Now I am not at all ashamed to admit that I am a bit of a sucker for an interesting new challenge.

So one day I was scouring the internet for some recipe inspiration, as I do, when I chanced across a recipe for three-ingredient bread – with one of those ingredients being a bottle of your choice beer. There was just no question from there on in: I had to give this recipe a shot, have a play with it, and see how it turned out. The result was probably one of the most delicious and heartiest breads that I’ve ever tasted – especially when it was freshly baked, and right out of the oven.

I know that some of you may well be sceptical about the successes of this here recipe; after all, beer wouldn’t strike anyone as a logical ingredient for a bread recipe unless you were already familiar with the process. But bear with me for a little while, and let’s explain it in layman’s terms.

Way back in the day (and I mean way back), beer and bread had pretty much the exact same ingredients: water and wheat. The only real difference between the two is that the wheat was ground up before it was made into bread. Yeast was… let’s say, an unexpected addition. Jonny Garrett, one of the cofounders of @beerchannel, put it this way:

“The yeast that makes bread rise and beer alcoholic entered the equation by accident; the mixtures were left open to the air, and wild yeasts on the wind got in. The yeast eats the sugars and multiplies (hence the rising) and produces alcohol. Sharp minds among you might ask why, then, isn’t bread alcoholic? That’s because it’s cooked off when it’s baked. Sadly.

When yeast was discovered 7,000 years ago, the bright sparks in Iran embarked on what is thought to be the first known biological engineering tasks – building a fermenter tank. Industrialisation was born…”

Well, you really learn something every day. Anyway, I’m sure that I’ve rambled on for long enough about beer bread – how about we get down to actually making some?

Now this should not be any sort of surprise to you, but the first thing that we’re going to have to do here is preheat the oven to 190C (about 375F), and greasing a loaf tin.

Next, sift three cups of self-rising flour and a quarter-cup of sugar into a bowl, and whisk until combined. Got no self-rising flour? No problem. Self-rising flour is easily substituted, as it is at it’s basic level a flour combined with a rising agent – therefore if you lack self-rising flour, combine the following ingredients and use in place:

3 cups all-purpose flour

3 tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

See? Not hard at all.

The next thing to do here is add the bottle of your choice beer. I have dabbled a lot with this recipe in the times that I have made it since, using beers and even cider. My personal preference is a bottle of cider, if you’re after a deliciously fruity sort of bread. The one beer which I would highly recommend not using would be Corona, as the result is simply flavourless.

A fourth optional ingredient (but one which I would highly recommend using in your bread all the same) is a quarter-cup or, if you’re feeling especially decadent, a half-cup of melted butter. There are two ways of adding this new ingredient to the recipe, should you see fit to add it: the recipe is perfectly satisfactory with the first three ingredients, but you can only improve it by adding the butter. You can:

combine the butter with the ingredients at the same stage as the beer, before putting the dough into the loaf tin. This will result in a softer texture, almost like store-bought bread. Or… put the dough into the loaf tin, and then drizzle the butter on the top. This will result in a bread with a crunchier and buttery crust.

It’s really down to your personal preference as to which one you pick. Either way, once your dough is in your prepared loaf tin and good to go, bake it in the oven for one hour. When it’s done, pull it out and leave it in the tin, on the counter, to cool for another fifteen minutes. After that, you can go ahead and dig in.

Let me know in the comments how you found the recipe, I’d love to hear back from you! Post any challenges too, if you happen to have one or two for me 🙂

Beer Bread

Ingredients

3 cups of self raising flour OR 3 cups all-purpose flour 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt

1/4 cup of caster sugar

330mL bottle or can of your choice beer

1/4 to 1/2 cup of butter, melted

Directions

Preheat oven to 190C, and prepare a loaf tin. Whisk together dry ingredients in a large bowl until combined. Add the wet ingredients and mix until just combined (omit butter until step four if desired) Pour mixture into loaf tin (adding butter here if desired) and bake in the oven for 1 hour. Leave to cool on the counter for 15 minutes once done. Enjoy