Hefeweizen was one of the first styles I was exposed to when I first started exploring good beer at the Iron Hill in Newark, Delaware. It’s a sweet German wheat beer brewed with a strain of yeast that produces lots of banana and clove flavors. This particular strain does not readily settle out of suspension, and the beer is served unfiltered, giving hefeweizen a cloudy appearance and a thick, bready body. It’s a great springtime beer, but the big body and above-average alcohol (depending on the brewer) make it less suitable for hot summer days, making it more appropriate at sunset. Or, well, sunrise, too. I’m not here to judge.

We got adventurous again with this recipe. We’d wanted to explore dried fruit for a while, so we’ll be adding raisins and dried cranberries to the beer during a two-week secondary fermentation. We’ll then transfer the beer to a tertiary fermenter, wringing the raisins and cranberries out to reclaim all of the beer that gets absorbed into them, and age it with orange peel and a lot of coriander. There’s going to be a big danger of oversweetening the beer with all of that fruit, so we’re using a bit more bittering hops than you’d normally see in a hefe (actually, we’re doubling it).

3 May 2009
Hefe the ORC
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
4.0 lbs Wheat Malt Extract (60 min)
2.o lbs Orange Blossom Honey (15 min)

0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Amarillo Hops [8.4% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (15 min)
0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (1 min)
0.50 oz Amarillo Hops [8.4% AA] (1 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (1 min)
0.50 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (1 min)

1.0 lbs Raisins
1.0 lbs Dried cranberries

2.0 oz Sweet orange peel
2.0 oz Crushed coriander

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min – clarifier)

White Labs Hefeweizen Ale yeast (WLP380)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

—

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

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

Turn off heat, add malt extract. Bring back to a boil. Add 60 minute hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add orange blossom honey. Stir until dissolved. Return to boil. Add 15 minute hops.

At 1 minute, add 1 minute hops.

At end of boil, remove all hops. Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer over raisins and dried cranberries to secondary fermenter. Age for 2 weeks.

Rack to tertiary fermenter. Recover raisins and cranberries from secondary fermenter and squeeze absorbed beer into tertiary fermenter. Add orange peel and coriander. Age for 2 weeks.

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

Bottle. Age for 2 weeks.

The hopping schedule is needlessly complicated because we had a bunch of leftover hops that we just wanted to use up. Normally you’d just use something neutral like Sterling for all of your hopping.

We weren’t able to find dried cranberries that did not have added sugar. You may have better luck, but after consulting with our adviser, we concluded that the small amount of sugar on the cranberries would have no significant impact.

You might be wondering why we’re adding the coriander after fermentation is complete instead of during the boil. We’ve boiled it in the past, but the flavor has always been nonexistent in the final result. We’re guessing that the coriander flavors are volatile enough to be carried away by the CO2 released during primary fermentation, so we’re going to wait until all of that destructive effervescence is done first.

This will be a HUGE morale boost for us if it’s successful. Our previous attempts at getting a little trippy with our recipes have been a bit disappointing, but we have a really good feeling about this one. Neither one of us is especially crazy about adhering too strictly to the established styles, though we certainly understand how important it is to know them to give you a metric to hone your skills against. I guess this is just what happens when you put two creatives together and tell them to have fun. We could fart out a Reinheitsgebotized hefe if we wanted to, because proven recipes are so easy to come by, but isn’t it a bigger test of skill if you can make a train cross the continent without even touching the rail?

Regardless, we’ve got a pound of crow ready to roast if this does end up exploding in our faces.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Comments Off

Welcome to The Session, a monthly event for beer and brewing bloggers! This is Session #27, for which Beer at Joe’s writers Joe and Jasmine has chosen the topic, “Beer Cocktails: Beyond the Black & Tan”.

This is probably going to be the shortest Session post ever. I call it a Ginpel. Ready? Add a shot of gin to some tripel. Imbibe.

I’ll wait until you’ve picked yourself back up off the floor.

Let’s make it official with a formal recipe:

Ginpel

Ingredients:
2 oz gin
12 oz Belgian style tripel

Pour tripel vigorously over gin to raise a good head. Drink. Seek local non-profit organization to help you recover.

The first time I did this, I used our homebrewed tripel and Dogfish Head Jin. Dogfish makes the best gin ever, but unfortunately it’s almost impossible to find if you don’t live in Delaware or South Jersey. We’ve only ever seen it at their brewpub in Rehoboth Beach, ourselves.

