This is an easy beer bread recipe that my mother used to make. It’s simple for beginners, only has three ingredients, and you can use any beer that you have on hand.
The bread is a quick bread with a soft muffin-type texture that’s delicious when you serve it as a dinner bread, and it really doesn’t taste like beer at all.
I tried it with two very different types of beer to see what the difference would be, and these are my results.
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How to make the beer bread.
To make this bread you’ll need:
3 cups of self-rising flour
3 Tbsp sugar
12 oz. beer
That’s it! If you don’t have self-rising flour, you can use AP flour with 1 Tbsp baking powder and 1 tsp salt instead.
Preheat the oven to 375F, and grease a loaf pan.
Mix the ingredients until you have a thick batter, pour it into the pan, and bake for 40-50 minutes.
When the bread is baked all the way through and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, (it took 50 minutes for my two loaves,) remove them from the oven and de-pan the loaf.
Put it on a cooling rack and let it cool off completely before serving to get the best cut.
If you cut the bread when it’s warm it can tear, because this is more of a muffin texture than a sandwich bread texture.
Does the type of beer make a difference?
I made two loaves, one with the worst beer I could get, according to the guys I informally surveyed in the grocery store beer aisle. It was a lite beer brand that they said didn’t taste like beer.
The other was Guinness, which my husband was very excited to see me bring home. (I don’t drink beer but he does, so he gets the extra.)
The two batters were obviously different-looking, but when they baked they weren’t that different flavor-wise.
The Guinness bread has a little bit of a stronger flavor in the crust, but just barely.
Most of the beer flavor seems to bake out of the bread, so it doesn’t really taste like strong beer at all. If I couldn’t taste the Guinness in it then there really isn’t that much of a flavor left over.
I used to make a chocolate Guinness cake that I could definitely taste the flavor in, so I don’t know what the difference is. But neither extreme of beer gave the bread any perceptible beer flavor.
Why does this bread work?
The bread works because you’re basically making in a loaf pan, and the sugar in it makes the loaf form a crispy crust.
The self-rising flour (or baking powder if you substitute that) gives the batter the lift instead of the yeast that you’d usually use for bread.
Even though beer is made with yeast, if it’s pasteurized it kills the active yeast so that the flavor doesn’t change over time. So yeast isn’t the reason why the bread is rising.
It’s basically a muffin recipe with no fat, so the texture is softer than “real” bread, but a little tougher than a muffin.
The recipe that I have for this was cut out of a magazine or a book or something, and there are also some variations on the basic recipe. I’ll try some of those out and post them soon!
