Beer Bread

12 Ounces of beer, any variety except non-alcohol

2 Tablespoons of something really sweet (sugar, honey, fruit juice concentrate, etc.)

3 Cups of self-rising flour

   (For every cup of flour, use 1 ½ tsp baking powder and ½ tsp salt to make it self rising)

Mix the ingredients together. Pour the batter into a lightly greased, pre-heated loaf pan and bake at 400° for 50 minutes (maybe more depending on your oven). The recipe makes one loaf of bread suitable for 2-3 people. If plan for more servings, adjust the ingredients proportionately. This bread tastes best fresh from the oven but is also quite good cold. It will be a rather dense bread with a texture more like muffins or corn bread. I highly recommend using a strong porter or stout (like Guinness or Murphy’s) for the beer and honey as your sweetener.

I've also done this recipe in the fire at 18th century encampments. For that purpose the only really questionable ingredient in the recipe above is the self-rising flour. Self-rising simply means that the flour already has baking powder mixed with it.

 In the period, potash, a.k.a. pearlash (a kind of salt made from refined wood ash) was used to aid the rising process. Baking soda is the modern equivalent of potash, and baking powder is essentially baking soda with some compound starches added as a souring agent.

 In other words, baking powder provides basically the same function as the salt or wood ash by-products but is easier to come by today. Baking powder was first discovered in the late 1700s, but didn’t come into widespread use until around the 1830s