Spring, Chili Beers, and the Grill

 I decided to take a little time away from writing the last month or so. First, I was in a funk from my Broncos getting absolutely annihilated in the Super Bowl. That coupled with the never ending winter here in Ohio left me a little bare on the inspiration front. I am now refreshed, over THAT game, and looking forward to posting a bunch more now that spring is more or less here. That means for me, more grilling time, and it’s time to get the garden up and running. I am not as enthralled with the beers of summer as some folks are, and they are just starting to slowly be released so we’ll save that for a post in the next month or so, but I have been paying some attention to the pulse of the beer world, and I have been playing around with food in my away time which should't shock anyone at all.So let's dive in.

Right now, there are some trends with beer that have been taking shape over the last year (or a little longer) that seem to have gained popularity among brewers and those of us who drink beers are taking a liking to. Much like a few years ago when the rage “trend” was the bourbon barrel aged blah-blah fill in the blank beer style; we now have a couple right now that I tend to prefer over that. After all beer was originally barrel aged, not necessarily in a craft whiskey cask or a wine barrel but you get the picture. It still is fairly popular and I do enjoy some, but I think that it’s almost a solely marketing tool and it’s been played out to the fullest. Christ, Miller has a bourbon flavored beer.  The trend that I am most interested in, that has got legs currently is the addition of chilies to beer. Sure it’s been around, we have all seen that shit lager with the chili pepper in it, but we are talking about something that has had a little more thought put into it. Contrary to what some may think I like this one. For the record I am not a don’t-put-things- in-my-beer-jerk-ass. The jerk-asses mentioned often pledge their allegiance to The Reinheitsgebot it is the German beer purity law (which has changed a little over time). Look it up for the full details on it but it basically has only a handful of ingredients that are allowed by law to make beer: water, hops, malted barley. You get the picture. I get some of the sentiment for this, putting corn or rice as the main grain on the bill to cheapen it, but other things can be done to beer that can be experimental and interesting. So up hold the “law” and miss out. Your ignorance and unwillingness to try new stuff means more for the rest of the sane people on the planet. Rant is over, let’s continue.

It seems that Ancho Chilies are the popular choice as far as what chilies are being used, which makes sense. They are ripened and dried poblano chilies that have a smoky, spicy, fruity flavor. They hit 3 distinct flavor notes which add 3 elements to a beer. I am assuming this is why it’s a great addition to a beer. 3 distinctive notes as opposed to one. This brings me to the next part, as a chef what can I do with this? What can I pair it up with? There are quite a few ways to go beyond the obvious Latin cuisines that the chili is used in. That brings us to the grill. These go great with grilled meats and poultry, I wouldn’t go the seafood route as they may be a little heavy for that; unless you want to experiment with some in a ceviche, or you could use it with a heavy oily fish like salmon or mackerel but I don’t think they are the best flavor combos for that but it could be worth a try. I am going to go out on a limb and say that pork would be the best vehicle to use one of these beers for part of a marinade. The other thing to look at will be what the original beer style is, Ommegang’s Fire and Blood is a Belgian style so it’s going to have different flavors than say the Rogue Farms Chipotle which is an amber with Chipotle. Most will work but weird things happen. As I said earlier my gears get turning when I see or try a beer about pairings and cooking, so I will be experimenting in the coming weeks with this and I will post any and all victories or failures on my Facebook page along with a recipe when we get one that is good. There will be a bunch more content upcoming including some  things I have wanted to try, and have been working on for a while that just aren't quite ready, and as always I'll be trying and seeking out beers and letting you know my feelings.  Also I will be doing something that I have wanted to test out for a while and that is a series of beer can chicken experiments, that will be this summer and it should be pretty cool if you like to grill and experiment, we'll do them together and at worst have chicken and beers!

A Little Ranting to Start Off the Year

Since we are in the New Year, I guess it’s time to do a synopsis of the year in beer, or a resolution. For one I am not one to make a resolution for the New Year. Not a freaking chance in hell of that of that. I am not going to a gym, eat kale and eat some horken fiber grain mix to make my diet healthy, just to throw it out the first chance I get to have a beer and some bar food with my friends. We are adults, you should be able to figure that kind of thing out without pledging something dopey. I wake up daily trying to be better at who I am and what I do, I don’t need to create a device to do this. I am not going to go over last year either. It’s the past, there were some great beers made and we loved them, I am personally more excited about the year ahead. One thing I will leave you with is a quote from Greg Koch the brilliant, arrogant in a good way, leader of Stone Brewery said.

 It is something that I personally back 100% and will start implementing daily in my conversations and writings about beer.Sorry if I disappointed everyone by not contributing to the normal year-end/new year bullshit. It’s not my thing.