What makes their gin special, apart from the spelling, is the use of rosemary, pineapple mint, and green peppercorns in addition to the usual juniper berries, giving it a crisp mix of citrusy and spicy flavors, and also making it immensely fragrant. All of these qualities blend superbly with the sweet and fruity tripel.

If all you have on hand is regular gin, the cocktail will still taste good, but it might pay to steep some of your gin with the missing herbs and spices for a few days, at least if you can find them. Pineapple mint and green peppercorns will probably be difficult to locate, but I’m betting regular mint and black or white peppercorns will be a decent approximation. If anything, you should be adding a branch of rosemary to every bottle of gin you bring home anyway.

Okay, so I guess that wasn’t as short as I thought it would be.

This discovery inspired us to try adding juniper and rosemary to our next batch of tripel. We’ll probably do it in August or September, so keep an eye out for that.

Recipes, The Session 3 Comments »

I’m sure a number of you do not have fond childhood memories of bee stings. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of them are horrifying, or at least they were when you were 5.

Nevertheless, I have come to terms with bees — in spite of being stung numerous times. I don’t plan on going all “Lil’Kim Queen Bee” anytime soon, but the reality is that my name — Melissa — is Greek for “honeybee.”

Couple my newfound interest in bees with the recent March/April BYO article I read — “Club Profile: Barossa Brewers Club” — I came across Barossa Valley Brewing’s Bee Sting, which is a honey wheat beer. The name inspired me, and I wanted to make my own Bee Sting Ale, not a clone. I came up with the idea of focusing on the “bee” and the “sting.” For the bee, I wanted to use honey to bring about a dry sweetness, and for the sting, I wanted something with zip — leading me to choose the peppery, earthy seeds of paradise. And there you have it!

12 April 2009
Bee Sting Ale
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

5.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
2.0 lbs Orange Blossom Honey (15 min)

Specialty Grains:
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 15L

1.0 oz Chinook Hops [11.1% AA] (60 min)
1.0 oz Amarillo Hops [8.2% AA] (15 min)
3.0 g Seeds of Paradise, crushed (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs California Ale Yeast WLP001

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter 2-3 days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract. Bring back to a boil. Add Chinook hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add orange blossom honey. Stir until dissolved. Return to boil. Add Amarillo hops.

At 5 minutes, add seeds of paradise

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. 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 two weeks.

So far the beer has a wonderful flavor, with Chinook’s grapefruit coming out to play with the Amarillo’s citrus notes. When we racked the beer we noticed that the zip of the seeds of paradise wasn’t quite there yet, so we created a seeds of paradise extract to be added when we bottle (We’ll update the recipe here once we know how much extract is needed). Honestly, I’m happy with the sample I had after racking, but it’s not a true representation of my idea of a bee sting — it’s all bee, and not enough sting. I think the extract will help us bring up the sting, while still being refreshing.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 4 Comments »

After trying to summon my inner Dogfish Head and it not quite working (not Sam’s fault … just mine and my inability to differentiate between 8 oz by weight and 8 oz by volume), I decided that my next recipe would be a little simpler and more classic.

15 March 2009
Sweetheart Kölsch
5 gallons, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Pilsen Light Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)
2.0 lbs Wheat Dried Malt Extract (60 min)

2.0 oz Vanguard Hops [54.4% AA] (60 min)
1.0 oz Sterling Hops [6% AA] (5 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs German Ale/Kölsch Yeast WLP029

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Bring to a boil. Turn off heat and add liquid and dry malt extracts while stirring.

Bring back to a boil. Add Vanguard hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 5 minutes, add Sterling hops

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 60-65°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. 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 two weeks.

Originally, since I like being witty and giving things weird names, I wanted to come up with an alliterative name for the kölsch. I had already come across one named Kölnnel Klink Kölsch, which I thought was pretty darn klever (ha! I crack myself up). The closest I came was calling my brew the Kurnitz Kölsch, after Grandma Kurnitz, the character I played in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers. However, Grandma Kurnitz is extremely bitter and harsh, and that’s not what I was going for in my kölsch, so I renamed it the Sweetheart Kölsch, under the guise that you would share a bottle or two with your sweetheart. Collective “Aw!” on the count of 3 … 2 … 1 … oh nevermind. Back to the beer.

