Porter and hops bread (World Bread Day)

A recurring theme of this blog is the relationship between bread and beer. Both are among the oldest known cultivated foods and exist in our culture in a kind of symbiosis. We rely on fermentation to give us both products, and for most of history the brewery was close to the bakery ... and often the same enterprise. So my World Bread Day post has to also involve beer.

This is the beeriest bread I've made yet. It doesn't just contain beer as the liquid, it is also raised with beer yeast and has added malt and hops.

I hope it's not too bitter. When I've used beer yeast in the past I could detect residual hop bitterness in the finished bread. That didn't bother me but some people might dislike it. This one actually has dried hops added to the dough too and I wonder if it'll retain any of the wonderful hop aroma, or just their bitterness.

The malt should give munchy bits, dietary fibre and possibly unwanted enzymatic activity that will devour the entire dough during the night, leaving only a puddle of sugar syrup.

If you brew, this is an easy bread to make, because you have the malt and hops, leftover yeast and spoiled beer handy. If you don't, it's probably more trouble than it's worth.

450g white flour
50g spelt flour
20g yeasty gunk from the bottom of the fermenting bucket
13g salt
20g crushed pale malt
2g crushed hops (I used Boadicea)
320g of some unsuccessful home-brewed porter beer

Straight dough, no faffing about. Bake it as you like it.



The hops give the bread a distinctive, though not very pronounced, hoppy aroma, and also, as I thought it might, a bitter finish, which is quite nice once you get used to it. You probably need to like hops a lot though. The crumb is relatively heavy for a white-flour loaf, but soft and moist; the crust is soft and chewy.

Morrisons barley malt and hops bread

I bought a loaf at Morrison's tonight. I don't want you all thinking this blog is just an elaborate hoax and that I actually eat Sunblest and Warburtons all the time. I generally only buy bread in supermarkets as a stop-gap, but I could not pass this by:



I had to buy it just to see what it was like.

The crust is kind of Shreddies-like in aroma which makes sense I suppose, although it's not nearly as malty as those. Eating it is kind of like if the malty bits in granary bread were the whole loaf. The texture is as cotton-wool fluffy as most supermarket bread, in fact I think it's slightly fluffier.

A very slight hop bitterness is discernible and also the odd faint aroma of green chillies, heaven knows where that comes from.

And there are small bits of actual malt the size of couscous grains scattered through the dough. These are the best bits.

As soon as you put some butter or ham on it, though, you'd never notice the difference between this and any other fluffy supermarket bread.

I wonder who at Morrisons thought this would sell? ... and how many meetings he or she had to sit through, explaining what hops are.

Another attempt at hoppy, hoppy pale ale

I got hold of some Chinook hops – I'd wanted to try them for a good while – and used them in a nice bitter beer. They're 12% alpha acid, so well suited for the task.


Brew length 10 L

2 kg pale malt
10g crystal malt

25g Chinook 12.7% 90
25g Chinook 12.7% 0

Mash 67ºC, 1 hour

Yeast: US-05
Original gravity: 1050

I made a hop tea from the bittering hops before throwing them into the brew, and held it back to add to the fermenting bucket with the cooled wort. A full pint of hop tea is a pretty intense thing.

Update: 1st August this has reached 1.010, but hasn't cleared, so I'm going to dry hop it for another week.