Everything You Need to Know for Perfect Beer Trub Bread

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In 2020, when everyone was really starting to get into sourdough baking, my husband was brewing beer, and I was experimenting with baking beer trub bread.

Wait, so what is beer trub?

Beer trub is the sediment that settles to the bottom of your brewing vessel while your wort ferments. It contains yeast, protein, malt, and bits of grain that weren’t filtered out. To prevent a hazy beer, brewers want to filter this out or take care to leave it in the bottom of the vessel.

While, the yeast that settles to the bottom is supposedly dead or dying, I’ve still been able to resurrect it with a sourdough-like feeding plus some sugar for reinforcement.

So, let’s get into how to feed trub and make bread from this flavor powerhouse!

How to Collect Beer Trub

This is your very first step, and it’s also the easiest. After 2 weeks of cold fermentation, your beer is ready to bottle, right? It’s at this point that we siphon our brew into a bottling bucket with a spigot fitted with a spring tip bottle filler. Your process should be similar if not exactly the same.

As you’re siphoning the brew from a carboy to the tank for bottling, take care to stop before you suck up the trub on the bottom. It’s heavy and sticky, and it won’t want to be sucked up anyway. So, be mindful, but don’t worry if you get a little in your beer.

Once all your brew is out, you’re left with trub! Grab a quart-sized jar, and turn the carboy upside down into the jar. The nozzle should fit right into the jar mouth. While it is thick and sticky, your trub should be liquid enough to drop right out into your jar.

Collect it all or just as much as you want. Take note of how much you have by weight, though. This information will be important for feeding.

Storing Beer Trub for Bread Making

Obviously, bottling takes a little time in a sanitized environment. So, screw the lid onto your trub jar, and place it in the fridge overnight. The next morning, it will likely have a layer of liquid at the top.

This is similar to the “hooch” layer that develops on a hungry sourdough starter. It just means your trub needs to eat!

While you can keep it in the fridge indefinitely, it won’t live unless it’s fed weekly. And if you take it out of the fridge, it will need to eat daily, so only measure out what you need to bake and bring that to room temperature separately.

Feeding Your Trub

Let’s circle back to feeding that trub bub. Remember how you took the weight of it? Do you also remember my post on keeping sourdough starter? We’re about to combine our knowledge, kids!

Trub, like starter, should be fed its weight in water and flour. For the first feeding, I also add in 1 teaspoon of sugar. If you prefer to avoid processed sugar, feel free to use molasses, honey, maple syrup, or coconut sugar.

Just do not use a zero-calorie sweetener. Our starter is not on a diet; it needs caloric energy to survive.

Once you’ve fed your trub starter, go ahead and fridge it for long term storage. Feed it again in a week after discarding half of it by weight. Hopefully, you’ll use your discard for baking!

Ready to Make Beer Trub Bread Dough

You’ll be ready to make bread as soon as you see activity in your fed-trub. Again, this process is so similar to sourdough. Go ahead and even try the “float test.”

Use room temperature water to see if a teaspoon of starter floats. If it does, it’s ready to go. If it sinks, it needs feeding, and you can test again in 4 to 6 hours.

For the loaf in the pictures, I fed my trub with equal parts oat flour and water and a teaspoon of sugar. It doubled in size in an hour! That was astonishing, actually. My sourdough doesn’t usually rise that fast. But I was really happy to know there were living yeasties in there.

Using a Stand Mixer for the Dough

I like to work with my stand mixer for bread dough because it keeps me from adding too much flour and allows me to work at a higher hydration ratio.

What that means is my dough is extra sticky, and the resulting loaf has a lot of big, beautiful, bubbly holes. You are more than welcome to experiment with your dough’s hydration for a different crumb.

You will see, though, that mine is closer textured than some sourdoughs. This is entirely due to my desire to put butter on my toast. High hydration bread with those big holes doesn’t really do well soaking up butter. So, use that information as you will.

But I really love my stand mixer. Aside from the hydration, it also means I’m not kneading dough by hand for half an hour. Woo hoo!

A quick note on hydration with a trub. We can really only know the ratio of flour to water in terms of what we feed our trub and what we use for the final dough. Unless you were meticulous with brewing notes, it’s more likely you don’t know the hydration ratio of the trub right out of the brew.

Preparing the Sponge

We’re going to start this loaf with a sponge. A sponge is the first stage in the “sponge method” where you mix your yeast (in this case our fed trub starter) with all the water and part of the flour.

So, with 1 cup of fed starter, you’ll mix in 3/4 cup of water and 1 1/2 cups of bread flour. Mix that all together really well. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, and let it rest for an hour at room temperature. In my house, that is 69ºF.

We’re aiming for the sponge to double in size before we add in the rest of the flour, salt, and oil to form our dough.

