The Mug Club at the new Iron Hill in Maple Shade is already proving to be a great deal. The ceramic mug you get when you join is probably enough to offset at least $10 out of the $35 membership fee, and then you also get 24 oz beers for the price of a pint as long as you maintain your membership every year. If you figure on $6 per beer, you’re effectively saving $3 every round, which means you’ve broken even after 8 1/3 beers.

That should have already been enough to justify joining, but then Iron Hill held their first Mug Club Party this past Saturday, offering free appetizers, t-shirts, door prizes, and an exclusive beer tasting to any Mug Club member who cared to partake. If they keep throwing these shindigs every quarter like they’re promising, then the club will prove to be an even more tremendous value than we expected.

Mind you, we’re under no illusions that we’re spending less money by being in the Mug Club, but it sure feels that way. We just prefer to, you know, downplay the fact that we’re going out for beer twice as often as we normally would.

It’s a pretty brilliant strategy, and almost resembles a sort of perverse bonds program. From our perspective, we buy into the program for a nominal fee, and essentially get a larger payout from it the longer we stay invested. For Iron Hill, though, they’ve effectively convinced the public to pay them for the opportunity to spend money there more often.

Genius.

Head brewer, Chris, serving the ravenous hoards.

Commentary aside, there were two exclusive beer offerings at the party, available only to Mug Club members. The first was a Cherry Vanilla Porter, aged on whole Mexican vanilla beans and concentrated sour Montmorency cherry juice from King Orchards in Michigan. It tasted like Cherry Garcia. They also had a grotesque chimera of a beer called Entirely Inappropriate, which was made by priming Octoberfest with actively fermenting Tripel wort in a firken, and then dry hopping it with Amarillo hops. I bet it was delicious, but unfortunately, the last person to get to try it was the guy in front of me in line.

The beers were not free, but the food was. At the far end of the bar area, the staff had set up a spread of hummus with feta and tapenade, nachos, and HUGE, inch-thick sweet potato fries with dipping sauce.

'Twas of the tasty persuasion.

The party was capped off with a very limited tasting of a 2003 bottle of Barleywine. Throw a steak into a cage of hungry lions, and you’ll get an idea of how this played out, but those who held their hand out quickly enough (I managed it twice, once for me and once for Mel) were treated to a smooth, complex elixir of malt and alcohol that had clearly weathered the last six years in that bottle with great enthusiasm.

Theoretically, one could have spent $7 that afternoon on an entire, albeit not very healthy, meal, but once we were in the door, it was pretty hard to resist the siren’s call of a juicy burger, a portabella mushroom sandwich, and a growler of IPA for the ride home, proving once again that the best way to get people to part with their money is to make them pay for the privilege.

Brewpubs, Opinion, Restaurants 1 Comment »

Back in May, we talked about my experiment mixing gin with our Tripel, and how wonderfully wonderful it was. We were inspired to try brewing a tripel with juniper and rosemary, and that happened yesterday:

23 August 2009
Ginpel
Extract w/ grains
5 gallons, 60 minute boil, 30 minute steep

5.0 lbs Pilsner Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
4.0 lbs Pilsner Liquid Malt Extract (15 min)
2.0 lbs Demerara sugar (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 15L
1.0 lbs Carafoam Malt

1.00 oz Sterling Hops [7.0% AA] (60 min)
2.00 oz Sterling Hops [7.0% AA] (5 min)

1.00 oz Crushed coriander seed
1.00 oz Sweet orange peel
1.00 oz Juniper berries
0.50 oz Grains of paradise
0.50 oz Rosemary

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min – clarifier)

White Labs Trappist Ale Yeast (WLP500)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

—

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to boil.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat and add 5.0 lbs malt extract. Bring to a boil. Add bittering hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add remaining malt extract while stirring. Return to boil.

At 5 minutes, add remaining hops.

At end of boil, remove all hops. Chill wort to 75°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Decant yeast starter and pitch yeast. Aerate thoroughly. Ferment at 70-75°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Add coriander, orange peel, juniper berries, grains of paradise, and rosemary. Age for 1 – 2 weeks.

