Beer and Bread: A Merry Christmas from C'est Bon Biere

First of all, we at C'est Bon Biere would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy new year.

We had a wonderful year brewing beer while learning about new beer styles and recipes. It has always been a mission of ours to create "his and her" beers, a friendly competition between beer recipes created by husband and wife. By a 3-1 decision "her" beers were the fan favorite at festivals.

Some of the "hers" fan favorites this year included Guilty Pleasure Chocolate Milk Stout, Just Peachy Sour Peach Ale, and Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine. Some of the "his" fan favorites included the Belgian Missile Crisis Belgian Wit, Night Shift Porter aged in a whiskey barrel, and Hakuna Mahopa Black IPA aged in a whiskey barrel.

Overall this year, we brewed about 15 different styles of beer, and have refined some of our favorite recipes. We love going to beer festivals and getting all of the positive feedback from our fans and beer enthusiasts alike.

This weekend marked the last brew of the season. We capped off a great year by brewing the Guilty Pleasure Chocolate Milk Stout and a new Pilsner-style Saison we are calling Jolie Blonde.

SPENT GRAINS

One question we have been asked at many brew days is what do we do with our spent grain? Many commercial breweries produce enough spent grain to create a partnership with local farms where the grains are used to supplement cattle feed. This is a great idea, not entirely practical for home brewers who only produce 10-20 pounds of grain with each 5 gallon batch of beer.

Spent grains from the stout.

We finally decided to do something with our spent grains (granted a small portion of them). We made our very first batch of  Pain Ordinary, or French bread. After all, beer is still referred to as "liquid bread". We added some spent grains from our chocolate stout into the dough to give the bread a touch of roasted flavor.

Two of our delicious rolls of home-made bread

Our home-made bread is delicious, and it pairs well with any of our beers on tap. Making bread from scratch is pretty time consuming, but the results are so rewarding. Beer brewing and bread making are more alike than we thought. Maybe we will start calling bread "solid beer"!