Beer Trub Bread Dough

Now, at this point, we’ve noticed that, after about an hour, our trub sponge has grown up a little in the mixing bowl. Now, we’re going to add in 1 1/2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. You may also want to add a little sugar if you’re concerned about the bitterness of your hops.

This is where you will appreciate having a stand mixer. You want to knead it for 10 to 15 minutes. It should pull away from the bowl and be fairly smooth. Keep in mind, it will still be sticky.

Place your dough in an oiled bowl, cover, and place in the fridge overnight (for at least 12 hours). Cold retards the yeast activity, but if your starter is like mine, it’s very happy. It may double in size in an hour. However, the main reason we love a cold ferment is flavor development.

So, get your dough in a nice big bowl with room to grow. And let it go overnight. It may get really large.

The next morning, you’ll get your dough from the fridge and allow it to come to room temperature for about 2 hours. This will vary depending on how cold you keep your house. You want the dough to have time to relax.

Shaping Your Beer Trub Loaf

Once your dough is room temperature and relaxed, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Stretch it out into a rectangle. Pull all four corners to the center. Then, pull top, right, bottom, and left sides to the center.

Flip it over, and use both hands to swirl the dough on the counter to seal the bottom and tighten the skin. It should begin to look like a nice smooth ball.

Now, you’ll want to prepare a baking vessel. Common practice for a sourdough loaf is to bake in a cast iron dutch oven. I do have one, but it’s in a horribly inconvenient place. So, what I do instead is use my favorite casserole dish.

I grab a square of parchment paper and crumble it up. This makes it easier to line my casserole dish, which I’ll do next. Then, I sprinkle flour over the paper to make sure it won’t stick. Finally, I set my dough seam-side dough in the dish.

Slashing Your Loaf

Let this rise for 1 hour. Now, it’s time to dust it with flour and score. You can get really fancy with your scoring, or you can stay very simple. The idea is that your bread has this tight skin, right?

Without a score, your bread is going to pop a seam and have a broken side. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not ideal. So you want to have two really good, deep slashes at the minimum. I like going down the sides, but some like to do a big X cut. Once you’ve done that, go nuts with decorative slashing.

Baking Your Beer Trub Bread… Finally!

Now, we’ve gotten to the good part. We’re in the final stretch. It’s time to bake! Yes, with the cast iron dutch oven, you put on the lid. We’re not doing that.

Place your vessel into the preheated 400ºF oven, and bake for 30 minutes. That’s going to get your bread’s internal temperature to about 140ºF. Bread is done at 190ºF.

So, now, we’re going to remove it from the casserole, or dutch oven, whichever you’re using. Place it (with the parchment paper) on a baking sheet. Turn the temperature down to 350ºF, and bake for another 20 minutes.

This will help the interior bake through. It’ll prevent the crust getting too dark, and it will also insure that the bottom doesn’t get soggy from sitting in a dish the whole time.

Once it’s done, you can test by tapping the crust. It’ll sound hollow. Or you can use a thermometer to make sure it is 190ºF inside. But once it’s done, set it on a cooling rack and let it come completely to room temperature before you cut it.

So, What Does Beer Trub Bread Taste Like?

If you’ve ever had beer bread, you might expect your trub bread to be a little bit bitter. Or maybe you’re expecting it to taste more like sourdough?

Well, what does beer trub bread taste like?

It entirely depends on the kind of beer you’re brewing. Our trub is from an English Brown Ale which features caramel, chocolate, and coffee notes from malted grains and hops. That means that the resulting bread is dark even if I use white bread flour. It smells hoppy and has a faint flavor of barley.

If you work from an IPA trub, your hops are going to be very forward in flavor and fragrance. You may even detect a little fruitiness.

And if you’re working with a darker beer, like a stout or porter, you’re going to have a darker bread with more chocolatey flavors. You can enhance that by adding in cocoa powder to your dough.

Playing with Trub Bread Flavor

This highlights the importance of sugar and salt to flavor your bread. Salt does so much for bringing flavors forward, so do not skimp.

On the other hand, sugar can hinder some flavors but highlight others. So, if you know your grain bill features some caramel, chocolate, or fruit flavors that you’d like to spotlight, you might need a little bit more sugar to capture them.

And like I said, if you really want to drive home the chocolate flavor, feel free to add in cocoa powder. Below is the base recipe. So, from there, you will be able to decide which flavors you want to play up in your next loaf.

For the pictured loaf, I split the dough and added a teaspoon of cocoa to half, and then mixed both halves together. All it really did was add some fun texture to the color. I’d use more if you want to really taste it.

Feel free to make some notes, and continue perfecting your own beer trub bread recipe based on the kind of brew you make.

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