Celebrate the Sedate – Brown Ale Day

On more than a few occasions I’ve come across the opinion that brown ales are boring. I personally don’t understand why, as I love a trip down to Brown Town. Sure, they’re not choc-a-block full of hops and they are usually of a fairly average ABV. Browns are not so sour that your whole face disappears into itself. They are dark, but not so-black-even-the-white-bits-are-black. They are just….well…brown. However, a good brown ale is a pleasure to drink. Not designed to smack your in the mouth, they are laced with subtle flavours – biscuit, toffee, coffee, chocolate – all working together. No divas – just a harmonious chorus. Sure, maybe a little easy listening M.O.R., but don’t we all need that sometimes?

I guess if you’ve been scaling the heights of beer-geekery, drinking only the most extreme brews that use ALL OF THE HOPS, or boozy barrel aged imperial whatsits, or beers so smoky they’ll set your smoke alarms off, or spending some quality time with our friend Brett, a basic brown ale may seem boring, yes.  You may be suffering from palate fatigue. It’s okay – it happens to the best of us. 

Recently, in the name of health and insanity, the husband and I decided to give up beer (and all forms of fermented beverages) for a month. It had been a long, tough winter that was survived only by the process of pickling ourselves and developing a snug layer of blubbery insulation. While this booze-hiatus was a personal quest of sorts, the upside was an unexpected re-setting of the taste buds. Suddenly beers that had long been left by the wayside for being too…normal…were seen (or tasted) in a whole new light. I mention this because one of the beers the husband had not long after jumping off the wagon was the 2brothers Growler American Brown Ale. This beer is fairly regular on tap at our local, but even for a lover of the brown such as myself, I very rarely choose it. There’s just usually something more…enticing on offer. I was surprised when he ordered it…and more surprised when he exclaimed, ‘WOW – they’ve really upped the choc on this!’. I had been contemplating my own IPA and how crazy hoppy it was. But maybe it wasn't? Maybe we were just tasting the beer’s usual character but with fresh buds. 

Luckily there are plenty of Aussie brewers out there who aren’t listening to any talk of ‘boring browns’ and are producing some deliciously drinkable ales. As well as the afore mentioned 2brothers,  Mornington Peninsula Brewery, Cavalier, Black Heart, Murray’s, Jamieson Brewery, and Brew Boys all produce fantastic brown ales. Also (with impeccable timing) Holgate have just released their seasonal Nut Brown Ale brewed with macadamia nuts in the new 500ml format. Of course, if you are still of the opinion that brown=boring, there are slightly less traditional brown ales out there, such as Prickly’ Moses Tailpipe, a 7.1% ‘Big Ass Brown’, and the 2brothers James Belgian Brown, brewed with lolly bananas. Then there’s Henry Fords Girthsome Fjord from Moon Dog, can beer get more interesting than an 8% Bulgo-American Indian Brown Ale?

Every colour, as long as it's brown.

 

On a food-related note, brown ales are definitely one of the most versatile beers for both cooking and pairing. They lend themselves to both sweet and savoury dishes, and as they are so ‘boring’ and well balanced, they don’t tend to overpower with bitterness or sweetness. They can match well with pretty much any meat – stewed, roasted or barbecued  – but are also great with mushroom dishes or mild vegetarian curries and chillis. They can be used to make a tasty rarebit, or accompany your traditional ploughmen’s lunch. You can bake bread or cake with them. Seriously – browns can do it all. As it happens, my last post here was for Brown Ale Banana Bread.

So, I’ve decided to celebrate the staid awesomeness and very non-boringness of brown ales. IPA’s and Stouts have their own days, so I’m declaring October 21^st as my own personal Brown Ale Day - a day to eat, drink and think brown. I’ll be cooking some dishes with brown ale, and drinking my way though a fine selection of Australian browns, because we are a wide-brown land…and if I included browns from other countries I may end up hurting myself.

Call it collective consciousness, kismet or serendipity, but not long after I made this declaration and first put these thoughts down on paper, a very similar post appeared on Craftbeer.com. You can check out some far more articulate thoughts on brown ales by Angelo De Ieso (@BREWPUBLIC for those on the twits) in the article, Brown Ales: The Overlooked Spectrum of Beer

If you happen to be one of those who may have pooh-poohed brown ales in the past (sorry, couldn’t resist), I challenge you to have a brown ale or two, and take your own little trip down to Brown Town.

The Temptress is a Molé

For those who may not be aware, the word molé (kind of pronounced mo-lay) means ‘sauce’ in the Mexican language. It’s a fairly generic term that covers all kinds of sauces, but outside of Mexico it tends to refer specifically to a dark chocolate brown chilli sauce, the molé poblano (poblano is a type of chilli). I’d say that the most common type of molé outside of Mexico is actually guacamole, ‘guaca’ meaning avocado. Traditionally, these sauces contain 20-30 ingredients, and can take days to prepare. They are considered a celebration food, so the effort is worth it.

