, say, can be added at virtually any step up to whirlpool, the end of the boil (since, and this is subtle, anything you add to beer needs to be sterilized, most easily accomplished by heat, generally above 160˚F). I believe that most pastry beers utilize the mash as a pastry entry-point, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen breweries utilize the boil as well, particularly for pastries whose starch content is entirely besides the point. I can see this making sense for brownies and cookies, but why not take the free grain while you’re at it? The mash tun makes the most sense, in my eyes.
Conclusion
We’re somewhat two for two so far, in that fruit musts act a lot like wort, and pastries act a lot like grain. This underlines a pretty interesting fact of nature, or of human existence in nature: the vast majority of non-meat food sources can be preserved by fermentation, and often benefit (from a flavor perspective) from that treatment. This is a fascinating statement with a deep connotation: microbes have carved out ranges of conditions of comfort that don’t always overlap, so by sicking our favored dogs on food sources (which is to say, microbes that only eat some of the food found in our...food, while making it inhospitable to less human-friendly microbes, through pH lowering or ethanol production or whatever), we rob unfriendly microbes of the chance to have all the fun, not unlike how patinas work. This could be read backwards as well - since sourdough starters can be started anywhere, clearly we’ve adapted, even on a societal level, to the microbes from which we once emerged.
Which is all to say, from kimchi to beer, soy sauce to whiskey, and pickles to wine, microbes have proven time and again that when they’re not busy killing us, they’re busy helping us.
Cheers,
Adrian “Microbe Apologist” Febre