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Fascinating clip about the barm. I regularly make a sourdough maslin bread. The recipe I have uses 50% rye and 50% wheat flour. Dense but delicious.

I have been using Ale-Barm for the last three years to bake bread for various local markets around Exeter. I collect a bucket of fresh barm each week from Guy Sheppard at Exe Valley Brewery. I use this to make a variety of breads, lardy cake and other baked goods, and have successfully used it for croissants.
I was initially inspired by the recipe for "The Finest French Bread" by Robert May " The Accomplisht Cook" - published 1660 - and have successfully recreated the recipe. I have developed a variety of methods of using the barm, but usually as an overnight poolish. It is also quite easy to use directly into a shorter time dough, White Spelt flour is particularly good.
The one thing I have not done is wash the yeast, and have not had a problem with bitterness in the bread.
However, we have developed a bread which we call "The Brewers Mash Loaf" - this involves boiling up malt to make a wort, adding barm and hops as if to make a beer. Once the fermentation is well established we put flour in and make the dough.
The finished loaf has a beautiful full malty taste up front, followed by the flowery character of the hops and finally the bitter finish comes through.
I would like to know if anyone has a good recipe for "wiggs" using ale-barm as they are the next recreation I hope to try.

Fantastic info - thanks for sharing. I'll have to get some from some home brewer friends of mine to try it.

For home baking, how would you use the barm? Say, make a poolish/loose pre-ferment, let it bubble a bit, then add more flour to make a dough to ferment, shape, proof and bake? Any ideas re: ratios/formulas to start off with using barm?

I have been making sourdough bread for 8 months and the results are amazing! Delicious bread, chewy crust, open crumb..it gets better with time.
I am starting my own micro-bakery from home as friends and family are urging me to spread the good bread!

Try it, it's easy and so satisfying to make!

I made my first bread using ale barm a few months ago encouraged by Ivan Day, a fellow villager. The barm I used came from a local brewer, Tirril Brewery and produced a distinctive loaf with a delicious chewy crust and good crumb. Flour was Little Salkeld Watermill's biodinamic 85%.
Visiting your local brewer and asking for barm can be an educational process, especially as apparently and ancient law declares that the brewer is bound to acceed to your request. Your first task, therefore, is to convince him that you mean to create bread with the barm and not a rival ale!

Here are a couple of methods that I have had success with using ale-barm, although due to its unpredictability I have also had a fair number of failures ( or learning experiences!).

Overnight starter: 400g barm, 800g water, 1200g dark rye flour.
Whisk barm and water together, stir in flour till smooth. Leave in a covered bucket overnight.
I make a 100% rye bread from this, incorporating the starter at between 10% and 25% of dough weight.
My best selling bread is a seeded loaf using this rye starter at about 10% dough weight, with equal parts of strong white and maltstar (from Stoates, Shaftesbury), mixed seeds at about 3% are ground and added to the dough, salt 1%. The starter above gives me about 24 kilos of finished dough (approx 65% hydration)

White Spelt flour works with the overnight starter if temperature is kept low enough; in warmer times the barm seems to go crazy and the starter will climb out of the bucket, exhausting itself in a few hours. I don't have a retarder or fridge space but guess that would make life easier.
My shorter time white spelt is a pretty reliable recipe.

1000g White Spelt (Shipton mill)
500g Water
100g Barm
1 egg white whisked till just frothing
15g salt

Whisk barm and water, gradually incorporate into the flour, adding egg about half way. Salt added once dough is coming together.
I always hand knead this as our spiral mixer seems to slap spelt dough into submission. Knead until you have got through the sticky stage, adding a little more water as necessary. You want a smooth soft dough, but don't overwork it. Leave to rise, watching carefully as it has a tendency to bolt and then collapse. It can be knocked back a few times if required, though as with the starter the barm seems to exhaust itself if allowed to run riot.
This is better baked in a tall sided tin.

I listened to your programme on Radio 4 and was fascinated by the concept of Ale Balm Bread - if I have spelt it correctly, plus the fact that it contained the vitamin B12 (I hope I have that correct too). I had just returned from Scotland and whilst there visited quite a number of castle ruins. The one thing that fascinated me was the fact that in every castle there was a brewery next door to the bakery or the bakery was incorporated inside the brewery. It made perfect sense as both needs warmth, and as was pointed out in all the documentation, ale and bread was the staple diet then. Also my husband who brews his own beer properly has tried to use the yeast to make bread but not with the same success as his beer.

So Mr Downes is there somewhere I can lay my hands on a book that explains the process more fully please, possibly with pictures? I have looked on the Internet and am not sure if you live here or have returned to Australia, and there appears to be a book that you wrote, but finding a copy has escaped me so far - obviously not looking in the right places. I watched the short video clip as well but realise that it is more complicated than that. We bake and eat our own bread and would rather like to try yours.

Whoops, mistake number one its Ale Leven Barm bread not Balm.

Hello John - fascinating programme and blog. I'm a homebrewer, been a homebaker and am also a PhD student so pretty analytical about these things. I'm brewing Belgian beers at the moment, and decided to try Barm bread. I have a question though - can you create a sourdough-style starter from the Barm, or does it have to be fresh off the wort each time? There are a lot of enzymes in Barley that turn the starch into sugars - could it be that these are also necessary?

Thanks John - good info. I shall definitely try a starter. For my experiments this time I took a turkey-baster of krausen (glad we have the word 'barm' for this now) and added this to enough flour to make a thick batter. This is from a 'Leffe Bruin' clone. I'm quite familiar with the narrative of this yeast, after 4 hours I didn't see a lot of activity, and wondered if there was enough viable yeast from the Barm - the beer had gone beyond the heady stage. I was due to take a sample for gravity reading (100ml) so I decided to chuck that into the mix too....and off it went! Followed the instructions on the Radio4 interview (12hours -> dough -> 4hours -> knock-back and shape -> 4hours -> bake) and it made perhaps the best loaf I've made in over 25 years...I was particularly impressed with the strength of the yeast. Slower, but can lift a heavy dough - I'm going to try an all Rye loaf now