Don't Cook with Expensive Beer!!!

Cooking with beer is nothing new, but the trend does seem to be taking flight as of late.  I have occasionally cringed to see recipes that use a beer that would be better put to use by drinking it -- say, making an ice cream sauce from Deschutes Abyss.   But the recent event that made today's rant inevitable was Beer Advocate's Thanksgiving installment of the Homebrew Chef, which counseled readers to brine their turkeys with 4 (four) 750 ml bottles of Allagash Tripel, and serve it up with cranberry sauce made from an even rarer Deschutes beer than Abyss:  The Dissident.

Beer can chicken is one thing, but soaking a turkey in $40-$50 worth of beer which then has to be dumped down the drain is just sick.  And no matter what your opinion is on extremely sour American takes on Belgian ales, can you see opening a bottle which is nearly impossible to get hold of right now, and pouring it into cranberry sauce?

Look, if you find that beer adds a flavorful dimension to your cooking, that's great.  But suppose a recipe calls for red wine.  Are you going to add 2 cups of Châteauneuf-du-Pape to it?  No, because it's an insult to a wine of that quality, not to mention a silly waste of money.  You'll use a good-enough table wine, and your food won't be any worse for it.

I suppose a Deschutes chef cooking with Abyss is just using what he has on hand, though I don't think the dish would have suffered any from the use of the less costly Obsidian Stout instead.  Here's a picture of Alan Sprints whipping up some chocolate-raspberry sorbet that includes some Hair of the Dog Adam.  It's not a cheap beer, but he's the brewer and it's what he's got.  Even so, I doubt he would pull out some of his barrel-aged creations and give them the same treatment.  [Oops! Matt points out in a comment below that Alan has made cheesecakes and ice creams with Cherry Adam from the Wood.  Now I don't have to feel so bad for making him the expensive-beer-cooking poster boy.]

I'm not the first person to inveigh against the evils of cooking with rare beer  Here's a year-old blog post from across the pond that gets it about right:  "Sometimes, it seems the point is to impress with big beer names. Regardless of the impact it actually has on the dish’s flavour."   There are also a couple of quasi-sensible comments about it on the Beer Advocate turkey-brining fiasco mentioned above.

Respect beer: don't cook with the rare stuff!

Beer Advocate Loves Portland

First the New York Times got a huge crush on us, and now Beer Advocate.  Have you noticed that three of the last four BA magazine covers feature Portland beer people?

• #56: Ryan Schmiege (Deschutes Portland Pub)
• #57: Geoff Phillips and the gang at Bailey's Taproom
• #59: Eric Bottero (Bazi Bierbrasserie)

The picture of Ryan was taken when he was working in Bend, but he's been brewing in Portland for more than a year.

The New York Times has been all over Portland for a few years now, especially for our food carts and restaurants.  But when they published a gushing review of Portland barbershops -- including Bart's Barbershop, where I get shorn every few months -- I knew their infatuation had crossed the line into weird obsession.  The picture of Bazi manager Bottero mixing a beer cocktail creeps me out in a similar way.  I don't mean any offense to Bazi by that -- it's an interesting new place -- but it doesn't seem to me to be at the forefront of beer cocktails, or even of the Portland beer scene.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it:  Find a Portland connection in the picture on the cover of Beer Advocate #58.  One of the bottles?  One of the people wandering around?