After the success of out first homebrew, we moved on to round two this weekend, trying our hand at recreating the recently released White House Honey Porter. If you somehow managed not to hear about the release of two of the White House’s signature homebrews (all with honey from apiaries on the White House grounds), check out this article – with recipes – on the White House blog. Since homebrew takes about a month to be ready (longer if you need to age out some esters because you are a noob), we’ll not be toasting to the election with our White House beer tomorrow. However, we can still be appropriately topical by munching on some White House Honey Porter spent grain bread.
Tastes like presidential election! Just kidding: it actually tastes fantastic, doesn’t leave a nasty aftertaste, and won’t be a point of contention at your next family gathering.
When making beer with grains, you wind up with some crushed grains that have been steeped to release sugars into the wort (AKA pre-beer juice). In our case, it was more than 2lbs of thse “spent” grains – they are called spent because they have had most of the sugars leached out. Just like used tea leaves, you wouldn’t want to try to make another batch of beer with these grains, but they are still perfectly useful for some purposes – like making bread!
Steeping the presidential grains for the presidential beer (and presidential bread).
I’m not a big grain person. Don’t get me wrong, I love them, but I largely avoid them in favor of my health. However, nothing really beats a sandwich for brown-bagging at work: they’re fast to make, portable, keep well, and the price is hard to beat if leftovers aren’t available. So making my own bread is still a money-saving proposition, since I do use bread for lunchtime sammies.
To make this honey porter bread, we modified the spent grain beer bread recipe available from Beer at Joe’s.
First we thawed and dried the spent grain in a warm oven. If you can’t make the bread right away, you can freeze the grains for later use. This is what we did, since we typically brew on a Friday night, and don’t want to start a second multi-hour operation that late at night.
Then we mixed together the two types of flour and yeast.
Then we added honey and sugar – an improvisation on our part, to keep the honey part of the Honey Porter recipe going in bread form – and an egg. We used a quarter cup of honey, a quarter cup of sugar, and one free-range egg.
Then we added three cups of spent grains (not even a third of what we had, so we’ve kept the rest in storage) and a little milk to get the right consistency.
We let the stand mixer do the five minutes of kneading.
Then we let it rise – for two hours instead of the recommended 90 mins (it just didn’t seem to get as large as it should have).
After rising, we punched down the bread a bit, divided into two loaves and let it rise again. The hubs made the sweet farmhouse-style round loaf, while I was already fantasizing about noming sammiches, and went with a store-bought loaf shape.
The finished product!
Surprisingly, this bread was quite tasty. Not sure if it was just due to the awesomeness of the porter grains we used, or if it will always be this delicious. While it is a dense, hearty bread, it isn’t the stomach-bomb we were afraid it would be. I think it would be especially good as part of a salami-based sandwich, with some nice, strong spicy brown mustard. Especially if it is then washed down with the White House Honey Porter. Mmmmm.
If you are interested in homebrewing, and eat bread, this is a fun and tasty way to recoup even more of your costs: the cost of the grains is already accounted for in beer-making savings (at least half off of the price of store-bought beer), making the money saved by not buying bread for a few weeks just like getting free money! At least that’s how I think about it.
emily
Nerd. Foodie. Gamer. Homecook. Perpetual planner. Gardener. Aspiring homesteader. Direct response graphic designer. I use too many damn commas.
