Beer

Beer with us #4: Stout Gingerbread

Beer with us #4: Stout Gingerbread

We're figuring that the gentlemen at the top of this post must have lost a bet. We spotted them in Dublin on one of Ireland's drinking holidays. Perhaps we should have spent St. Patrick's Day this year in a similar vein, but instead we turned some of our extra Guinness into a powerful gingerbread. We got the recipe from David Leibovitz, the Parisian blogger and all-around great pastry chef. In turn, he got it from Claudia Fleming, formerly of Gramercy Tavern in New York. It's also in her classic cookbook, The Last Course. This might be one of the stickiest, most effusive cake batters we've ever worked with. It has a tendency to climb the sides of the pan and collapse in the middle. (Be...Read More
Beer with us #3: Swiss fondue

Beer with us #3: Swiss fondue

We've hiked the Bernese Oberland region of the Swiss Alps in the winter when the mountains are covered with snow and in the spring, when waterfalls cascade off cliffs and meadows are full of wildflowers. On a spring hike in the Lauterbrunnen Valley (above), the grass was so green that it looked almost as tasty to us as it obviously did to the herds of Swiss milk cattle. Either season, we had worked up an appetite and often ended the day with a satisfying pot of cheese fondue. When we decided to use a can of Lamplighter ‶Giants Under the Sun″ as the base for a fondue, we set aside lightly steamed pieces of vegetables and slices of sausage to dip into the cheese along...Read More
Beer with us #2: Beer bread

Beer with us #2: Beer bread

When we went through our store of beer bottles and cans, we discovered that we still had some Moosehead Grapefruit Radler from a visit to that Canadian's stalwart's brewery in Saint John, New Brunswick (89 Main Street West, Saint John, NB; 506-635-7000, ext. 5568, moosehead.ca). That's the brewery taproom at the top of the post. We remember the radler as a powerful warm-weather thirst quencher, but old beer is usually stale beer, so we decided to cook with it. Moosehead is known in the U.S. mainly for its export lager, a nicely balanced but hardly surprising beer for all-day drinking. The grapefruit radler was an anomaly. Even in Canada, the most popular Moosehead fruit-infused beer is the Blueberry Radler. But the grapefruit tang and slight...Read More
Beer with us #1: Onion soup

Beer with us #1: Onion soup

Now that was fun, wasn't it? We're talking about Super Bowl LVIII (or Super Bowl 58, for readers who don't do Roman numerals), in which the Kansas City Taylor Swifts beat the San Francisco Forty-Niners by a score of 25-23. Once the cheering subsided, we managed to convince our friends to eat the last deviled eggs and take home the remaining dip, chips, and chili. But they left behind a bucket of miscellaneous bottles of beer. Rather than hoard them to drink in warm weather, we decided to have more fun now and cook with the beer. It so happened that we also scored a terrific bag of yellow onions at the winter farmers market here in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Grown at Busa Farms in nearby...Read More
Istria’s full-immersion lager beer experience

Istria’s full-immersion lager beer experience

Halfway through Saturday afternoons when David was growing up, his classical musician father often betrayed his Appalachian country boy roots by launching into a spirited rendition of ‶Rye Whiskey.″ He was particularly fond of the verse (as sung in Louisa, Kentucky at the source of the Big Sandy river) that referenced some of the local wildlife. ‶If the river was whiskey and I was a duck,″ the tune went, ‶I'd dive to the bottom and drink myself up.″ That memory came flooding back when we booked a stay at the San Servolo Resort & Beer Spa in Buje, Croatia, just south of the Slovenian border. We went directly from the truffle fair, with a stopover in the picturesque fortified mountain village of Grožnjan, known since...Read More
History by the glass in Cincinnati’s OTR

History by the glass in Cincinnati’s OTR

Most city walking tours barely scratch the surface of local history. But, as the name suggests, the Queen City Underground Tour in Cincinnati digs deeper. Guide Craig Maness of American Legacy Tours (1332 Vine St., Cincinnati; 859-951-8560; americanlegacytours.com) led us on a 2-hour trek across and eventually beneath Over-the-Rhine (OTR) as he related the neighborhood's history. That's him at right with ancient bottles discovered in underground OTR. OTR was heavily settled by two waves of German immigrants who arrived in the 1830s and again in the 1850s. The Miami-Erie canal, which separated the district from the rest of the city, was locally nicknamed “the Rhine.” Cincinnatians searching for beer, pretzels, and bratwurst could find them by going “over the Rhine.” The canal was buried long...Read More
Britt’s Pub & Eatery: good bet to quaff and dine

Britt’s Pub & Eatery: good bet to quaff and dine

We sometimes do a presentation that we call “How to Get a Good Meal Anywhere in the World.” We like to think that we've learned a few things over the years that can help guide folks to good food at a fair price. But we ignored some of our own advice one evening in Saint John, New Brunswick. We selected a restaurant more for its location in a popular, touristy area than we did for the menu. We did have a lovely time sitting by the harbor at sunset and enjoyed the local Idol-like talent contest taking place on an outdoor stage. But the food was disappointing. And we'd missed an opportunity to see what a better kitchen might turn out. Fortunately we were able...Read More
Moosehead: Saint John’s very own brewery

Moosehead: Saint John’s very own brewery

Ever since Molson merged with Coors and Anheuser-Busch gobbled up Labatt, Canadians have been hard-pressed to buy a truly Canadian mass-market beer. That is, unless they drank Moosehead, which proudly proclaims that it's the last major brewery still owned by Canadians. The great-great-great grandson of founder Susannah Oland, who launched the business in 1867, remains at the helm of Moosehead Breweries. Andrew Oland's family has steered the operation through fires, the Halifax explosion, Prohibition, two world wars, the Great Depression, and trade barriers. Although the company launched in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, it's been part of the Saint John scene for more than a century. We knew Moosehead (89 Main Street West, Saint John, NB; 506-635-7000, ext. 5568, moosehead.ca) from the nicely balanced, crisp Moosehead Lager...Read More
John Whaite views world through lens of comfort food

John Whaite views world through lens of comfort food

Comfort food is such a personal thing. For Pat's Irish-American family, it's a serving of champ, the rich dish of mashed potatoes and spring onions with lots of butter and cream. For David, it's cornbread like his Kentucky grandmother used to make with bacon drippings and unbolted meal. In his new book, Comfort: Food to Soothe the Soul (Kyle Books, $29.99), chef and cooking school proprietor John Whaite explores the taste of comfort around the world. He adds his own twist to traditional Mexican chilaquiles by adding eggplant and feta, uses sweet apricots to balance the heat of Scotch Bonnet peppers in West African Jollof rice, and tops a Scandinavian-style pizza with salmon fillets and pickled cucumber. But Whaite was raised in Lancashire in northwest...Read More
Pour a cool one on Montreal Craft Beer Tour

Pour a cool one on Montreal Craft Beer Tour

With Heineken as one of the sponsors of the Montreal Jazz Festival, there's no shortage of beer for sale at the outdoor food and drink stalls. But if you are a hops-head looking for something more than a quick thirst quencher, you might want to set aside time for a Montreal Brewpub Experience (montrealcraftbeertours.com). On a previous visit to Montreal, we joined one of the walking and tasting tours—along with a group of extremely cheerful guys on a bachelor party getaway. Stéphane Lussier (our guide shown at right) told us that Montreal jumped on the craft beer bandwagon about 30 years ago. He also pointed out that Montreal is one of the biggest brewing cities in North America. In addition to brewing giants Labatt, Molson,...Read More