As much as we like drinking beer, we like cooking with it too.  If you’re looking for a unique mustard to go with your beer brats this spring, try this beer mustard recipe.

Beer Mustard Recipe

• 1/3 cup yellow mustard seeds
• 1/4 cup brown mustard seeds
• 1/2 cup cider vinegar
• 1 cup dark beer, divided
• 3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons honey
• 1 teaspoon Kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/8 teaspoon ground allspice

From flickr user San Diego Shooter

We’ve been big fans of our brewers spent grain beer bread, but what about spent grain beer cookies?  We’re so excited by the idea, we haven’t even had time to test the recipe.

Blog Omnomicon posts this recipe that seems like it would add something to the must-bake list after brewing.

Nutty Spent Grain Chocolate Chip Cookies

Adapted from a recipe featured by Seven Bridges Cooperative.

• 1/3 cup peanut butter
• 2 tbsp melted butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/3 cup milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1.5 cups spent grains (or alternatively, 1.5 cups of your favourite grain meal, prepared and still wet)
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup chopped nuts

Mix in the peanut butter, regular butter, sugar, milk and vanilla. Then add the flour, baking soda and salt. Once that’s all mixed, stir in the nuts and chips.

Bake on a greased cookie sheet at 425F for 8-10 minutes until the tops are just getting golden, but before the bottoms burn. Let sit on the pan for about five minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool.

Makes about 2 dozen cookies

One Iowa man has decided to bravely go where few have gone before: he’s given up all food for lent, and replaced it with beer.  But while outrageous, it’s not as crazy as it may seem at first.

Hold your giggles. You may assume that this is a high-falutin’ excuse to stay schnookered for a month and a half, but that’s not the case. We think. Wilson calls this a “historical study,” an attempt to live like a seventeenth-century monk. To sustain themselves during Lent, monks subsisted on a high-calorie, carbohydrate-crammed beer dubbed a doppelbock.

To sustain himself, Wilson, a veteran homebrewer, teamed up with the folks at the local Rock Bottom brewpub to create the Illuminator Doppelbock. It packs a hefty 288 calories per 12-ounce dose and a potent 6.67 percent ABV.

I’ve referred to many beers as “bread in a glass” simply because they seemed substantial enough to serve as a meal.  But for as much as I love beer, I wouldn’t want t0 do it for over a month.

Photo of the final product

Almost a year ago, our friend Joe wrote up his experience using spent grain to bake brewer’s beer bread.  He didn’t have great results, and ended up with an under-baked, not-so-great-tasting bread.    After a recent brewing session, I decided to revisit his experiment and see if I could make it work.  For the most part, I did.

The recipe is below, and I’ve annotated places where I think you could run into trouble.  Baking, like brewing, is science — there’s not a lot of room to mess around with the process or ingredients and still achieve what you want.  But when you combine the two to make this spent grain bread, there’s actually a lot of guess work that goes into it.

Also, keep in mind that different grain bills will obviously produce different tasting bread — I used a darker Amber that was 17% Belgian Special B, 17% American Roasted Barley, and 66% Crystal Malt 80L.

Brewer’s Beer Bread with Spent Grains Recipe

To start, you will need the following:

• 2 cups spent grain – wet-to-damp, but not soaking wet
• 1 cup of 100 degree warm water
• 1 packet of standard bakers yeast
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 4 cups of flour, +/- 1 cup depending on the wetness of the spent grain (see procedure)
• 1/4 tsp kosher salt (optional)
• Handful of oats (optional)

1. Dissolve the brown sugar in the warm water and add the packet of yeast.  Cover loosely and let sit for 30 minutes.
2. In a food processor or blender, make a spent grain mush.  Try to break down the husks as much as you can, but don’t over do it.  You want something closer to the consistency of smooth oatmeal than to grits.
3. Put the spent grain mush, 2.5 cups of flour, water/sugar/yeast mixture, and salt into a mixing bowl and start mixing. A Kitchenaid or something similar will save a lot of work, but you can mix with a spoon or hand mixer until it gives out, then start kneading by hand.
4. After you’ve combined the ingredients, you want the dough to be cohesive and not sticky — a slight tack is ok, but you don’t want it wet, and it should hold a shape without oozing or anything.  Keep adding flour until that happens.  I think I used about 4 cups, but the final amount of flour is completely dependent on how wet your spent grains were to begin with.  Knead it for a few minutes to allow for the gluten structures to develop — they’ll hold the CO2 from the yeast during proofing and baking.
5. Take the final dough and place in a clean, lightly-oiled bowl for 1-2 hours, until the dough has doubled in size.
6. Punch the dough and put it on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or some type of silicone baking mat.  You can also split the dough in two and put it in greased loaf pans, but I think it will lead to a soggier bread.  I prefer the boule-style approach.  Either way, scatter the handful of oats over the dough.
7. Bake at 375 for 35-40 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

That’s it — instead of throwing the spent grains away, slather it with some Irish butter and eat it with Guinness beef stew.

From flickr user Schlusselbein2007

As we head into the last week before Christmas, Sam Calagione from Dogfish wrote up a guide to help beer lovers merge the holiday menu and beer list in the best possible way.

To his credit, it’s not an artcile about how to best pair Dogfish beers with food — he mentions the ever-popular Troegs’ Troegenator, Avery’s White Rascal, Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, and New Belgium’s Fat Tire, along with others.

Broken down into cheeses, meats, shellfish, seafood, and chocolate, it’s a nice list, which should help you make the next week even better.

From flickr user riptheskull

We started to write a post about beer pairings for Thanksgiving, but everyone on the Internet seems to have attempted some form of that already.  So, below are a few links to a few of the better articles out there.

