Beer for breakfast? Absolutely.

We’ve all heard someone utter something about a beer for breakfast before.  It usually follows a long night out as a quick way to ease a bit of the hangover blues, but for us it’s not about hangovers.  Beer is made up of four important ingredients, water, grain, yeast and hops.  If you drop the last ingredient you have the basic ingredients for something else, bread.

Ever since we’ve moved to an all-grain system we produce a large amount of spent grain every time we brew a batch of beer.  After the first couple of batches we started to wonder what we could do with that grain other than drop it into the yard waste bin for composting.  One of the answers we came up with was to make bread with some of the grain and a bit of the wort.  Along with that you add some additional flour, salt, bread yeast and a few other ingredients into the bread machine and set it up to go.

To date we’ve made an ESB loaf, a Stout Loaf (which was awesome for grilled cheese sandwiches), and below are pictures of our Maple Porter Loaf.

Maple Oatmeal Porter Loaf

• 3/4 cup of wort
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 cup quick-cooking oats
• 1/2 cup spent brew grain
• 2 1/2 cups bread flour
• 1 package active dry yeast

Combine the wort and maple syrup to allow the syrup to dissolve into the wort.  Add all of the ingredients into the bread machine and set for desired bread style.  We usually put the wet ingredients in first with the flour and the yeast last.