While beer has always been a staple ingredient on the Australian menu, craft beer and breweries have blossomed of late, bringing with them an ever-expanding variety of flavour. We spoke to Ben Devlin about how bakers can take advantage of these flavours by using the spent grain leftover from brewing to make bread.

Before we get into this recipe, let’s talk about beer for a moment. More precisely, let’s talk about how beer is made. The beginning of the beer-making process involves extracting sugars from grains (usually barley). The barley goes through a process called mashing, where the grains are steeped in hot water. This process causes the grains to release their sugars. Once this is done, brewers drain the liquid, which is now full of sugar, and use this liquid to make beer. The process goes on, but this is where we’ll leave it.

You see, at the stage, the mash (or spent grain) that the liquid has been drained from isn’t needed anymore. Many brewers will use the mash to feed livestock or simply throw it away, but mash can go on to serve another purpose.

Increasingly, bakers are getting a hold of mash and using it to flavour bread. Ben Devlin has been using spent grain in the form of mash to make sourdough. We asked him to show us how.

About Ben:
Ben has worked as a chef locally and overseas in Byron Bay, Brisbane and Copenhagen. He spent two years at Noma before returning to Australia to lead award-winning kitchens at Esquire (Brisbane) and Paper Daisy/Halcyon House in the Northern Rivers beachside town of Cabarita.

Ben was Queensland Good Food Guide’s Young Chef of the Year in 2014 and has been named one of Australia’s chefs to watch by Restaurant Australia, Delicious Magazine, and Gourmet Traveler.

During his spare time at Esquire, Ben created Beerkary Bakery, a pop-up bakery offering matched beer and bread made from spent beer grain. He and partner Yen Trinh collaborated with breweries to use their spent grain in bread and pastries.