Whole Wheat Beer Bread, Easy Enough for Dinner Tonight

Bake up this hearty Whole Wheat Beer Bread to fill your bread basket. It’s delicious alongside soup, stew, or chili, and tastes great warm with butter.

Cheddar Cheese Soup

While I am not a beer drinker, we usually have some kind of beer in the cupboard. My husband loves dark beers, particularly stouts and porters. Lucky for me those beers make the best beer bread.

I make this bread with Guinness, but you can use any beer you like. Darker beers will give you a heartier flavor. The recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups or 12 ounces. If your bottle or can is something lame like 11.2 ounces, just add enough water to make it a full 12 ounces.

Beer bread is a weird thing. It doesn’t taste like beer, but it does have a unique flavor. If you typically keep self-rising flour on hand, beer bread can come together with as few as three ingredients: flour, beer, and sugar. For this recipe, I chose to use whole wheat pastry flour. I’m trying to work in whole grains as often as I can. Since I’ve never seen self-rising whole wheat flour, it made sense to up my ingredient count to five.

The bread itself mixes up in about five minutes, but it does take about an hour to bake, so plan ahead. It’s quicker than yeast breads, but still takes some effort. All good things do, dontcha know?

How to make this good and cheap:

Here are some of the strategies you can use to make this recipe more economical:

Bake it yourself from scratch – Don’t buy mixes. Don’t buy pricey bakery bread. You can make your own better and cheaper at home!
Stock up on ingredients when they are on sale. When I find regular kitchen staples on sale, I buy a lot. I’m currently using a price book to track prices and that’s saving me money. For this recipe, keeping an eye on the price of flour and beer can help keep the price down. Hint: this is a good week to stock up on Guinness. 😉
Buying in bulk – It’s rare that I would buy one bag of flour. I usually stock up when there are good baking sales. I also have gotten into the habit of buying cases of flour from Bob’s Red Mill.

How I make this recipe easy:

This recipe really couldn’t be easier than it is, but having the right kitchen tools can really make your time in the kitchen more enjoyable. Over time, I’ve honed my collection so that they are perfect for my needs.

Here are the tools that I use for this recipe:

stainless steel mixing bowl – I’m not sure you have too many of these.
wire whisk – Be sure to get one with a closed barrel so dishwater doesn’t get stuck in its innards and drip into your food. Ask me how I know.
rubber spatula – I have two of these; I love them so much.
bread pan – I love the USA pans. No greasing needed and no burning!