Until the 1980s and ’90s, wine was generally the beverage of choice served with meals in the United States. The craft beer renaissance changed this, elevating beer to a new status in social and culinary realms that allowed it a respected place at the dinner table. This has helped lead to the use of beer in cooking. It has long been standard to pour a dash of wine into a stew or a sauté. Now, chefs are increasingly doing the same with beer.
This application of beer is often as simple as making a beer batter for dunking a fish fillet or an onion ring, seen at Marin and Moylan’s brewpubs, for example. It may also involve slightly more sophisticated preparations, like Marin Brewing’s clams steamed in pale ale, and, at Iron Springs Pub and Brewery, a cobb salad with turkey brined in IPA and pork braised in stout and barbecued.
Beyond the restaurant kitchen, craft beer and craft beer ingredients are finding their way into packaged food products, such as mustards, hot sauces, ice cream, cheese spreads, energy bars and even beef jerky, all highlighting a trend of new ways to eat our beer instead of drink it.
“People become brewers because they’re creative people, and sometimes that creative drive pushes us to try other things outside of beer,” says Greg Koch, founder of Stone Brewing C. and, more recently, the cofounder of a small nut butter company.
Years ago, while Koch was traveling in Piedmont, Italy, he was highly impressed by the freshness and quality of the region’s hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are the key ingredient in Nutella, the iconic European chocolate-and-sugar nut butter spread.
Koch had the idea of making versions of the same product — but perhaps healthier. He began making nut butters at home in 2012.
As he honed the craft, he had thoughts of going commercial. In 2017, he and two friends launched Nutista, an online inventory of nut butters made from varying blends of peanuts, pecans, cashews, hazelnuts and almonds, plus other whole-food ingredients. Naturally, several Stone Brewing beer recipes have inspired a series of Nutista nut butters. Dark-roasted barley, coffee, cacao and nuts are blended into the Totalitarian Russian Imperial Stout Nut Butter, and the Tangerine Express IPA and Stone’s w00tstout helped inspire their own respective nut butters.
Koch says a driving principle behind the brand is natural ingredients.
“There’s nothing on the ingredient list that you wouldn’t recognize or at least be able to say,” he says.
For instance, the Mountie is made with raw cashews, sprouted almonds, dry roasted peanuts, maple granules, raw pecans and Himalayan sea salt.
Other brewers have similarly taken up culinary side projects. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., in Chico, sells bottles of hot sauce infused with its pale ale and another line flavored with porter. The brewery also makes pale ale peanut brittle, pale ale honey spice mustard, a stout mustard and an IPA hot sauce.
In Pennsylvania, Victory Brewing Co. offers a diverse lineup of foods made with added beer or with beer ingredients. The Belgian Brûlée Ice Cream is made with unfermented beer — wort, as it’s called — blended into sugar and cream. The company offers several cheese dips infused with beer.
Williams Sonoma offers a craft beer hot sauce made with New Belgium’s Fat Tire Belgian-Style Ale. Be careful: A 7-ounce bottle will run you $20.
Some of these, as well other beer-inspired foods and condiments, should be easy enough to try and make at home. For pointers, you might refer to “The American Craft Beer Cookbook,” beer writer John Holl’s 2013 roundup of more than 150 recipes incorporating beer into recipes rough and refined. I would advise picking this book up no earlier than 4 p.m. on a given afternoon, lest you find yourself sipping IPA and cooking beer-braised meatballs at noon.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com