Rack to bottling bucket. Boil corn sugar with 1 c filtered water and add to beer. Mix well.

Bottle. Age for 2 – 3 weeks.

Definitely one of our odder recipes. I have a feeling the juniper and rosemary will end up being over-emphasized, but nothing ventured! *fingers crossed*

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 6 Comments »

A little over a month ago, Ray and I were given the immense privilege of sitting down to a farmhouse table with 8 other individuals — sounds nice, but no biggie, right?

Wrong.

We were dining at Talula’s Table. The same restaurant that is considered one of the five toughest reservations to get. And we have our friends Jen and Derek — the latter of whom is the mind behind The Best Food Blog Ever — to thank for it.

Now, I’m not going to regale you with what possibly was the most amazing meal of my life — not because I can’t, but because I think Derek says it infinitely better. And he took notes, so he gets the credit. But what I will tell you is how excellent an opportunity it was to bring four 22 oz bottles of our beer to a table of strangers (save J & D) and have them give us honest opinions. And these were not all necessarily beer geeks.

I had spent an afternoon of my daily train commute pouring over The Brewmaster’s Table by Garrett Oliver, comparing Talula’s menu to the book, cross-referencing and jotting notes. It wasn’t the easiest thing to pick out four perfect pairings, but I heeded Oliver’s advice, and more often than not, went with my gut. I asked myself “What would I want to drink with the Wild King Salmon, Smokey New Potato Sauce, and Red Trout Caviar? Hmmm … salmon … our Dry Humour Dry Stout should go well with that.” And it did!

Along with the stout, we brought our Bee Sting Ale, Sweetheart Kölsch and Hefe the ORC. The pairings all went surprisingly well, and both Ray and I had the chance to formally introduce each beer to the table as it was served. And that was possibly one of the coolest things I have done all year.

For an in-depth look at the evening, including descriptions of each course and the beers we brought with us, check out Derek’s post at The Best Food Blog Ever.

Pairings, Restaurants Comments Off

Welcome to The Session, a monthly event for beer and brewing bloggers! This is Session #30, for which Beer 47 writer David  have chosen the topic “Beer Desserts.”

Ahh dessert. The realm where I feel most comfortable because it’s one of my specialities — so much so that I just left my desk to go bake my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, although it doesn’t contain beer.

I have made 3 beer desserts I can recall. My first was a spice cake using Victory’s Storm King Imperial Stout, frosted with a quadrupel-spiced buttercream. I baked it for my 26th birthday, and guests seemed impressed.

We’ve made stout floats with Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Oatmeal Stout and a mocha java chip ice cream — and I think we’ve also used North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin and Stoudt’s Fat Dog.

I’ve also baked with liquid malt extract in place of molasses, creating my cherry oatmeal cookies, which were insanely good. Mmmm … cookies.

While baking my chocolate chip cookies and pondering beer desserts, I picked Ray’s brain for ideas. He thinks that any Belgian Strong, Tripel, Dubbel or Barleywine could be used with fruit somehow — so I suggested their use in a pie filling. Hmmm … a mincemeat pie dressed with a little English Barleywine in the filling? It could be delish. Ray also suggested making a reduction of a beer with some brown sugar and serving it over warmed fruit, with a spot of fresh whipped cream.

As for desserts we’ve ordered out, we have to tip our hats to the folks at Dogfish Head. We have shared the  Chocolate Chicory Stout Cheesecake, which interestingly enough, is made with blue cheese and is insanely rich, and we have also shared the DFH Stout Sundae, which consists of vanilla ice cream, Chicory Stout chocolate sauce, whipped cream, and a hop-infused brownie.

What I think is important to consider when creating a beer dessert is that you must have a plan of action for dealing with the bitterness. Balance is crucial. If you’re going to reduce a beer for a sauce, you don’t want to reduce it to an unappetizing sticky mess.

So I think this might mean no IPA-infused cookies. Nevertheless, I’m sure there’s a place for bright, grassy beers, just maybe not dessert.

Breweries, Brewpubs, Pairings, Recipes, Restaurants, The Session 4 Comments »