We just recently bottled this beer, so a tasting post should be around the bend in a week or two. My hope is that this beer is balanced and refreshing. Sure, it might not make you fall off your seat with a burst of flavor, but at least you’ll stay seated with no beer spilled.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 5 Comments »

Y’know, maybe this simple recipe malarkey is overrated. Let’s get creative again.

I am (in)famous within our social circle for my love of all beers Belgian — quite a shame, I’m sure you can agree, thanks to the vulgarity of it.

Belgian-style Dubbel is a dark amber ale, a bit on the strong side (up to 7.5% ABV), and usually sweet and fruity, often sporting subtle plum and dried fruit notes, with just a touch of roasted malt to round the whole thing out. Hop character is generally subdued, providing a careful balance against the malt.

Sass that, I thought to myself when I started to write this recipe. Spring would be arriving by the time this beer was ready, so I knew we were going to be in the mood for a nice hoppy quaff. Bearing that in mind, I decided it might be fun to take the plummy sweetness and hints of chocolate found in a Dubbel and see how they would play against a bit more hop bitterness and some pronounced spicy hop flavor and aroma. On the same vein, with the weather warming up, a high gravity beer would become less and less satisfying with each passing day, so we targeted a lower starting gravity of about 1.050 instead of the usual 1.060 – 1.070 range.

Vanguard and Sterling both impart a pleasant hop spice to a beer, so those were our first choices. Our goal with the hops was to have a fairly pronounced flavor and aroma, but without too much bitterness, so you’ll notice our early hop additions are pretty light.

As for malt, pilsner malt extract tends to result in a very light body and color with a bit of residual sweetness. Some candi sugar should dry that out. Meanwhile, we’ll also add some Caravienne for its caramel, Special Roast for its nutty biscuit flavors and deep orange color, and Chocolate for its roasty cocoa character and a bit more color. In the end, we should end up with a lot of malt complexity for such a light bodied beer, backing up some strong hop notes.

This was also our first dry hopped beer. Dry hopping involves adding hops to a finished beer and letting them steep cold for a week or two. This adds a very distinct hop aroma. “Dry Hop” is also the name of my Rock Band band.

31 January 2009
Hoppy Dubbel
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

5.00 lbs Pilsner Malt Extract (60 min)
1.00 lbs Belgian Candi Sugar Amber (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
0.50 lbs Caravienne Malt
0.50 lbs Special Roast
0.25 lbs Chocolate Malt

0.50 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (60 min)
0.50 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (60 min)
0.75 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (15 min)
0.75 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (15 min)
0.75 oz Sterling Hops [6.0% AA] (dry hop)
0.75 oz Vanguard Hops [4.4% AA] (dry hop)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Belgian Style Saison Ale Yeast Blend (WLP 568)

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter at least three days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract and candi sugar while stirring. Continue stirring until candi sugar is dissolved.

Bring to a boil. Add bittering hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, add flavor hops.

Chill wort to below 70°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion, starting at 65 – 70°F and allowing the temperature to rise to 80 – 85°F over two to three weeks.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. Add dry hops. 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 two weeks.

The yeast in this recipe is notoriously fickle. Saison yeast tends to take several days to start working, and will sometimes stop dead in its tracks after a week only to start up again another week later. The key with these idiots is patience. I’m not talking long red light patience here, either. More like airport security line the Friday after Thanksgiving patience. Take gravity readings every day after the first week. If the fermentation stops before it should, leave it be. It should wake up again. You might try pointing a space heater at the fermenter to get the yeast riled back up. If there’s a lot of sediment, it also can’t hurt to gently stir the beer with the handle of your (sanitized!) brewing spoon, but be careful to avoid splashing so you don’t introduce any oxygen into the beer (there should be a blanket of CO2 over the beer anyway, so don’t worry if a little bit of splashing occurs).

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Comments Off

Our last three or four brews were a bit… out there. Successful, mind you, but generally inspired by muses who like their jobs too much.

And so, we dialed it back a notch for our January brew session, creating a recipe for a low alcohol dry Irish stout.

4 January 2009
Dry Irish Stout
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

4.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Black Roasted Barley
0.5 lbs Black Patent Malt
1.0 lbs English Brown Malt
0.5 lbs Crystal Malt 75L

2.0 oz British Kent Goldings Hops [5.7% AA] (60 min)

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Irish Ale Yeast WLP004

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add 3 gallons of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract while stirring.

