IPA Pumpkin Cheesecake Bars with Beer Candied Pecans I know, I get it. You’re already sick of pumpkin things and the season hardly started. I hear you, for me fall is all about hops. Spending last week running around the hop fields of Yakima, my love for hops has never been stronger (I’ll tell you… Read More
Crab Tarts with Saison Béarnaise Sauce This is because I don’t care. I don’t care that “blogging is dead,” so says everyone who spikes higher on SEO than I do. I don’t care that this is not a very googleable recipe, therefore it won’t earn me much incoming search engine traffic. Your capacity to care… Read More
Fiery Thai Kettle Chips and Sweet Potato Burgers with Beer Sweet Chili Cream Sauce I was a vegetarian for 3 years. Mostly because I grew up on a farm, and I saw how the sausage was made. It didn’t stick, but what did stick is my true and complete love for non-meat burgers (and yes,… Read More
Salt Roasted Mini Potatoes with Garlic Sage Beer Butter. The most delicious appetizer you can make with just ten minutes prep! I have a confession to make. Or possibly more of a reminder. It occurred to me, when I was posting this on instagram, that if you just stumbled upon this weird life that I… Read More
10-minute Beer Bread Cinnamon Rolls: Takes ten minutes to get these in your oven! It started years ago, when, for a brief moment, I was trying to be less weird and figure out if “normal” was my bag. For some reason, cinnamon rolls seems like something normal people did on Christmas. I grew up with… Read More
Mascarpone Winter Ale Stuffed French Toast Winter ushers in a new crop of hard-to-get-your-hands-on beers, and they are just starting to poke their heads out the pumpkin saturated beer crowd. Winter ales have flown under the main-stream-beer-radar for a while, getting a bit lost as beer drinkers trample from the squash-spice section over to the… Read More
Puff Pastry Cake with Maple Ale Pastry Cream It’s storming in a way that makes me nervous. But maybe not in the way you’d expect. I watch the outage map light up all around my town as the lights start to flicker off. I hear the light footsteps of rain on the roof and the… Read More
Lemon Garlic Beer Butter Cod You have to jump, sometimes. When I was in high school I was a lifeguard on a lake in Northern California for a summer doing a steady rotation of pool watch, lake watch, and zip-line duty. The last of which was my least favorite. I was there for the water,… Read More
Grilled Apricot Saison Shortcakes with Ginger Mascarpone Whipped Cream I have to show my cards when the very glaring hole in my beer resume is revealed the moment I am forced to admit that I don’t brew. I’m not a brewer, I’m just here for the beer. I’ll stick to what I’m good at and… Read More
20 minute dinner: Chili Beer Chicken Tacos with Pineapple Salsa Stocking a beer tub for a summer party is as important as planning the food. Beer sets a tone and fuels conversation. It’s as much about offering your friends their favorites as it is about introducing them to new ones. When planning the brew menu keep in… Read More
Holiday Ale Candy Cane Truffle Fudge. Only takes 10 minutes, and it’s crazy good. Winter ales make me glad it’s December. The frozen roads, crowded stores, jam-packed schedules are the price of admission to the best month of beer all year long. We still have some fresh hop beers from hop harvest that happened a… Read More
Coconut Pumpkin Ale Overnight French Toast Bake Every interview, radio and TV, that’ve done the past two months has involved answering questions about pumpkin beer. I told you about the harvest question incident already, and the problem with pumpkin beer. Beer people, for the most part, see this time of year as hop harvest season more than… Read More
Pumpkin Ale Cornbread There is a moment in the year that every food becomes both necessary and then irrelevant. Ice cream becomes a necessity, and absolute brilliant idea, sometime around mid-May when the weather spikes up past 80 degrees for the first time in months. When the sweaters get shed like downy feathers, and scarves… Read More
I’ll give you a quick and easy way to tell if your favorite pumpkin beer was made with fresh pumpkins or the canned version. Release date. It takes weeks to brew a beer, and pumpkins reach full maturity, ready to harvest and roast for brewing, sometimes around late August. Making those beers released in July… Read More
I’m sitting at a bar in Bogota, Colombia, communicating the best I can through broken Spanish. Laughing with several kitchen’s worth of chef’s, trying to convince them that, even though I nearly passed out from the altitude, and I’m in fact, not pregnant. They motion with their hands to create invisible fake bellies, then laugh.… Read More
I’m in the middle of class 4 rapids, the yellow raft I’m in is pinned on the right side to a giant boulder, the impossibly fast current is rushing over the left side of the boat and the raft is quickly submerged. Seven of us are waist deep in cold water, trying desperately to… Read More
Peach Ale Crème Brulee Tart & Let’s Talk about Peach Beer A craft brewers excitement for the changing of the seasons and the new crop of fresh produce to play with rivals even the most innovative chefs. Mention fruit beers just a few years ago and the collective groan from most beer lovers was… Read More
What is a Winter Ale? This is the time for generalities. With the Winter Ales, these seasonal favorites, it’s essential. Because you can get specific, and even technical with other beer styles, but the vast spectrum that these beers run along won’t allow for strict categorization. Winter ales are often what’s called an Old Ale,… Read More