One such celebration where molé is usually served is Dia de los Muertos – the Day of the Dead. This is a time where people remember and honour their dead and is usually held over two days, November 1-2. Since I first came across this holiday, I’ve found a real fascination and attraction to it. I’ve never been lucky enough to experience it first hand, but it appears to be such a colourful, happy celebration – the brightly painted sugar skulls, garlands of flowers, parades of skeletons in the streets, mariachi bands patrolling the cemeteries. In the western world, we treat death as taboo and with such bland seriousness. I find the Mexican attitude a lot…healthier? By celebrating the people who have passed on and accepting death as inevitable, there is a better appreciation for life.

Last year, I decided to cook up my own molé for Dia de los Muertos, using beer of course. Seeing as I am not Mexican, I’m wasn't too concerned about sticking to a traditional recipe. This was helpful because (a) traditional Mexican ingredients can be quite hard to find here, and (b) I had moved house a week prior to November 1st. There was no luxury of cooking for days. I’m surprised I managed to make anything more complicated than an Old El Paso kit. Traditional recipes also tend to use a lot of lard, which I’m not such a fan of. So, while not exactly traditional, this dish is still super tasty and barely takes hours, rather than days.

The beer of choice is the Holgate Temptress Chocolate Porter. It’s not uncommon for dark beers to be part of a Mole recipe, and this one has the added bonus of being a chocolate porter, enhancing the chocolate that is already added in the cooking.

Well she was just 17…

3 tablespoons oil (whatever mild-flavoured oil you have – I used light olive oil)
8 chicken thighs, or 4 legs, or an entire chicken cut into pieces, or use turkey if you have a big enough pot (turkey is more traditional, but they are bloody big birds)
1 onion, diced
1 capsicum, seeded and diced
1 poblano pepper, seeded and diced – you can use canned or dried if you don’t have access to fresh…which I don’t, so I used canned for this recipe.
3 cloves garlic, diced
2 teaspoons chilli powder (hotness dependant on your pain threshold)
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup raisins
2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup of Holgate Temptress chocolate porter (or another dark beer - bonus points if it contains chocolate)
2 teaspoons of peanut butter
1 teaspoon of salt
60 g of dark chocolate – the darker, the better

FOR SERVING:

warm corn tortillas
sour cream
fresh coriander, chopped

…and you know what I mean*

Place a large frypan on medium heat and heat half of the oil. Add your chicken (or turkey) pieces and brown on all sides. Once that has been done, remove to a plate, cover with foil and set aside.

Add the remaining oil to the same frypan and turn the heat down slightly. Sauté the onion, capsicum, poblano chilli and garlic until soft and slightly caramelized. Stir in the spices - chilli powder, cumin and cinnamon - and cook until fragrant (about 2-3 minutes should do it).

 

Add the tomatoes, raisins, chipotle, stock, beer, peanut butter and salt. Bring to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes, stirring often.

 

Transfer the sauce into a blender or food processor and add the chocolate. The heat from the sauce should melt the chocolate, allowing it to blend in. Process until you have a consistently smooth sauce.

Now, back to your chicken. Place the pieces into a deep, heavy cooking pot and pour the blended sauce over them. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through.

Serve with warm corn tortillas, sour cream and fresh cilantro. You could also serve with rice, fresh salsa or sautéed greens.

The beer we drank with this was the excellent Mikeller Texas Ranger, which happens to be one of my fantasy beers. It’s a chipotle spiced porter, so the flavour profile of smoky, chilli heat with roasty, chocolate matches the mole pretty darn well.

* On a side note, in the Australian vernacular, the word ‘mole’ (pronounced MOLE) has a completely different meaning. I used to attend a pub bingo night where one of my favourite calls was for #17 – ‘Well she was just 17 and you know what I mean! What do I mean? She was a MOLE!’ By amazing co-incidence, there are 17 ingredients in this particular recipe.

Taking a backseat

Actually, it's always the passenger seat for me, but what I’m getting at is a metaphorical backseat when it comes to cooking with beer. As much as I like experimenting with beer in the kitchen, what I really like is having someone else do the beer cookery. You know, someone who actually knows what they're doing. Recently I've been to a few of the places that do great things with beer and food, and I felt like sharing (and raving) about them. I guess this is a bit of a personal journey story for me too, as I revisit some of the places that inspired me to try my hand at cooking with beer.

Holgate Brewery – Woodend

It all started for me at the Keatings Hotel in Woodend, home of the Holgate Brewery. This as the first brewery that the husband and I visited and we both had epiphanies of different sorts. His was about the beer, or more accurate a beer, a beer called Big Reg - a Vienna lager, which was once bottled, but is now only a seasonal release (but will hopefully be bottled again!). My light bulb moment was more about the food. The menu is full of items that use the brewery’s own beers (and occasionally the by-products), and it goes way beyond the old standard of beer-battered fish.

