Cooking with beer

I've got a stockpile of home-brewed beer and little interest in drinking

So I started looking for ways to use it, aside from watering the garden.

Beer bread has been good, although sometimes flour isn't good for me.

The recipe is easy, just add 375ml beer to three cups of self-raising flour and a teaspoon of salt.

I've found it also works with soft drink to produce a damper-like dough.

It's even better with a tablespoon or three of brown sugar, a cup of cut-up dried dates and some spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger.

I've also started using beer when a recipe calls for water and am finding it's good in many foods.

The pizza dough I made with beer was described as my "best yet" too.

Baking beer bread

Bread is the carbohydrate of my people 

While cereal-based loaf recipes date back to around 10,000 BC, around 2000 years ago Pliny the Elder reported that Gauls and Iberians used the foam from beer to produce "a lighter kind of bread than other peoples.”

My recent baking has been an adventure with beer as I’ve tried using various drinks to constitute loaves.

The beer flavour is subtle and I found that a Guinness-style stout added a richness that enhanced the bread, while a soft drink created a thick glossy crust.

A simple loaf made with a can of Coke, a teaspoon of salt and three cups of self-raising flour produced a crunchy damper-like bread that tasted great with butter.

The most popular results have gone for a sweeter bread that included three tablespoons of brown sugar (or treacle) and a cup of cut-up dried dates, as well as a teaspoon of dried ginger and half teaspoons of nutmeg and cinnamon.

Experiments continue with a savoury cumin flavour, as well as another loaf spiced with a teaspoon of Caraway seeds (shown with pumpkin seeds added to roast outside).

Next I want to try a loaf from flour, salt, sparkling tonic water and a teaspoon of oregano. 

Hydrometer drinking

Sometimes drinking the hydrometer sample is tastier than the bottled beer

After my last beer meme got a big response in a brewing group on Facebook, I thought I'd make another.

Beer bubbles

Been brewing beer again recently and I'd forgotten the thrill of seeing the yeast spring to life

Mint and yarrow beer

There’s a lot of mugwort in the garden, so I thought I should brew

However, I’m short of bottles because there’s a huge stockpile from previous experiments.

Can’t remember when I brewed this one, which is marked as mint and yarrow.

Might’ve been 2018 and it tastes really good.

Dry bubbles with a mild refreshing tang.

Alcohol seems moderate.

Thinking I should brew with mint more often.

My first cerveza

I started a new brew today after bottling the mugwort porter that went sour

Opened a cerveza extract that I'd bought heavily discounted and added lemongrass, as well as mugwort.

This one has 1kg dextrose, which is the first time I've tried it.

Mugwort porter

I've put on a new brew now the weather has cooled

This is a mugwort porter and the recipe is:

• 18 litres water
• 600g molasses
• 1kg brewing sugars
• a few inches of ginger
• about half a dozen small lemonbalm leaves
• one of those bags used for fruit and veg stuffed full of mugwort

I've submerged the mugwort in the wort, using a cotton bag weighed down with mugs.

The nettle porter last year worked well but had a bit much of alcohol for me.

Update: seems I've pushed my luck too far and the wort is infected. Guess it might've been the tea bag (an old flour sack) weighed down with three mugs.

My next recipe

Pun from my son

Oscar asked to bottle the stout

As he was tipping the fermenter forward to get the last of it, I asked him to be wary of slime at the bottom and he replied with a pun: "I'll see those in gradients"!

Dark nettle beer

Brewed another nettle beer

The nettles were boiled a week ago and I let them sit in glass bottles until today.

I heated them with ginger, mugwort, mint, spearmint and a little wormwood and tansy.

Also added a few leaves from a wattle that was sprouting in the backyard,

And then there was a few shots of vodka which had soaked about four handfuls of lavender.

I also added three star anise.

Just under three kilos of brown sugar, one box of Cooper's brewing sugar and half a jar of molasses were stirred into 25 litres in the fermenter, with a starting gravity of 10.70.

I've read that nettles taste better with brown sugar, so I'm hoping the molasses will complement that flavour.

I used a dark brown sugar previously and got a dry ginger ale-like flavour which suited the green taste of the nettles.

Used more ginger this time, which seems to give a deep flavour, as well as bowl of mint that gives a strong punch in the mid-palate.

I've put leaves of mugwort, mint and a few tansy fronds into a bag to soak in the wort for the first few days too.

Hoping for an earthy porter-like flavour.

Edit: a week later and it has around 5% alcohol with still sugar to go.

Netted more nettles

Collected more stinging nettles after posting a request on a local Facebook page

It was kind of the woman to respond, she couldn't believe someone wanted these weeds.

I'm boiling them with ginger and turmeric and hoping to add lavendar too.

However, my fermenter will be brewing another batch of nettle beer for a week.

So I will strain the liquid into bottles and hope they're okay until next weekend.

Nettle beer with mugwort, yarrow and borage

Having bottled a recent brew, I was eager to begin another

A recent highlight had been a beer made with stinging nettles and ginger, so I was keen to experiment further with that weed -- which has had a bumper year in the Riverina.