 As I am writing this we are having the Polar Vortex pay a visit here in the Great Lakes (or as I like to call it winter), I am just hanging around the estate in lovely, frozen Lakewood, Ohio. I was thinking that this time of year, the post-holiday pre-spring release time of year is the most underrated time of year for beers. I love the fact that most if not every brewery/brewer goes out on a limb more and more, and create crazy one-off brews during the year. This time of year is great for that. I am a fan of the beers that get right up in your face with flavors and styles that are not the norm and out of your comfort zone.
 If you want to get me out of my beer comfort zone, one way is to give me a barley wine, You know the beers that start appearing this time of year that are usually named “Old” something or other. I am not a huge fan of this style. To me it’s just a way to brew a huge beer for the sake of it being big. They are for the most part cloyingly sweet and very boozy. Most hit around 10% ABV(Alcohol By Volume) on the bottom end and I have seen some that are upwards of 14-15% if not more (although not in my current state of Ohio which has ancient, absurd ABV laws for beer set at 12% - this is a rant for another day). A great deal of them do have a hoppy finish and I do like that. I am leery of the sweet-not-stout/Baltic porter which work for me, I am not saying that barley wines are bad beers at all. They just don’t hit the right notes for me. The high ABV% isn’t a bad thing but higher alcohol beers for the most part tend to have that burn on the back end. Which can make a beer great, or ruin it for me. Contrary to what some folks believe higher ABV doesn’t equal better beer. This is where I take a little side trip.

Let’s talk ABV, or more importantly, the “I only drink beer that has 9% alcohol or higher” guy. I know some of you are reading this, too. Well I am about to piss you off. I find this attitude to be one of, if not the most annoying, stupid, and outright fucked up ones out there. Don’t give me it’s your preference, that’s all BS. If it was just a preference you wouldn’t be hammering anyone for drinking, or brewing good beer with lower alcohol levels. You are not an Elitist; but more or less a drunk. All this says to me is that you want something to get you fucking hammered quickly rather than revel in and enjoy great beer. You are no different than the hobo drinking a Lazer malt liquor out of a paper bag to get trashed. No I am not putting high ABV beers in the level of Lazer so back up, I am putting the dopes I mentioned above there. If you have a problem with that fire away, not going to change my mind on this. Anyway that red-faced rant is now over, so back to barley wines. I do have a couple that I have had in the past. I am a big fan of Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot. It is big, bold, has a dried fruit-like sweetness that is evened out by a good resiny, piney hop finish. I also like Victory Old Horizontal; it’s not as hoppy as Bigfoot but it carries a lot of similar flavors. This is just one of many types of different beers you see this time of year.
 I encourage everyone to follow your favorite breweries on the various social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter, for example) we have right now. They will for the most part give information on releases and other info so you can see what weirdness they are planning. I can go on and on about what else is available right now but hit social media and there’s a good amount of info to be had. Now go out there and get out of your comfort zone find some different beers and have some fun!

Holiday Beer Party Part 2

The food is out of the way now on to the beer! The way this party was orchestrated was to try as many holiday beers as possible and have some interaction between the guests and make it fun. The first thing that  we did to make this fun and interactive was to put the beers on the table (in a cooler, tub, or something to keep them chilled); we also put out some clear plastic cocktail glasses so we could open multiple beers similar to a beer tasting event. I came up with a simple ballot for the event as well so we could see what the general consensus was for the best and worst of the bunch. I didn’t think it was necessary to go full on beer nerd with these, we just wanted to find out which was the crowd’s favorite without all of the minutia that goes into windbag reviews like I do on Facebook. We wanted best worst and that was it, maybe a comment or two on why. So everything is all set up, now the tasting begins! My wife and I brought a growler of Buckeye Brewing Ho! Ho! Ho! Magic Dubbel and a couple of bottles of Brooklyn Double Chocolate Stout. Two of my favorites, as I previewed them the week before the party.

