Three Cheese Jalapeno Skillet Beer Cheese Dip, made in a skillet, warm and bubbly I’ve hit a benchmark of sorts. A way of measuring if I’m actually becoming successful at this weird chosen profession that I, essentially, just made up. Money has never been much of a benchmark for me, other than in a “can… Read More
Easy Beer Cheese and Bacon Pull-apart Loaf I laughed so hard that it hurt. Coming back from the first night of brewery hopping, after a 7-hour drive up into the high desert of Oregon, I walked back to the hotel with my favorite travel companion laughing so hard I could hardly stand. Maybe the reason… Read More
Beer Doughnuts with IPA Lemon Curd Don’t invite me to dinner if you’re looking for a normal dinner conversation, it always gets weird. I brought my sister with me to a press dinner and we ended up telling the story of the time we accidentally killed a 300-pound pig. It was well after my parents moved… Read More
Buffalo Beer Cheese Bites + What is Wet Hop Beer This time of year there is an obsession among the beer crowd, an almost singular obsession that takes over. It’s not pumpkin ales, which seem to be more of an obligation brewers take on mid-summer to compete in an oversaturated fall market. It’ not even… Read More
Grilled Street Corn with IPA Chipotle Cream + What’s The Deal With Gluten Free Beer? Beer’s main objective is to taste great. To gratify an urge, quell a thirst, satisfy the drinker with a balance of it’s necessary ingredients: water, hops, malt and yeast (and possibly a few not as necessary ingredients). But let’s say… Read More
Beer Cocktail: Raspberry Peach IPA Slushies This is how it starts, isn’t it? This is the siren sound that beckons to your non-beer friends, the ones who never even take a sip, the ones who opt for sparkling wine and drinks that end in -tini. It’s how we get you hooked. Because you can taste… Read More
I’ve made no secret of my love for grilling. Once the weather breaks and I’m able to do so without the threat of rain, grilling becomes my go-to cooking method. I’ve even moved my Char-Broil grill across three states because I wasn’t able to part with it. Four years and three moves later it still grills… Read More
Strawberry Pineapple Pale Ale Cake with Whipped Cream Cheese Frosting This is the new beer-to-watch of 2016. Pineapples have been slowly sneaking their spiked heads into brew kettles for the past few years, closing the lead on grapefruit’s fruit-of-the-moment status. IPA’s are often the drug of choice for the pineapple craze, but the tentacles of… Read More
Crispy Oven Baked Beer Battered Onion Rings Last year, on the east side of Portland, I came across a line of people wrapped around a small bar waiting to get inside. Of course, I went to investigate. I asked one of the guys in line what was going on, “Bell’s is here.” That’s all he… Read More
Bacon and Beer Cheese Brussels Sprout Gratin I judged a beer competition last year with the primary assignment of the IPA category. A fantastic assignment under normal circumstances but this day, there were some logistical issues. Pound for pound I was the smallest judge and this was the biggest category, 35 beers in total, all… Read More
Beer Cocktail Recipe: Cucumber Basil IPA Cooler Citrus IPA’s will rule the summer of 2016, and with good reason. Ballast point, and their well-distributed Grapefruit Sculpin is often pointed to as the genesis of the grapefruit beer obsession when it fact it was more of a large scale manifestation of our growing love from the… Read More
Southwest Beer Cheese Dip We talk a lot of pairing beer and food. About the sensory experiences of flavors, textures, and ingredients that compliment each other. We’ve known since the accidental and unfortunate childhood pairing of toothpaste and orange juice that some flavors are a combative train wreck once they comingle in our mouth. We… Read More
Bacon Beer Cheese Stromboli, just 30 minutes to make the best football food ever. I’m sitting in my kitchen on a phone interview with a reporter from Bloomberg answering questions about the buyouts. You know the ones, the ABI, Miller-Coors, Constellation, Big Bad Macro Beer comin’ in and buying up OUR beer. The ones that… Read More
Sriracha Beer Mac N Cheese (15-minutes Stove Top) These photos were taken at the beginning of a power outage that lasted two days. Luckily, the light from my window was filtering through breaking storm clouds in an eerie but beautiful way that made it possible to shoot the macaroni I’d finish making by candlelight. It also… Read More
I grill pizza more often than I grill anything else. Unless you have a pizza oven in your backyard, it’s likely your best option when it comes to at home pizza cooking. Or, in this case, parking-lot-back-of-a-truck-with-a-portable-grill cooking. You get those lovely grilled char marks that you want when open flames are cooking your food,… Read More
Gochujang Beer Cheese Dip and Is Gochujang The New Sriracha? There are similarities, I’ll be honest. Spicy red sauces, with fermented ingredients, originally from the Far East. Americans “discovered” these sauces, that have been around for generations in other countries, and decide they are the hot “new” thing. Clearly, Sriracha and Gochujang have a lot in… Read More
I was at a brewery in Southern California early last year and a brewer handed me a small cup of warm wort to sample from a batch he was in the middle of brewing. “What is it?” I asked. He shrugged. “It was a bunch of leftover bits from bags and batches. I just decided to… Read More
Grilled Cheese & Gratitude I was standing in the kitchen of a group home, talking to a 15-year-old foster kid when I learned what gratitude really was. (Before I became a full-time food and beer writer, I worked with foster and probation kids in South Central LA, you can read more about that here and… Read More