Bring to a boil. Add hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

Chill wort to below 80°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 65 – 70°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. 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 two weeks.

Easy, hands-off boils like this one are so refreshing.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes Comments Off

Out of my brewing group, I think I’m the only non-engineer. Numbers? Science? Pshaw … I want ass-kicking flavor and a nose that will tickle the fantasies of your olfactory glands. Sure, you can get that with very precise and measured recipe writing, and honestly that’s admirable. As much as I am a baker (where measurements are important) I’m an experimenter, and I like throwing in a little bit of this and that.

Perhaps I might be taking after entrepreneur and brewer extraordinaire Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, who in his book Brewing Up a Business recalls his great grandmother during the discussion of his first brew: “…my great grandmother … was known in her town for making the best sausage using only pinches and handfuls to measure. I felt comfortable trusting my judgment and it actually worked well.”

A little less than a month ago, I sat down to write my first recipe, after following many of Ray’s innovative and successful endeavors (I swear, nothing beats that Tripel we brewed!). I knew what I wanted to brew, and I knew the flavors I wanted to bring forth, but how to get to that point took a little time. I started with Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing, reading about the style I was interested in and making notes about a few of the recipes Papazian recommended. Though I wasn’t interested in copying one of his recipes, it was a great place to begin. I also googled the type of beer I wanted to brew — I know I’m being elusive, but I want the recipe to be a surprise — to see if anyone else had attempted it. I had some luck with forums, getting a few ideas for ingredients. Then, it was off to our handy-dandy brewing software, Beer Alchemy.

I find Beer Alchemy to be user-friendly, and quite honestly a whole post could be written about it (Maybe if you ask Ray nicely he’ll write about it.). With MoreBeer.com open, I could search for malts, hops, adjuncts and yeasts, getting an idea of what the site stocked, and then analyze what certain ingredients would do in the recipe. It can be fascinating how an extra ounce or two of malts or hops can make a difference in SRM or IBUs.

Just the other day we received our shipment of the ingredients for my recipe as well as Ray’s next one for January. I’m excited — look for a post on December 8  — and I will try my hardest to not add a pinch of this and a scoop of that. Our digital scale will be my friend.

Opinion, Recipes Comments Off

Remarkably, we are not brewing a pumpkin beer this year.

The weather is getting cold (not to mention characteristically unpredictable) over here in South Jersey, and it won’t be long before we’re all huddled under blankets in front of our open ovens. It’s time to brew something warm!

This month, we’ve put together an apple beer loaded with spices and sweetness. We don’t expect it to be especially alcoholic, but the 6.5% ABV that we’re shooting for should still be pleasantly warming. Factor in the 40% cider wort, mix in a little luck, and we should end up with something like a nice, hot apple pie to get us through Jersey’s bitter January. Except it’s beer and it’s cold.

One unique thing about this recipe is that it doesn’t really fit into a specific style. We based the recipe loosely on the Red Ale style, but there are also elements of Scotch Ale. That and it’s obviously also a fruit beer, which is what it’d be entered under in a competition. Basically, this beer is a monstrosity and a perversion of nature. And here’s how to make it:

30 October 2008
Winter Red Apple Ale
5 gallons, 30 minute steep, 60 minute boil

5.0 lbs Ultralight Liquid Malt Extract (60 min)

Specialty Grains:
1.0 lbs Crystal Malt 120L
1.0 lbs CaraRed Malt
0.5 lbs CaraFoam Malt
0.25 lbs Chocolate Malt

1 lb 8 oz Wildflower Honey (15 min)

2.0 oz Willamette Hops [3.9% AA] (60 min)

2 gal Apple Cider
3.0 lbs Granny Smith Apples, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2.0 lbs Gala Apples, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch pieces
3 Whole Cinnamon Sticks
1 Whole Nutmeg, chopped
1 oz Ginger Root, peeled and chopped
1 oz Coriander Seed, crushed

1 tablet Whirlfloc (20 min — clarifier)

White Labs Irish Ale Yeast WLP004

4 oz corn sugar (bottling)

———

Create a yeast starter two days in advance.

Add cider and 1 gallon of water to kettle. Heat to 155°F.

Steep grains at 155°F for 30 minutes.

