Holiday Beer Party
One of my favorite parts of the holidays (other than the
beer of course) is getting together with folks eating, drinking, and spreading
some holiday cheer. As I promised in my last post I helped two great friends of
mine with their annual holiday beer party. I always get all geeked up when: (A)
it’s a beer themed affair, (B) there’s friends and family involved , and (C) We are pairing
up food and beer.
This party presented a wild card. We didn’t pick all of the
beer. That is where the fun begins. If you plan on doing this for the holidays
(it can even be on New Year’s Eve or anytime from Thanksgiving to post New
Years for that matter) tell your guests to bring a Winter/Holiday seasonal beer
or beers. That is the guideline, a six pack, a growler, a couple of big
bottles, however they want to bring it. Don’t get into ”I want you to bring
this or that beer”. Stop being a control freak and just let it fly. You get a
good cross section of what is offered especially now that most wine and
beverage stores have some sort of single bottle section. So pairing food with
no earthly idea of what people are bringing is a challenge, but there is a
general feel for the holiday beers that make easier than one would think. They fall into a couple of categories minus a
few different ones: The Spiced up American Holiday Ales, English style Winter
Warmers, and Belgian Christmas ales. The majority are going to be spiced up
ones. Ones that have cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom, cloves, etc. or any
other variation of dumping a spice rack or bag of Holiday potpourri into a brew
kettle (you can see that I am not a big fan of these in general). One of my
co-workers turned me on to this pairing that I totally didn’t think of. Indian
food. They have a common thread, the spices used minus a couple here and there,
but they complimentary to each other. That was one of the best eye openers I
have had in a while. The other 2 types are very versatile for food in general. English
Winter Warmers are good balanced ales that have a sweetness, some fruitiness,
and a little of a hoppy bitterness at the end. They work extremely well with
pork, game meats, and cheeses, and Indian food as well. The 3rd
category is the Belgian Christmas ales; these are fruity, sweeter, and slightly
bready, with no real bitterness to them. Now these are overall generalizations
of these types of beer styles, all of them come with a uniqueness in flavor,
color, body, but this is just to get an overall picture of what the hell we are
dealing with. I posted the menu on my last entry and we stuck
with it minus 2 mad science experiments that I did in my Laboratory (it’s not
really a lab but my kitchen. If this thing takes off maybe at some point I will
have one). I made a beer and bacon jam
that killer, but my wife took it to another level by making it part of a cheese
spread. It went from good to orgasmicaly good. I felt we needed something sweet
so I came up with beer marshmallows. I posted them on my Facebook page which
you can find here. Here are the links to the other recipes that we used; Lou,
one of the hosts, sought them out and here they are:
The Sausage balls were one of his mom’s recipes which were awesome. He
used sausage from one of our favorite stands at the Westside Market, The Pork Chop Shop. The girls there do an AMAZING job with pork of all kinds so if you
are in Cleveland go there, get what they offer, you will not be disappointed.
They currently have a Christmas Ale bacon that is beyond awesome, I can eat it
all day. Back to the sausage balls, here is the recipe:
1. Mix together 2# ground pork sausage, 28 oz. shredded
cheese, and 4 cups Bisquick until a "dough" is formed. You may need
to adjust the quantities of cheese and Bisquick depending on the fat content of
the sausage you use with the goal of achieving a consistency to form little
balls out of the dough mixture. You can use spicy or mild sausage and sharp or
mild cheese depending on your tastes. (I used 1# spicy & 1# mild and half
sharp, half mild cheese).
2. Form golf ball sized balls and place on cookie sheets
lined with waxed paper or treated with cooking spray.
3. Bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes until tops of balls are
slightly browned for immediate eating, or bake for only 25-30 minutes if you
plan on heating them up at a later date.
So the menu is set, you can mix it up however you want to
this is just what we did, it was awesome and I highly recommend it but if you
want to throw some other foods go for it, it is a party and people will love
it. In the next post I will give the results of the beer poll and my top 5,
along with some other fun stuff.
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