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Comment by blippage | Hacker News Reader

Two things I know about bread: Roman soldiers baked bread, using beer as a raising agent instead of yeast, on account of the fast that beer was readily available.

A "baker's dozen" is the number 13. This is believed to stem from medieval England, where bakers gave an extra loaf in order to avoid penalties for being underweight.

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Compared to ancient beer the yeast of modern beer is killed off before bottling, so you can't use it as a yeast replacement, but instead this allows the beer to be stored for a long time.

'Killed off'? Or just filtered? (Genuine question - I brew a bit, and have used mine for bread, but don't really know anything about commercial brewing.)

I'm just a home gamer so could be wrong. In large commercial breweries it is killed off, flocculated out with a flocculation agent then filtered out. It is killed at a certain time so the amount of remaining sugar is controlled.

Some microbrews don't do this and you can recuperate live yeast from those beers for brewing or baking.

I've always heard filtered to bring it to sterility, but there have to be other steps to flocculate. Micro brews or traditional European brews are often bottle finished.

Some micro breweries use a finishing yeast that's different than the fermentation yeast to keep that proprietary. I think anchor brewing comes to mind for this.

You need bottle conditioned beer. Many wheat beers are.

That was typical of all premodern breads, other than sourdoughs. Yeast was isolated in the 1800s.

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