Remove grains, turn off heat, add malt extract while stirring.

Bring to a boil. Add hops.

At 20 minutes, add Whirlfloc tablet.

At 15 minutes, turn off heat. Add honey while stirring. Add apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger root, and coriander.

Return to boil for remaining 15 minutes.

Chill wort to below 80°F. Rack to fermenter and dilute to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast starter and aerate thoroughly. Allow to ferment to completion at 65 – 70°F.

Rack fermented beer to secondary fermenter. 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 two weeks.

One important note: Do not use apple cider that has preservatives in it. The preservatives will either kill or severely inhibit the yeast. You’ll most likely have to go to either Wholefoods or a farmer’s market to get un-preserved cider. Get an extra gallon while you’re there, to prepare for the eventuality of you drinking a lot of it before you can get to brewing.

For the apples, we were shooting for a slightly tart apple character, so we used more Granny Smiths than Galas. Taste your cider beforehand and adjust your apple selections to your liking. You may want to use many different apples to give the beer lots of apple complexity. My style, personally, is to focus on one or two flavors and really showcase them (which is also why I tend to write recipes with only one breed of hop). Some people like to mix it up. Do what makes you happy. Pet a kitty. Give hugs.

Honeywise, your best bet is to take a ride to your local farmer’s market. The honey you can get at the supermarket is perfectly valid, but you’ll probably find that you get higher quality stuff from local farmers. Ours came from the agricultural prodigies at Griggstown Quail Farm.

A couple more tips: Instead of trying to chop the nutmeg, wrap it in paper towel and hit it with a mallet. Try to resist the urge to stuff your nose in the freshly smashed nutmeg. You won’t be able to. It’s intoxicating, I tell you. For the coriander, pulse it in a coffee grinder for a few seconds.

Something we’re trying differently this time: All of our beers so far have come out with a lot of fruity esters. It’s yummy in most cases, but in the stout, for example, it was completely out of place. These esters are the result of the temperature in our bathroom where we keep our fermenters; warmer fermentations produce more esters. To try to contain this, at my brother-in-law Tim’s, recommendation, we filled the bathtub up with a few inches of water, set the fermenter in the water, and covered it with a wet towel. Tim says this should lower our fermentation temperature by a good 10 degrees. He’s smart.

Homebrewing, Our Brew Days, Recipes 2 Comments »

Wait … what the heck is LME you’re asking? “The London Metal Exchange? That doesn’t make any sense. Did she sit down and have some cookies with the exchange? And if she did, then wouldn’t they be called biscuits?”

Ahem, anyway, LME is known as liquid malt extract. Since we are not all-grain brewers, we rely on LME for our beers. We had some leftover after brewing the stout, so I put the leftover away until I could stick it in something. LME is somewhat similar to molasses, so I found a new oatmeal cookie recipe that stems from WWII when brown sugar was rationed and molasses was used more readily in cookies.

I must say, I am really happy with how these cookies turned out. The recipe does not call for spices, so I kept it that way — I have a separate recipe for spiced oatmeal raisin cookies — but in lieu of raisins I decided to use the dried cherries I had leftover from a chocolate cherry stromboli I made ages ago.

You could really smell the LME in the batter, and anyone who has sampled LME before could pick out its distinct flavor in the batter. The cookies are also thick with oatmeal — 2 cups — so as Ray said, it gives you plenty to chaw on.

The finished cookie has a great oatmeal texture, the cherries are a nice substitute for raisins, and the LME worked as a great sweetener/molasses substitute. If you have some leftover LME of your own (or molasses I suppose), then check out the recipe below, I think you’ll dig it!

Ingredients:
2 cups flour
2 cups oatmeal
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup (1.5 sticks) unsalted butter
2 eggs
5 tbsp LME or molasses
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup dried cherries

Directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F
2. In a medium to large bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt and oatmeal.
3. In a large bowl, blend together softened butter and granulated sugar until creamy. Add the vanilla, LME, and eggs. Slowly mix in the dry ingredients.
4. Cover baking sheets with parchment paper. Drop batter onto the paper by the teaspoonful, fitting 12 cookies to a sheet.
5. Bake for 10 minutes. Let the cookies rest for a moment before placing them on a wire rack to cool. Yields roughly 48 cookies.

