Just yesterday I put up a one-gallon batch of an experimental brown ale that uses stale bread as an adjunct.
The bread comes from a local food bank where I volunteer; after the bread is too old to give away and otherwise destined for the dumpster, I will bring a couple loaves home and sock them in the freezer 'til brew day. Yesterday I did my first experiment with mashing bread. I mashed the barley and the bread separately, so as to be able to discard the bread brew if need be without destroying the whole batch. I cut the bread into slices (it was a bakery sourdough) and put the pieces in a spaghetti pot with about a half-teaspoon of alpha amylase and about two quarts of water. I got the temp up to between 140 and 150 and kept it there while I proceed to mash the remainder of the beer, which was two pounds of two-row and about two ounces each of caramel 20 and 60. From time to time I would taste the liquid from the beer pot, and almost throughout the process it did not show any sign of sweetness; only near the end of a 90-minute mash did it start to show hints of extracted sugar.
The spaghetti pot's integral strainer made it easy to get the soggy bread out of the bread pot. What was left was white, cloudy, and tasted mostly like bread with just a little sweetness. My barley mash had come out just as it should, so in the interest of science I crossed my fingers and poured the two worts together for the boil. Three additions of a half-ounce each of Goldings were spread evenly through the hour-long boil, and when I was done I actually had to add some water back to bring my volume up to a gallon. Oh... I wasn't happy with the flavor of the wort going in, so on the fly I added a half-cup of table sugar and two tablespoons of brown.
I pitched a half-pint starter of Nottingham, installed the airlock, and went to bed. By morning it was bubbling along purposefully. When I got it all into the fermenter, with starter and water to volume, OG was about 1.080.
I have decided to call it "The Sheriff's Brown Bitter," because it is made with Nottingham yeast and the bread of the needy.