December 30, 2011

Big Beers

I’d already written about celebratory homebrew (that wasn’t so celebratory), so for the holidays I decided to go with something more reliable, albeit less historic: giant beer bottles. My picks were arranged, in the paper at least, from smallest to most monumental. Fin du Monde, a house favorite and plenty punchy, seems featherweight compared to Stone’s Double Bastard, which comes in a three-liter totem, complete with a padlocked swing-top cap. You know, so you can’t sneak in a midnight tipple. I thought about sabering off the cap, like they did in the Times, but I didn’t want to waste a drop. This is beer, after all, not Champagne.

Posted by: William
in: Beer Reviews, Homebrewing
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December 05, 2011

A Morning Draft

Wintertime in the Midwest demands a warm breakfast. Waiting for your oatmeal to boil is a life-and-death situation, almost. You feel like Shackleton watching the sun come and crack the ice. Sometimes more so, if you have errands to run and left the car out of the garage.

Seventeenth-century drinker and diarist Samuel Pepys preferred a pint and some gossip to morning oatmeal—he took his breakfast at the bar. But come winter, even he took it warm. With butter.

So meeting in my way W. Swan, I took him to a house thereabouts, and gave him a morning draft of buttered ale; he telling me still much of his Fanatique stories, as if he were a great zealot, when I know him to be a very rogue.

Buttered beer isn’t my cup of tea, so to speak, so I mulled it. The nutmeg is perfect—beer gets bitterer, boiled, and you need some spice to mellow it. Just go easy. You have a long, cold day ahead.

Posted by: William
in: Recipes
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October 13, 2011

Oktober’s Best

Oktoberfest is over. First on the list of things most people don’t know about Oktoberfest (what the lids on steins are for, what a Märzen is) is the fact that it ends on the first weekend in October. Time to start training for next year.

Märzens, the official beer of the festival, brewed in March and aged cool until the fall, are still for sale, though. Here are the best of the Fest.

Posted by: William
in: Beer Reviews, Events
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August 31, 2011

Black, Light

My high school drama teacher loved Goethe (whose didn’t?) and so I avoided both of them. I didn’t know Young Werter was a beer snob. He got sick in law school and recovered, the story goes, with Schwarzbier. Tipsy and atrophied, he became a writer instead. Some bottles of Köstritzer have a picture of him on the label, pensive, opulently hatted, sudsy glass Photoshopped into his hand.

Follow his example: Drink black lager. I picked the best in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Posted by: William
in: Beer Reviews
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August 14, 2011

Jelly Man

My editor at Bon Appetit asked me to write about cooking with beer. I decided to make a day of it, starting with beer jelly on beer bread. The bread, an Irish soda bread with stout instead of buttermilk, was OK, kind of greenish, but toasted beautifully. The jelly was bitter and too lemony, but people seemed really interested in how I made it. You don’t hear about beer jelly every day, I guess. I read somewhere that it’s popular in the Czech Republic, though. Anyway, the secret is: I made beer Jell-O.

Boil some beer with, say, ginger and a little sugar, mix in gelatin, and pour into jars. Since I used gelatin instead of pectin, the jelly liquifies when it gets warm—so eat fast, especially if you spread it on toast. I’ve tried beer (and bourbon) in more traditional jellies with little luck so far. The water content screws things up.

Beer in breakfast wasn’t a total success, but I have higher hopes for my next experiment, for the WSJ: beer for breakfast.

Posted by: William
in: Recipes
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July 12, 2011

BBQ Beers

I’ve been known to fire up the grill on Christmas, so for me, outdoor cooking knows no seasonal bounds. Still, summertime grilling, and drinking, are institutions, at least in newspaper food sections. And so I wrote about them.

First, for Bon Appetit, I subjected a friend’s dinner party to the spectacle of beer-can chicken. When I say use indirect heat, I mean it. Beer will bubble out of the bird, and all over the coals. One trip to the fridge, and your chicken’s on fire. It’s a spectacle, like I said.

But what to drink while aimlessly poking the grill? I stocked the Wall Street Journal‘s ice bucket with lighter fare (a Dortmunder, a pale, a saison), the all-rounder Brooklyn Brown, and, for those whose burger is naked without bacon, a smoky rauchbier. I even got to drink some Hennepin on camera while Skyping into the Journal‘s afternoon news show. When you’re serving beer-can chicken, lingcod, steak, sea urchin, and roasted prince mushrooms, it’s good to stock a versatile bar.

Posted by: William
in: Beer Reviews
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