We have never talked about Beer

@fire gave these to me for my birthday this year:

Drake’s is one of my favorite breweries, but it’s hard to get their beers down here in Los Angeles. So when she visits the Bay Area, she often brings down our favorite beer to share, the Denogginizer Double IPA. It is a joy to share that beer.

This time she brought me three beers I’ve never tried, in addition to the favorite.

Reports to follow upon tasting, hopefully starting this weekend. I’m tempted to start with the Imperial Stout.

-xtien

One day I’ll get to try CBS. One day.

Here in Fresno that is now available in 6 packs. I don’t think I have seen any of the others though.

I love bourbon-barrel stouts and imperial stouts. A lot are in bigger bottles, though, which are a bit much for me, and I don’t go to bars (and all the bars around here I’m thinking are stuffed full of nothing but hipster IPAs and sours).

Same for me, man. There were a couple of tastings this weekend for it, but they were so limited I didn’t make it. It’s always held up as one of the best beers Founders has ever made, and they make some fantastic stuff. One day, indeed. :(

C’mon up to Grand Rapids next year! You’re welcome to crash on my couch.

Hey, if I ever do, trust me, we will need a beer day (or two.) I would like to do a bit of a road trip up there, taking a rental car and going around in a big square from Grand Rapids to Lansing, then Marshall, then cutting back to Kalamazoo. I’ve done a few beer trips like that, but Michigan I haven’t yet tried.

Michigan has some great beer.

Hehe cheers for the offer, I’m in the UK mind you. :)

Sometimes even a company one despises comes up with an awesome PR stunt. Well, their horses are pretty cool, too.

That’s…actually pretty neat. I mean, “dilly dilly” is dumb as fuck, and the beer is horrible (the Bud), but the town crier thing is cool.

I’ve been working my way through a six pack of this:

The espresso taste is quite bitter and overwhelming, a bit like a Starbucks dark roast coffee. Definitely not my favourite stout but fairly refreshing. If you like Starbucks dark roast then you will like this.

I made beer bread last night for a work potluck.

Made my standard Cheddar-Chive-and-Herbs mix using Sierra Nevada’s Celebration IPA and then also made a spiced cranberry-walnut sweet bread using Traveler’s Winter Shandy (spiced + orange juice). They were both a huge hit!



I am definitely making at least one of those, and soon, too. Thanks!

Maybe this is a question for the cooking thread, but do you find the beer makes a lot of difference? Whenever I cook with beer (chili, beer battered fish, etc), I never know if I’m actually accomplishing anything, or just giving myself an excuse to drink half a bottle while cooking.

It may be because I’m pretty hyper-sensitive to the bitterness in beer, but I find it makes an enormous difference, personally. To the point that some beers in some recipes can ruin things. I made beer battered fish with a strong IPA I had lying around after a party once and found the flavor to be miserable.

In something extremely intense already, like chili, it can be more subtle. In that case, you’re bigger benefit comes from “unlocking” extra flavor compounds in the tomatoes that are alcohol-soluble, but still, the added richness/depth from a heavy stout can be a nice background flavor in the same way that cracking a few ounces of intensely dark chocolate into the chili can help.

But in something like beer bread or especially beer batter? I find the flavors come through noticeably, though, again, I’m unusually sensitive to especially the bitterness from hops.

Yeah, kinda like adding a cup or so of red wine can really help enrich the richness of flavors in a beef stew, for example. It doesn’t taste like wine, but the flavor profiles get that much deeper.

Wine I get, I’ve just never really gotten it with beer. I probably just need to try stronger flavored beers.

Yeah, I mean, if ya toss a can of Bud Light into a gallon of chili, it’s probably not gonna make a big bang. But after a lot of experimentation, I can conclusively state that the only way to eat cod is enveloped in a crispy Newcastle Brown Ale-based batter swaddling.

Yeah brown ales or porters are perfect compliments to something like chili. Rich flavor without overwhelming bitterness of a double hopped IPA.

So, when you read up on beer recipes, there are a lot of methods of getting coffee into the beer. Some end up really nasty tasting, like old stale coffee, and some end up being overly bitter, because coffee is already bitter, and the brewer doesn’t compensate for added bitterness. I’ve had some really good ones, and some that just tasted nasty. Sorry to hear that this one was probably one of the latter ones.

I’ve cooked a lot with beer, but it’s a mixed bag. The hoppier it is, the harder it has been for me to cook with, but it could have just been the dish I used it in. It’s no different than cooking with wine, you get a depth of flavor that combines with the food and adds to the result. Even a light tasting beer can affect a recipe. Like a light, fizzy lager in breading for frying adds a king of airy-ness to the resulting batter. You don’t taste the beer so much as recognize that the overall breaded food tastes different without it.