I loved the atmosphere that a party like this created, it was fun hearing what people were trying, what they were going for next, and going around the rooms and talking about beer. The crowd was mixed from beer novices to people that drink craft beer regularly. The mix of people made it fun for me. Mostly because I usually don’t shut up anyway; add beer, plus people who want to learn about it, people who already enjoy it, end result - I had a blast. There were a lot of agreements on good and bad, likes and dislikes, one beer was even described as tasting “fishy”. I conveyed my major annoyance with the “spiced” beers tasting like a bowl of holiday potpourri, some agreed and some felt it made the beers more Christmassy like gingerbread. When all was said and done the beers that got the top votes from the vast array of beers that we had were:

1.       Revolution- Fistmas

2.       Buckeye Brewing- Ho! Ho! Ho! Magic Dubbel

3.       Delirium Noel

4.       Julie's-  homebrewed Holiday ale(side note it was really good

and was better than the vast majority of any of the beers we had from “professionals”, I loved it)

5.       Troegs- Mad Elf

 

That is the top 5. I think it's a real good list. The one noticeablefact with this list is that the "spiced" beers that dominate the holiday beer landscape were not in the top 5. In fact the most discussed "bad" ones were. One was Southern Tier's 2XMAS, which I didn't like, but it was better than others such as Lagerheads' Winter Mischief which was often described as bad and "all I taste is spice". This makes my point somewhat valid on these holiday beers. A good well-crafted English Winter warmer like Fistmas or a Belgian style Christmas Ale like Delirium Noel are more palatable than the kitschy, insipid, waste of my fucking time emptying the spice rack beers. Here's my top 5 from The party not overall. I'll have my top 5 overall up on my Facebook page in the near future.

1.  Revolution- Fistmas

2.  Julie's-  homebrewed Holiday ale

3. North Peak- Blitzen

4. Delirium Noel

5. Buckeye Brewing- Ho! Ho! Ho! Magic Dubbel

 

The masses have spoken, people. Men, women, experienced beer people and novices alike. So stop the madness will you please. Stick to making well-crafted beers like the ones on the lists above and the 3 ghosts may not pay you a visit this year.

I just want to wrap this one up by saying thanks to Lou and Dale for hosting and creating this party, and everyone who came making this party a fun and festive evening! I hope that everyone reading this who was not there decides to give this idea a try. It doesn't necessarily have to be a Holiday beer party it could be summer beers, stouts, god forbid a pumpkin beer party, however you want to do it!

 

 

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL !!!

Spreading the Holiday Cheer Part 1

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 3^rd 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:

Curried Chicken Salad
 Roasted Eggplant Caponata
Butternut Squash and Tahini Yogurt Dip

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.

Thanksgiving is now a thing of the past, and I hope that my little guide was helpful to everyone, and that you all had a great time feasting. It’s now time to get out all of the lights, Christmas trees, and holiday decorations and get all festive! It’s also time to think about parties, entertaining guests, so why not inject the festivities with beer? I have a couple, if not more, blogs on this subject in the coming weeks mostly because I love Christmas, it’s truly the most fun holiday for me. You get to give gifts, spend time with family and friends, eat, drink, be merry- all that good stuff. Since I have already purchased our tree, put up the lights (while most of you were in line at some big box hell hole last weekend), it’s time to talk about PARTY TIME!! Since this is part one, I am going to give some previews of what is coming up.

A couple of close friends of mine who enjoy the holidays and craft beer much like I do, have an annual holiday beer party. This is an outstanding idea for a get together. The premise of the party, other than having a lot of fun is for everyone to bring different holiday beers for everyone to try. It doesn’t have to be a straight up six pack of one type, it can be a bunch of different singles put together as well. Most areas of the country have someplace to purchase single beers and throw a bunch together, weather it’s a wine shop, beverage warehouse, Packie (if you live in the northeast), Whole Foods Markets and some regional grocery chains generally have a some as well.  This year I asked them if we could do a little interaction with the guests and get their feelings/ratings of all of the beers, and pair some foods up with the beers. So we are going to give this angle a shot it will be fun and we are going to do some video of it so you can get a feel for it. The food is going to be of the snacking/appetizer variety so we have a few things to pair up with the range of beers which run the gamut of flavors and styles. If you are interested in my ratings for these beers and others I have put up a Facebook page that has ratings brewery info and will have some other things that won’t be on here, so give me a like at (insert link) and you can get all of my input. So here is our menu, in the follow up post I will throw the recipes up for them.

Sausage Balls (yeah I know, you are a 3^rd grader stop laughing)

Curried Chicken Salad

Goat Cheese and Tomato Jam Spread

Eggplant Caponata

Butternut Squash and Tahini dip

Assorted salty snacks

So there’s the menu. I’ll give you a rundown on the reasons we chose these killer snacks in the next post on the party. Stay tuned for more. I am, as we speak constructing a brunch for your Christmas morning that is powered by craft beer, and fueled by local businesses here in wonderful Cleveland Ohio, it can be (recreated elsewhere to an extent) and well is going to be awesome if I can tout my skills for a moment. If you are interested in my ratings for holiday beers and others I have put up a Facebook page that has ratings, brewery info, and will have some other things that won’t be on here, so give me a like at Unfiltered on Facebook and you can get all of my input.