Choosing the Right Beer for a Recipe
With the wide array of styles available, you need to make a choice about which beer to use in a recipe. Although the everyday, light-bodied, commercial lagers generally do fine, they obviously don’t add [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Roasted Garlic and Onion Soup Recipe
The mellow, flavorful Brown Ale can be a delightful addition to a rich, hearty garlic and onion soup. You can roast additional heads of garlic for future use: Simply freeze the unpeeled heads in a well-sealed [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Beer Batter Extraordinaire Recipe
This beer batter can be used to crisp and coat meats, fish, vegetables — anything savory you’d like to deep fry. It’s best used immediately after being prepared, so be sure to have the food being battered [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Beer-Glazed Focaccia Recipe
This recipe makes the chewiest, fullest-flavored focaccia around, made just for beer lovers. You can follow the first five steps to prepare dough, or buy frozen bread dough, thaw it, pat it into a 1/2-inch-thick [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Chile con Carne Recipe
Adding beer — in this case Vienna, Märzen, or Oktoberfest, but the choices are plentiful — to your chili can make the flavors more complex and robust. Try serving this chili with garnishes of sharp cheddar [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Brewers Pulled Beef Recipe
This simple-to-prepare barbecue of succulent shredded beef steeped in a deep, beer-enhanced barbecue sauce should be piled high on big sourdough buns and served with your best coleslaw. [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Arizona Quiche Recipe
Beer and quiche? Why not! But this isn’t your regular high-brow quiche; it’s filled with spicy-hot chilies, peppers and creamy Jack cheese. Quiches aren’t the lightest fare, but if you’d like a lighter [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Hot-n-Spicy Chicken with E-Z Garlic Sauce
Marinating meats in beer (or other alcoholic beverages) is nothing new, but this hot and spicy chicken recipe includes beer both in the marinade and in the sauce. [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Bayou Shrimp Recipe
Although they don’t necessarily come from the same neighborhood, the robust taste of a Stout or Porter can blend well with the rich flavors of Cajun food. Serve this shrimp with lots of chilled brew [more…]
Cooking with Beer: Chocolate Stout Silk Pie Recipe
It’s not unusual to find liquor in the list of ingredients for a dessert (Bananas Foster, Cherries Jubilee, Bourbon Bread Pudding, even alcoholic whipped cream), but you might not think of adding beer. [more…]
Microbrewing Gains Attention — and a Following
When craft brewers (also known as microbrewers) first came on the scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just about everyone ignored them. Consumers didn’t take them very seriously, and as far as the [more…]
Canadian Beer Brewing
Canada’s brewing roots are just about as old and well established as those in the United States. Actually, much of Canada’s history is intertwined with American history because the Great White North was [more…]
Drinking Beer in Beer Bars
In Ireland, the United Kingdom, and most of western and central Europe, the pub culture is still intact. Many pubs and taverns are quaint, quiet places where you can comfortably enjoy a drink with the [more…]
Drinking Beer with Dinner in a Restaurant
Usually, a restaurant is an unlikely place to find a good beer. Wine has always been, and still is, the conceptual favorite for food and drink pairing. But now there’s hope. More and more often, you can [more…]
Celebrating at Beer Festivals
Beer lovers love to celebrate beer. Craft beer fests seem to be popping up wherever a small collection of brewpubs or microbreweries exists. Can it be that beer is a good social lubricant? Something to [more…]
Beer Festival Dos and Don’ts
There’s an etiquette for everything. Any veteran of local, regional, and national beer festivals has a mental list of dos and don’ts to maximize enjoyment and learning at beer festivals. [more…]
Drinking Beer in Germany
Few people are aware that beer in Germany is very localized. Because of the number of breweries, and in particular the number of breweries per capita, Germany is pretty well saturated with beer on a local [more…]
Drinking Beer in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom is the ale stronghold of the world. Similar to the U.S. brewing industry, a handful of large, national breweries dominate the market, but several hundred brewpubs, micros, and regional [more…]
Drinking Beer in Ireland
Ironically, though well known for both its wonderful pub culture (the tales! the music!) and internationally successful brewers Guinness, Murphy, and Beamish, Ireland doesn’t have many breweries, museums [more…]
Mexican Beer Brewing
Mexican beer is far from glamorous; it’s never been considered much more than another thirst-quenching beverage in a hot and parched country. But a number of major and craft beer brands are available. [more…]
Pairing Beer with Food
Although vintage wines and aged spirits can boast of a long companionship with haute cuisine, beer — until recently in some places — is often relegated to the backyard barbecue. But that’s wrong. Beer [more…]
Choosing the Right Barrels for Brewing Beer
The whole point of having beer in contact with wood is for the beer to pick up some of the aroma and flavor characteristics of the wood. Additionally, if the beer is aged in a barrel that previously held [more…]
Creating New Beer Flavors with Old Beer Barrels
Today’s beer brewers realize that much can be gained by aging their beers in barrels that once held other fermented beverages. They also realize that barrel aging isn’t an exact science; in fact, it’s [more…]
Getting Started with Extreme Beers
As part of the beer brewing process, malted barley undergoes a mashing process that leeches out the grain’s fermentable sugar, or maltose. Maltose is then converted to alcohol by the yeast during fermentation [more…]
Monastic Brews and Extreme Beers
Religious orders have been brewing beer in Europe since the Middle Ages. These monastic brews are always widely praised and prized but often misunderstood — mostly due to their origins. Many people believe [more…]
