Drink Matron

Tag: grain

  • Spent Grain Bread Recipe

    Last weekend I started home brewing again.  Being that I brewed an all-grain batch, I had a concern early on about what to do with the spent grain.  When you brew all-grain beer, all that grain you used in the process ends up being a waste product after all the starches are washed out.  So what can you do with that grain once its spent?  You could throw it on a compost heap to add some nutrients to the dirt, or you could make some seriously kick ass bread!

    I looked around online and found a recipe for it.

    • 3 cups all-purpose flour
    • 1 cup whole wheat flour
    • 1/4 cup sugar
    • 2 tsp baker’s yeast
    • 2 tsp salt
    • 3 cups spent grain (ground up)
    • 1 egg (beaten)
    • 1 cup milk
    • 1/4 cup butter or olive oil

    Mix the dry ingredients, add the wet ingredients, knead, put in an oiled bowl and let it rise for ~90 minutes, punch down and put in an oiled bread pan, let rise until doubled, bake for 40 minutes at 350F, let cool for 30 minutes.

    This recipe makes 3 loaves, which is WAY more than we here at DM Labs will eat in a week and if you do the math, 3 cups of spent grain isn’t nearly all the spent grain you will have after a batch of brew.  Thankfully, bread dough freezes well for later baking.  I used up all the flour I had in my house and almost used up all of my spent grain making dough for 12 loaves of bread (all frozen now), and I froze the remaining cup or so of spent grain I have for when I restock my ingredients.

    I was expecting this bread to be run of the mill, home-baked bread, but it turned out far greater than I imagined.  This is seriously some of the best bread, commercial or homemade, that I’ve ever had.  We devoured the first loaf in just under 24 hours.

  • Drinkmatron Labs: Get Off My Lawn (version 1) Brew Day

    This week marks a special occasion in the history of drinkmatron.prjct.info.  We finally got Drink Matron Labs off the ground with our first experimental batch of beer: Get Off My Lawn Old Ale.

    So we sat down on Saturday evening, cracked open some tasty beers and got started brewing.  GOML is an all-grain beer, so we had to mash the grains.  This was the first time I’ve ever done an all-grain beer and didn’t have anything remotely resembling a mash tun to mash the grains in.

    Enter the Australians

    I style of mashing has become hugely popular on the Australian homebrew scene called Boil In A Bag (or BIAB) where you essentially steep the grains in 150ish degree water for around an hour to activate your enzymes.  This is convenient because you don’t need a separate vessel from your boil kettle and the grain is enclosed in a big bag that you can easily pull out of the kettle and do as you please with.

    Unfortunately, you need to keep a constant eye on your temperature and wrap your kettle several blankets to keep your mash at the appropriate temperature.  By the end of my mash schedule, my mash had cooled down to 140 degrees, which is not terrible, but not ideal either.

    In the end, we locked it away inside Mr. Beer and let that yeast get to fermenting.  Stay tuned to hear how it turned out.