toast india pale ale
The details: Toast Ale India Pale Ale, 6.5% ABV, 55 IBU, served in a 12 oz. can
My paternal grandmother really had a knack for baking. At it's heart it's simple kitchen chemistry, but deep down there's an art to getting it just right. She was so good at it that my cousin has spent the past decade trying to recreate her yeast rolls, and while she's come close they're just not the same. When grandma made them there were never leftovers.
The only leftover bread that I remember getting on purpose was from a sandwich shop in Williamsburg, VA. I was in college. I was dirt poor in college once my meal plan ran out. What would make for a decent meal that you could do for a couple bucks was to go to the Cheese Shop and buy something called "house and ends." House was the mayo-based dressing they used on just about everything - it was augmented with some mustard, a bit of horseradish, and who knows what else but it made the stuff super addictive. The ends were nothing more than the cut off ends of baguette rolls from the sandwiches they made. A large bag of ends was something like $0.75 and house was a buck or two. If you tried really hard you could make it two meals.
It was an interesting move to curtail waste and to make money on something that other shops were most likely just throwing away. Fast forward to 2019 and someone's using ends to make beer.
We really missed the boat on that one.
Toast Ale is a UK based brewery that contract brews at Captain Lawrence Brewing up in Westchester County, NY. They make three beers here in the USA, and I found their IPA on that same trip to Whole Foods as last week. I had to buy six of these, and in all honesty it wasn't the worst choice I could make in that cold case.
So how exactly does one use old bread to make beer, you ask? Allow me to summarize their recipe, which they give away freely so you can make it at home:
Toast that bread! Low and slow to dry out that bread. When it's done, it's cut up into crouton sized pieces.
Mash it up! The first step in making beer is to make a mash, which is where you steep your grains to release their sugars. In this step you'd add the bread in to replace some of the malts on the grain bill.
Do something called Sparge & Lauter! Those two terms are actually methods of rinsing the grains so you'll end up with what's called a wort.
Boil that wort! The last stage of cooking wherein you add all those delicious hops!
Ferment and chill! Cool the wort, add the yeast and let them get working, and then let it sit for a few weeks to condition.
In the end this recipe will give you a pretty solid IPA. It's very traditionally English - it's a little bitter, it's a little sweet. It's neither earthy or citrusy in any great manner, though hints of both are in each sip. It doesn't taste bready sweet at all, which I'm glad of, as I'd consider that a massive fail. In the end it's a mostly easy drinking beer. Will admit that there's a hint of weird aftertaste and it leaves my tongue rather dry, but for a beer that is working to end food waste and that's donating 100% of it's profits to Feedback - I'll support that.
The verdict: 3.5 out of 5 (on Untapp'd - follow me @slownumbers to see what I'm drinking)