HOW TO BREW A BREAD BEER
Welcome dearest reader,
As hinted at in the past, we’ve been working with a very interesting brewery based in the UK, Toast Ale, to make a beer made in part out of actual bread here in Van Nuys, and by golly, we’ve actually done it. Stalemate English Hazy IPA will be coming out next Wednesday, on 9/29 (which, would you look at that, just so happens to be the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste), on cask (!!!) and in cans.
But as with any new venture, particularly those requiring procedural changes, brewing this beer wasn’t as simple as asking Whole Foods for 200 lb of cubed bread in the morning and brewing in the afternoon, and while everyone involved was super helpful in making the process as easy as possible, I thought I’d fill you in on the logistics and process of actually brewing this whacky beer.
The Concept
While you could conceivably use a heavily-spiced bake good, like ginger snaps or anise cookies, to replace a portion of the hops in your beer, and while you could technically brew a wild ale with something like a sourdough starter, the idea behind Toast’s beers is to replace the obvious thing, grain, with bread, to some degree. Obviously it wouldn’t help anyone to buy and use fresh bread, but perhaps less obviously, they make sure not to divert old-but-edible bread away from, say, food pantries, so what they actually do (and make sure their partners do) is to use bread that’s otherwise unusable (but perfectly fine for brewing; food safe), for which they have a suite of pleasant euphemisms.
There are two or three problems that arise with this strategy: 1) even for a small batch of beer, you need quite a bit of bread (for us, perhaps 100 loaves), so it’s very hard to work with small craft bakeries, whose daily waste is probably lower than that, and which may or may not have a means of storing bread long enough that any human who wants to eat it has gotten a chance; 2) speaking of picking up a bunch of small batches, should you choose to do so, you need to be able to process and then store fairly large volumes of bread, and; 3) the repeat trips could very well outweigh any planetary advantage to subbing malt for bread.
How do we solve these problems? In one fell swoop. While I don’t think working with most craft bakeries would be viable unless you happened to be right next to them, giant industrial bakeries solve all of these issues, and that’s exactly who we ended up going to, thanks to an alley oop from our Toast rep, Shannon.
Procedurally, once we got this bread, I separated the breads with any form of dairy in them (generally, any pastries, some white breads, hot dog buns, that sort of thing), and left slices of the remaining bread to dry on racks of baking sheets, which they did without molding or otherwise deteriorating (croutons have a massive shelf life due to their low moisture content - same concept).
After they were dried, we stored them in used grain bags until brew day, which worked quite well, though be warned: most bread has a lower density and packing fraction than grain, so you’ll need quite a few bags even for a modest amount of bread - it was something like seven 55 lb grain bags for 150 lb of the bread we used.
What shall we brew?
The question of what to brew is inextricably tied to your bread source, so step one is figuring out what you’re going to actually use. Pastries would lead naturally to pastry stouts, and a flavorful bread source like Rye would yield an interesting Bitter or Rye IPA, say, but it may be practically impossible to accrue enough actual rye bread in order to substitute an appreciable portion of your grain bill. Fortunately, the most likely options (sourdough or good ol’ white bread) operate along the lines of unmalted wheat, and since you’ll be substituting 10%-30% of your grain bill, while, for reference, few styles use “base malt” as less than, oh, 70% of their grain bill, you should have no problem brewing just about anything with unsexy bread.
However, there are two caveats: first, industrially produced bread can have elevated salt and iron contents, which can affect flavor and shelf stability, and second, if you’re a homebrewer, there’s actually a decent chance that you can grab enough of pretty much any type of bread you’d like if you ask nicely and get lucky, so that’s worth considering if you’d like to lessen your global impact, even as a homebrewer.
So what did we end up with? You already know that it’s an English Hazy IPA, and that’s principally for two reasons (geez, tons of lists of reasons in this post): Hazies are guaranteed to sell well (unlike an experimental Rye Saison or something), and our brewer hypothesized that the elevated protein content in bread (particularly due to its being made of wheat, famously high in protein as far as grains go) could help the colloidal stability of the beer’s haze.
Brew day
I wasn’t actually there on brew day because at the time, I was getting up...late, let’s say, but the word on the street is that it was surprisingly easy to add bread to the mash. We used two commercial enzymes from White Labs, Visco-buster and Opti-mash, to ensure complete conversion of starches to sugars and nice draining properties, which indeed we got. Our head brewer, Stephen, even said that as far as our Hazies go, this one was particularly on-the-dot as far as sugar content (gravity in the parlance) is concerned.
And the beauty of a bread beer like this is that the rest of the process is identical to that for a normal beer, assuming there aren’t fermentation problems, and for us, fermentation was entirely normal.
So, is it good?
I’m not a big hops or Hazies person, but I’ve had enough Hazies to have a decent sense of what they should taste like, and I quite like this one! Which is fully a testament to the skill of our brewer, as well as reflective of the fact that the bread successfully “got out of the way.” My notes:
Nose: tropical fruit and some sort of orange, plus a slight hop funk
Visual: a slightly orange-er white peach bellini
Taste: super fluffy, definite note of hops, classic
No obvious salt flavor or other bread flavor, but they’re buried under the hops (kinda the point)
A touch of woody resin; bracing, but balanced by the cold floof and subtle sweetness
Really quite pleasant
And indeed, if you’re into Hazies, you shouldn’t hesitate for a moment to grab some of this liquid gold.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a small craft brewery or a homebrewer, life in California may well require us all to get better and better about minimizing our footprint, and using bread as a brewing “grain” may well offer one of several roads to that end. And hey, it never hurts to have a novel way to add new, malty-bready flavors to our beers.
And as this is the last post of this blog as I depart for a tech-ier job, I want to express my sincere gratitude to any of you who read this and any other posts. They took time and effort, and while I learned a ton, I wrote them to be read, so thank you for doing so!
Cheers,
Adrian “Adios!” Febre