From the San Jose Mercury News…

Of course, part of the reason I love turkey so much is because it pairs so well with beer. Beer really brings out the flavors of that main course, but it also complements the many side dishes that make up the Thanksgiving feast.

Most Thanksgiving turkeys are roasted, which brings out caramel and even smoky flavors. If you glaze or brine the bird, that adds additional flavor components, and stuffing brings herbal and spicy notes to mix. That’s a tough melange of tastes to pair with just one quaff. Happily, many beers are up to the task.

From the Miami Herald…

Some historians say the Pilgrims drank beer on that first Thanksgiving, just as they did every day, because the water available to them was polluted. Others say this is poppycock.

And from the Huffington Post…

Beer for Thanksgiving? Don’t reject it out of hand. One can make a very persuasive case for holiday brews.

We’re taking the rest of the week off for the holiday, but don’t forget about the Lautering store on Black Friday for all of your the best beer gifts money can buy.  The proceeds directly benefit Lautering, helping us pay for servers and the infrastructure that keeps things up and running.

From flickr user Ahd Child

Sure, things have gotten crisp, but not too crisp for cold beer.  And if you’re going for cold beer, why not have it in ice cream?  It’s not like it’s some kind of pumpkin hopsicle or something.

This ice cream is actually more like a version of pumpkin pie ice cream with a little beer thrown in, and “a little beer thrown in” is something I think we can all support.

The recipe, from the Brewer’s Association, is below.

Read the rest of this entry »

NASA

PopSci reports on the first ever space beer, a beer brewed specifically for the challenges that come with drinking in zero gravity.

One of the problems experienced by astronauts is numbing of the taste buds, causing even the finest Earth beer to taste bland. Astronauts have been known to douse their food in hot sauce when on missions to make it tastier. According to Ben Corbin, PR director for Astronauts4Hire, this particular brew is a stout with all the naturally darker chocolaty flavors amplified for the astronauts’ less-than-refined palates.

The carbonation in beer also poses a problem for drinkers in space. Bubbles that normally rise up and escape from a beverage on Earth simply stagnate in microgravity. Without the buoyancy force that Earth’s gravity provides, carbon dioxide stays in the liquid and prevents astronauts from burping, adding additional discomfort to the lives of people whose fingernails already come off inside their gloves. To combat this, the carbonation of this beer will be lower than most. Since this is a stout, though, which naturally has less carbonation than lighter beers, not too much has to be sacrificed.

As the article mentions, space tourism is expected to be a growing industry, and if you’re on vacation, you’re going to want a beer.  Personally, I’m glad they’re trying to solve this problem now, so the beer can get better before I actually go up.

Oktoberfest food

Foodie blog SeriousEats takes a look at the food of Oktoberfest.  After all, you aren’t going to be able to try much if you’re drinking on an empty stomach.

Today, it is less about royalty and more about, let’s face it, beer.  But even the hardiest German or most experienced fest tourist will need something to go with the specially brewed (and slightly stronger) festival beer. So if you want to build a solid foundation in your stomach, or if you want to be prepared for when the inebriated cravings set it, here is a quick run-down of what is and what may not be worth eating at the Munich Oktoberfest.

They write about everything from the sweet, including the ubiquitous gingerbread hearts, to the savory, which includes astronomical amounts of roasted meat.

From flickr user ~Prescott

We’re huge — like, really huge — college football fans here at Lautering, so tomorrow night is essentially a holiday at Lautering HQ.  To celebrate, we’re going to be drinking beer and eating these beer batter soft pretzels as we watch Ohio State take on Marshall to start the season.

The reciepe is as follows:

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup warm water (not hot)
• 1 (1/4 oz) pkge active dry yeast
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp kosher salt, divided
• 1 cup brown ale (any kind), at room temperature
• 3 3/4 to 4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 cups hot water
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/4 cup parmesan cheese, grated
• 2 tbsp butter, melted
• honey mustard OR any other mustard for serving
• Pretzels can be kept in a ziplock or air tight plastic container without refrigiration for several days. Just warm up in the microwave for a few seconds.

Process:

• Place warm water in a lg. bowl, sprinkle with yeast. Let stand 5 min.
• Add sugar, oil, 3/4 tsp. salt, ale and enough flour to make soft dough. (add 3 3/4 cups first, then see if you need more. You can always incorporate more while kneading)
• Place dough on lightly floured surface. Knead 6-8 min., or until smooth and elastic. Place in lightly greased bowl and cover. Let rise in WARM place until doubled in bulk, about 60 min.
• Punch dough down. Divide into 12 pieces.
• Roll each piece into a rope, about 20 inches long. If you want soft pretzels, make your rope thicker; if you prefer them lightly crunchy, make your rope really thin. Both types of pretzels on the pictures above were made from the same dough.
• Shape rope into pretzels.
• Combine hot water and soda in a shallow container or a pie plate. Dip pretzels into solution and place on lightly greased baking sheet. Take care not to burn your hands.
• Cover pretzels loosely and let rise in WARM place for 15-20 min.
• Brush with beaten egg. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 tsp. salt. (use more salt if desired). Then sprinkle with parmesan cheese.
• Bake in preheated 425F oven until lightly golden, about 15 min.
• Brush with melted butter. Serve with mustard.

Just so you know: our loyalties lie entirely with the Buckeyes, and we’re unrelenting in that.  But, we think these pretzels go with just about any game this week — even if you root for “that school up north.”

Such a great way to start the season.  Here’s to 12 weeks of Saturday beer!