My friend allowed me to collect nettle from her yard and I found there was also flowering yarrow and borage.

Added to these was the remainder of the nettle in my yard and also the mugwort I tipped, which will hopefully bush up and provide plenty of material for a future mugwort beer.

The experiment was adding a can of wheat malt and also a box of Cooper's brewing sugar, both of which I found on special recently.

I've read that stinging nettle tastes best when brewed with brown sugar, so hopefully it'll taste okay.

Original gravity is 10.38 and I'm expecting to pitch yeast around 26C.

Beer with boiled sweets

Thought I'd keep track of my experiments making beer by posting about them here

Today I've bottled a mint, wormwood and rosemary brew and it's an experiment in a couple of ways.

It's the first beer I've made that uses an existing beer, as I added a few bottles of a rosemary beer that has a flavour I found a bit strong.

(Other drinkers have enjoyed it but tellingly they were mostly women who weren't beer drinkers.)

And, as shown, it's an experiment with using boiled sweets as carbonation drops.

I'm curious whether the flavour of the sweets can be discerned, so I've put the wrappers on the bottle to indicate what went in.

Something brewing

Do you know those times when you sense resonances across disparate subjects?

I've been having a few of those recently and it's surprising how, after reading across seemingly unrelated subjects, patterns start to form between them.

For example, I've mentioned my interests in fermentation starting with Kimchi to lately brewing beer, as well as Star Wars.

While reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation, I've been learning about the mythology that informs -- as well as, in a sense, scripts -- the process of fermenting.

Many cultures describe the god-like figure that shared the first recipe for beer, gruit, mead or wine as being one who also returned from the dead or the underworld, possibly also as being a fertility figure with plants literally growing as a result of this heroic potency.

The stories explain processes like bacteria growing and seeds germinating, these illustrate how human culture grows with agriculture.

Both are demonstrated in beer-making too, particularly yeast and malt.

The respect for the ability to cultivate life underscores religion, just look at Jesus' bread and wine.

So, why was I thinking about Star Wars?

Recently there was news of a conversation with George Lucas, creator of Star Wars, when he described his idea for the trinity of films that have been developed by Disney:

"...they were going to get into a microbiotic world."

George Lucas' space opera draws on mythic themes, particularly the apparently spontaneous inception of Annakin Skywalker as a parallel with the virgin mother Mary.

Then there's Skywalker's return from death as Darth Vader.

I guess his siring of the twins Luke and Leia might also be significant too.

Now that I think about it, it's significant that Star Wars has become a new kind of May Day in recent years.

Now the idea of Darth Vader as a fertility figure seems a bit weird, but as I read how indigenous cultures display few of the negative effects of alcohol, I pondered if he demonstrates the dark side of our relationship with fermentation.

Did Skywalker's anger lead him to misusing the sacred Force or did this antisocial tendency develop as a result?

Those Sith Lords seem like a bunch of lonely guys, right?

In contrast Jedi seem very social.

Does Darth Vader embody toxic masculinity?

History in homebrew

This week I bottled my first batch of homebrewed beer

It was just the lager that came with the brewing kit but I couldn't help but tinker with the recipe and infused the water with mugwort and yarrow before adding the other ingredients.

As it fermented I remembered assisting my father brew his beer and then reflected on a passage in The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz where he discussed how brewers in previous millenia would call on the spirits to make alcohol.

We now know these spirits are yeasts and other bacterias but I like the idea that brewing beer links me to a tradition going back thousands of years.

The image shown comes from a Sumerian tablet showing people drinking beer with straws to remove the chunks that formed during brewing.

Katz' book also discusses how early European brews had a greater variety than our bottleshops today.

Local alcoholic drinks came to be known as gruits and their flavourings contained a combination of moderately narcotic herbs.

During the 11th Century the Holy Roman Empire awarded monopoly brewing rights as a way of collecting taxes and social control.

"Regulating beers and what could go into them across a vast territory effectively transferred power from the women who gathered herbs and brewed beer with it to the emergent institutions of empire."

Hops started to be used as a flavouring and preservative, particularly among German brewers who were outside of the control of the Empire but began mass production and transport to capitalise on the opportunities.

By the 1400s the beers brewed with hops were competing with gruits and the term beer became associated with barley-based drinks to which hops had been added.

Katz quotes Stephen Harrod Buhner as interpreting the rise of hops as part of competition between faiths.

"One of the arguments of the Protestants against the Catholic clergy (and indeed, against Catholicism) was their self-indulgence in food, drink, and lavish lifestyle... This behaviour was felt to be very un-Christlike indeed."

Buhner identifies that the aphrodisiac and psychotropic herbs used in gruits were discouraged, including yarrow, sweet gale and marsh rosemary.

Hops beer had alcohol but produced "subdued behaviour and eventual torpor."

"The result was, ultimately, the end of a many-thousands-years' tradition of herbal beer making in Europe and the narrowing of beer and ale into one limited expression of beer production -- that of hopped ales or what we call today beer."

The next brew in my fermenter is mugwort with rosemary and lemon.