Whether you’re a first-time brewer or a pro honing your chops, there’s always more to learn. Here’s how to go from the back of the bar to the head of the class, from a round-up of top brewing schools, to books for learning more about beer and some tips for becoming a better beer advocate.
The notion of cooking with beer has certainly overcome taboo, but it has yet to completely trounce its reputation as being unfit for food. Five of the country’s best beer chefs share their recipes.
In brewing, it’s the yeast, as we know, that turns sugars into our beloved alcohol; in beer bread, this alcohol is burned off in the baking process, but the end result is an extremely practical bread that perfectly captures the slight sweetness and yeasty, malty appeal of beer.
Designed to shake martinis, the humdrum, standard-issue pint glass seems woefully inadequate as beer’s catch-all vessel. So Jim Koch hired a company to come up with a solution.
Anton Schwarz, the Bohemian immigrant and editor of The American Brewer until his death in 1895, racked up more geek cred in a few years than any of us could in a lifetime.
At Boston’s Publick House, beer turns up everywhere: in sauces, in condiments and dressings, and as a marinade. Try your hand at adding flavor to chili with Stone’s Arrogant Bastard Ale.
For us regular folk, cooking with beer has always been fair game. A few cans of Bud may serve as a delicious, industry-standard sauce for simmering fresh mussels; and any ale can lend a comforting, yeasty tang to a sturdy loaf of beer bread.
Every time a can of beer is cracked open, it spits out a little bit of history. The can—our handy, standard, aluminum homie—has enjoyed a long and manifold history.