Also, we also managed to score River Horse’s latest Brewer’s Reserve, the Imperial Cherry Amber Ale. I found that sipping it after tasting the batter left a hoppy taste in my mouth; however, sipping the beer after a nibble of cookie did not do the same thing. Weird. Nonetheless, the cookie and beer pair well.

The great texture and balanced chewyness make these cookies addicting!

Craft Beer, Pairings, Recipes 1 Comment »

Jerk is weird and wonderful. On its own, the word Jerk traditionally refers to the style of Jamaican cooking in which meats are given a dry-rub of Jamaican Jerk Spice, a hot-as-all-hell mixture of allspice and Scotch bonnet peppers (a breed of habanero, the most feared pepper in the world), and then dried over smoke. In the North, Jerk is usually cooked, instead of dried, over a hot grill. The mixture of the cinnamony, nutmegy, clovey allspice with the eye-watering heat of the Scotch bonnet creates a fantastic and unique contrast between dessert spice and hot spice.

All of that heat makes Jerk a perfect summertime style (sweating = cooling off), and also an ideal pairing with a roasty stout or a well-hopped Imperial IPA. For this recipe, I used my version Jerk seasoning in a grilled chicken pizza. Steph also had the crazy idea of substituting pureed roasted red peppers in place of pizza sauce, which turned out to be delicious.

I am just now remembering that I forgot to take a picture of the final results, which makes me sad and remorseful. If I make this again and I remember to take a picture, I’ll update this post.

So, recipe time:

1lb pizza dough

Pizza sauce:
12 oz jar of roasted red peppers, drained
1 Scotch bonnet pepper (substitute a jalapeño if you don’t want to chance an encounter with a habanero)
2 tbsp skim milk
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp ground black pepper
1/2 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp dried basil

Toppings:
1 lb chicken breast
1 c lime juice
1 c apple cider vinegar
3 tbsp Tabasco sauce
3/4 c chopped scallions
12 oz mozzarella cheese, grated

Jerk seasoning:
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp dried thyme
2 tbsp allspice
1 tbsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp salt

———

Mix the lime juice, vinegar, and Tabasco. Marinate the chicken for at least 8 hours, preferably 24 – 48 hours.

In a grill, prepare a searing hot flame. You should not be able to hold your hand over it for more than two or three seconds.

Remove the chicken from the marinade and grill for about 5 minutes per side, until charred on both sides. If it takes any longer than a few minutes to char a side, do not continue trying or the meat will become overcooked. Set chicken aside to cool.

Preheat oven to 500°F.

While the chicken cools, prepare the sauce: Drain the red peppers. Slice and seed the Scotch bonnet (wear gloves). In a food processor, blend the peppers together with the skim milk and spices until smooth.

Spread the pizza dough over a 16″ pizza pan. Spread a thin, even layer of sauce over the dough.

Prepare the Jerk seasoning: Mix together onion powder, thyme, allspice, black pepper, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and salt.

Roughly cut the chicken (use a steak knife and tongs) into 1/2″ pieces. Toss well in a mixing bowl with the Jerk seasoning. Spread evenly over the sauce along with the scallions. Finally, spread the grated mozzarella cheese over the pizza.

Bake at 500°F for 5 – 10 minutes, until crust is golden brown.

Serves 4.

I went ahead and substituted in the jalapeño for the habanero. Surprisingly, I think I could actually take the heat, but I have sensitive skin and didn’t want to risk exposing it to the inside of the habanero. Maybe I’ll try it next time if I remember to get a glove.

The roasted red pepper sauce proved to be a perfect mix of bitterness and mellow sweetness to counter the heat of the Jerk seasoning. We also mixed the leftover sauce into a tomato sauce the next day. I’d like to find more uses for this.

I personally felt that the seasoning was a little too hot, so you might consider toning down the cayenne just a little bit, or omitting the habanero/jalapeño. Everyone else who tried the pizza thought it was good as it was, though, so you might also consider leaving everything as is. Basically, this paragraph was not worth writing. Oopsie!

We all paired this with Heavy Seas’ Red Sky At Night Saison, an unusually — and pleasantly — sweet and citrusy Saison, with almost none of the funk that one usually associates with the style (which I almost see as a strike against it, actually). It was great to have in between bites of the pizza — the citrus did a lot to help extinguish the heat, even despite the heat-exacerbating carbonation. I’d like to try this again against either a Hefeweizen or a big IPA.

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