Since that first time, we’ve tried to get back there to eat and drink whenever possible. It’s a bit of a drive, which does make the drinking part difficult for at least one person. However, we recently discovered it only takes an hour on the train and you can drink as much as you like, as long as you can stumble back to the train station.

Such is our love for this place and its warm pub atmosphere, fantastic brews and beery food, we decided to spend our first wedding anniversary there. Oh, did I not mention that you can actually stay there, right above the pub and brewery? You can’t beat that for convenience!

We had our anniversary dinner in the dining room, and I think all the dishes we ordered used beer in some way. We started with some beer bread to share, made with the wonderful Temptress Chocolate Porter. This is not the yeasty style bread (like the type I blogged about right at the start), but the quick and easy beer bread. It’s less elastic and more crumbly,  like a savory cake really. However it is still incredibly delicious, especially when served warm with the porter butter. On this occasion the bread had also been made using the spent grain from the day’s brew.

For my main, I chose from the specials board, as I could not go past a risotto made with squid ink and the Big Reg lager. The waitress made sure she warned me that it was black – I guess not everyone might realize that squid ink is really…inky. It came topped with basa goujons (that's food speak for 'fish bites' I think). The risotto itself was just right, with that little extra flavor that I find beer lends a dish, and the goujons were possibly the crispiest fish bites I have ever have. I swear you could have heard the crunch across the room.
The husband treated himself to the kangaroo marinated in ESB, which came on a tasty bed of salad. Now is confession time for me – it looked and smelled so good, I had to take a bite outta skippy. It would seem that after a few pints of Big Reg and ESB I am open to the concept of eating our national emblem. It was actually not as bloody as I expected – I found the flavor quite subtle although the texture was a little chewy.

As it was a special occasion, we both ordered desserts. Mine was the porter fruitcake, I think with crème anglaise (things are getting hazy by now), while the husband went with the chocolate beetroot cake with ganache. They were both decadent, without being too much. The perfect end to the meal.

Red Hill Brewery – Red Hill

The next chapter in my beer-food journey concerns Red Hill Brewery. Sitting about two hours out of Melbourne, with no public transport and limited accommodation options in the immediate area, it's almost impossible to get there without a designated driver. However, it’s well worth the journey for the food alone. It has more of a restaurant / café feeling, with a light airy bar area and a huge outdoor deck nestled among the trees. While I’ve had a multitude of fantastic meals there, there is one thing I always order without fail – the Welsh Rarebit.

This is a classic beer-food dish and on paper is not really that special – just fancy cheese on toast, right? Yeah, but the cheese, it has beer in it. Let me just make that clear for you….it’s CHEESE with BEER in it. There is more than beer – there’s mustard and paprika and leeks too. To top if off (or more accurately, bottom it off…but no one says that) they use fantastic local baked bread. This would have to be my ultimate comfort food. The cheese sauce is creamy and packed with tangy flavor and a little spicy bite. I think I raved about it so much on one visit that the lovely Karen Golding actually gave me the recipe. I have made it at home, but its not the same really. Maybe it’s something about sitting out on the big deck with a beer, relaxing with that feeling of ‘all is well in the world’.

The Local Taphouse – St Kilda

As far as both Holgate and Red Hill are, I think we have visited them both more than this iconic beer pub located in St Kilda. To get there either involves an hour on a tram, or someone willing to battle with traffic on Punt Road. It’s a shame though, because they put a lot of thought and beer into the food they serve. I only really discovered this when we attended an excellent Good Beer Week event there, and not only did every single course contain beer (and some amazing beers too), but they really bent over backwards to look after this non-red-meat eater (that was before the skippy incident, okay?). I was pretty blown away by it and was lucky enough to bend the ear of one of the owners. I discovered they are very passionate about beer food and educating their kitchen staff in the use of beer in cooking, and yet they don’t make an issue out of it.

A great example of their work is a dessert we were served at the most recent Barley’s Angels meeting. It was a stout panna cotta, with strawberries macerated in Framboise and a barley malt brittle. It was A-MAZ-ING. Every element was seriously good. I expected the panna cotta to have a heavy, bitter flavor to it, but there was no bitterness at all. The sweetness was off-set by the slight sourness of the strawberries…and the barley malt brittle? It was just plain good – crunchy caramelized sugar coated barley good.

There are a growing number of places who are using beer and by-products in their dishes now, popping up all over Australia. I can highly recommend all the places I’ve mentioned, but there are plenty of places still on my to do list as well. If you are into beer and food, you should definitely pay a visit to these or any of the other establishments who are exploring the uses of beer in the kitchen.