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

It’s the weekend, and your dog is going to have to spend it watching you brew.  To reward that kind of loyalty, give these spent grain dog treats a try.

Spent Grain Dog Biscuit Recipe

Makes 2-1/2 dozen medium sized dog cookies.

Ingredients

• 2 cups grain
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1 egg

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix ingredients thoroughly.
3. Roll out dough and press shapes with cookies cutters, cut with knife, or drop cookies using two spoons.
4. Bake for 30 at 350 degrees, then reduce temperature to 225 degrees and continue baking for 2 hours.  The cookies should be dried out at that point so they won’t spoil when left out.

Photo from Bob Stempski

Bob Stempski was looking for a way to enhance his failed homebrew.  What if the hop utilization wasn’t great?  What if he wanted variations of a  base recipe?  What if he was just sick of mixing plain old vodka with his beer (and aren’t we all)?

Actually, I have no idea what Bob Stempski was thinking when he decided to make hop-infused vodka, but it was actually pretty smart.  He’s posted the entire recipe online, complete with great photos.

Hop Vodka Recipe

1.5 oz bag of pellet hops (bittering are best)
2 cups cheap vodka
2 cups water

1 French press
1 Bottle for storage
1 Measuring cup

1. Mix the pellet hops with the vodka in the french press.  Let sit for 15-20 minutes.  Don’t press the french press yet.
2. After the hops have steeped, plunge the french press to extract the oils.  Pour the vodka and hop mixture into a bottle.
3. Lift the plunger and fill the french press with water.  Stir the hops and water, wait 15-20 minutes, plunge again, and pour water into bottle.
4. Save the hops by placing them in a bag and freezing them.  You can re-use them as part of a future brew, but they will be much less efficient.
5. Refrigerate the hop/vodka/water mixture for 5-7 days without disturbing it, allowing the mixture to separate.
6. Gently — very gently, without jostling the bottle — put the bottle in the freezer.  Freeze the mixture for 24-48 hours.
7. After the mixture is frozen, turn the bottle upside down on top of another container.  The hop-infused vodka won’t freeze, so take the first 40% of the bottle and use it as hop vodka.
8. Take the hop infused water and toss it, or throw it in a batch of homebrew at some point in the process.

From flickr user multiple trees

To Make Small Beer

Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. Boil these 3 hours then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Melasses (sic) into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask—leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working—Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed.

8 lbs pale malt
4 lbs wheat
1 lb molasses

1 1/2 oz east kent goldings 60 min
1/2 oz east kent goldings 10 minutes
american ale yeast

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

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 Parl

The Guardian has a fantastic article up covering some of the more…inventive beer to be found.

Some of the beers are relatively normal: a Chilli IPA; a hop-free ale with yarrow, turmeric, bay and lemon balm; Shellfish Stout, brewed with oysters, cockles and mussels (oyster stout is a traditional style, many of them brewed with actual molluscs); a beer brewed with seawater; a Barley Tikka Vindaloo which includes chilli, ginger, coriander, cumin, cardamom and fennel; and one with added apple juice and crushed blackcurrants to recreate the perennial student favourite: Snakebite and Black.

But then there’s one based on Black Forest Gateau. A West Country White Ale, a recreation of a medieval beer style which contains eggs and flour. Heston’s Offal Ale includes liver, kidneys and heart (meat ales aren’t entirely new). And Jellyfish Red which, given what we already know, probably doesn’t need much explanation.

I’ve brewed peanut butter stout, but that’s nowhere near as crazy as some of this stuff.

From flickr user insidethemagic

The wildly popular Harry Potter books feature a drink — the alcoholic nature of which is purposefully vague — called Butterbeer.  In the Harry Potter theme park in Florida, you can actually buy this Butterbeer, though it very clearly doesn’t contain alcohol.

But Butterbeer has actually existed for hundreds of years, dating as far back as a recipe book in 1594. That Butterbeer actually calls for ale. And it’s warm.  So, along with mulling your beer this winter, why not try Butterbeer too? The recipe is below.

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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.

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From flickr user skeggy

With college football starting tomorrow night, we posted a recipe for beer batter pretzels earlier today so you could be at least a little prepared before the season begins.  But you know what goes with pretzels almost as well as beer?  Cheese dip.  And if you’re going to eat cheese dip, why not make it beer cheese dip?

Fortunately, the Brewer’s Association has this covered, and has helpfuly provided a recipe for hefeweisen beer cheese dip.  We’ve pasted it below, and will likely be making it along with our beer batter pretzels.

(And yes, it says it serves 40-50 people, but we plan to cut back proportionally.  4 pounds of cheese seems like a little much.)

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