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If you haven’t been to TAP and you live in the Atlanta metro area, you need to make plans to go there now. A great time to try it out will be at their Flying Dog Beer Dinner on May 7 at 6:30pm The menu looks great:

Tire Bite Golden Ale
Crayfish, Asparagus, Pickled Ramps and Mache Salad

Classic Pale Ale
Bruschetta of Rosa Bianca Eggplant, Tomatoes and Crispy Prosciutto

Road Dog
Black Sea Bass, Stuffed Morels, Gnocchi and Arrow Tip Spinach

In Heat Wheat
Roasted Duck Breast, Spring Turnips, Logan Mills Grits and Orange Coriander Jus

Old Scratch Amber Lager
Tres Leche, Caramel, Vanilla Ice Cream

After the meal
World Beer Cup Gold Award winner, Gonzo Imperial Porter for meditation purposes

$55 per person. Space is limited, so call TAP at 404.347.2220 to make a reservation.

Part 2 of Your Next Beer’s beer and food podcast is online. They get more detailed in this one as the last podcast was more of an overview.

This week we’re looking at specific beer styles and food so you can get some mouth watering ideas of beer meals to make.

Back in January I was lucky enough to represent Flying Dog Brewery at the Big Beers, Belgians and Barleywines festival in Vail. It’s definitely one of the perks of being in the craft beer industry. Friday night was their Brewmasters’ Dinner, and Odell and Lost Abbey beers were featured. I met Tomme Arthur (the man in charge over at Lost Abbey and Pizza Port), and we talked a little bit about the event. I later emailed him and he was kind enough to respond. The menu from the dinner is below, with our email conversation beneath. I shot photos at the event, and you can click on any of them to be directed to a larger image.

Opening Reception - Paired with Odell Double Pilsner and Lost Abbey Lost & Found
Caviar Station
Hot Soup Station
Authentic Rocky Mountain Oysters
Carolina Pulled Pork Sliders

Second Course - paired with Odell IPA and Lost Abbey Ten Commandments

Baja Shrimp Gazpacho with Spicy Tortilla Sticks

Third Course - paired with Odell Imperial Stout and Lost Abbey Veritas 002*

Tenderloin wrapped with Pancetta bacon, served with Star Anise Marinated Quail Breast - served with parsnip puree and chocolate port reduction

*Veritas 002 is blended Sour Ale with Redstone Meadery’s Raspberry Mead

Fourth Course - paired with Odell Extra Special Red and Lost Abbey Veritas 001**

Warm Cambazola cheese in filo with lavender honey and poached pear

** Veritas 001 is blended Strong Ale with cherries

Fifth Course - paired with Odell Doppelbock and Lost Abbey Angel’s Share
Dessert station (chocolate cake, paradiso, chocolate opera torte, tiramisu, white passion, chocolate marquis, ice cream chocolate truffles)

How long did it take to come up with the menu for the beer dinner? How much interaction did you have with each other?

Tomme: We were responsible for selecting beers that we thought would “WOW” the crowd, match the other brewer’s offerings and could work well with food. In this respect, we selected some unique beers that we felt afforded the chefs an excellent opportunity to find matches with our beers. We offered our assistance but as we weren’t at the reviewing of the beers with the chef and Doug Odell, there wasn’t much input from us towards to the food.

Which course/pairing did you think worked best? Why? Are there any changes you would have made in retrospect? I personally thought the pancetta wrapped tenderloin with the chocolate sauce paired wonderfully with the imperial stout and veritas 002, even though they were such different beers. Great to know that the same meal can be paired with a few different styles of beer.

Tomme: I really loved the meal. It was a huge risk reward sort of night. There were so many opportunities to find slam dunks. I really enjoyed the Odell’s Imperial Red Ale with the Phylo. I think the Veritas 002 was great with the Tenderloin. I also think the 001 would have been great with this as well.

It was a large beer dinner (I heard 200 total people) - what were the difficulties in putting something like this together? Was it the largest beer dinner you’ve put on?

Tomme: It was about the biggest dinner I think I have been associated with directly. We have done larger dinners where one of our beers was involved. All in all, it goes down as one of the most ambitious beer dinners I have been associated with. I’d like to thank Chef Mercer for going above the board on this one.

One of my favorite things about working in the Craft Beer industry is that we can be friends with other craft brewers. The camaraderie of craft brewers is unlike anything I’ve seen in previous jobs. And ultimately, we’re all promoting the concept of “better beer”.

Along that theme, extraordinary chef Bruce Paton is having a great-sounding beer dinner on April 20th at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco. I saw this beer dinner at the The California Craft Beer Newsletter blog (see link for all the pertinent information) - and the beer dinner looks exquisite. There are five participating breweries (with their brewmasters being in attendance):

Rod Todd, Allagash, Portland, ME
Adam Avery, Avery Brewing, Boulder, CO
Sam Calagione, Dogfish Head, Milton, DE
Tomme Arthur, Port Brewing/Lost Abbey, San Marcos, CA
Vinnie Cilurzo, Russian River, Santa Rosa, CA.

These are heavyweights in craft beer, and they’ll all be there. I had the privilege of going to a beer dinner hosted by Chef Paton and it surpassed all my expectations (more on that event later this week). If I lived in San Francisco, I’d definitely be at this event. My favorite course from the upcoming beer dinner is called “A Study in Duck” - not entirely sure what that means, actually.

This month’s session is about Barley Wines with The Brew Site being the host. Flying Dog Brewery had a sales and marketing soirée up in Steamboat last weekend, and we decided to prepare our own beer dinner. Among our courses, we decided to include our Barrel-Aged Horn Dog Barley Wine paired with smelly Stilton cheese. Barley Wine pairs extremely well with the Sharpness of the blue cheese. If blue cheese isn’t your thing, barley wine also pairs wonderfully with chocolate.

We decided to shoot some HD video of the event, and you can click the image below to be taken to the HD video.

Course 1: Stilton Cheese on toasted bread paired with Flying Dog Barrel-Aged Horn Dog Barley Wine (an über-limited release based off our standard production Barley Wine). Blue Cheeses pair well with Barley Wines.

Course 2: Maryland crab puffs paired with Flying Dog Tire Bite Golden Ale. Our Jim Lutz brought a $30 can of Maryland crab out to Colorado and showed us how to make crab puffs. Basically it’s crab, old bay seasoning, salt and pepper, scallions and Flying Dog Road Dog Porter. Next the crab gets placed into some crescent rolls (crescent, croissant…) and baked for about 18 minutes (whatever it says on your croissant recipe).

Course 3: Salmon pie paired with Flying Dog Double Dog Double Pale Ale. Recipe available here.

Hood River, Oregon - Full Sail’s Brewmaster, Jamie Emmerson and Chef, Ron
Penrose have teamed up to create a hearty winter menu as a part of Full
Sail’s continuing weekly Brewmaster Dinner series. The new winter
Brewmaster Dinner menu will be available every Thursday, beginning January
10th, at Full Sail’s Tasting Room and Pub. The four course menu features
savory and sweet seasonal fare paired with four of the brewery’s award
winning brews.

Appetizer
Porcini Stuffed Crimini Mushroom - drizzled with a sage crème fraiche.
Paired with Amber Ale

Salad
Mixed Greens Salad - with chevre cheese tossed with raspberry vinaigrette.
Paired with Session Premium Lager

Main Dish
Dry Rubbed Prime Rib - Mt. Shadows Natural Meats 6 oz. prime rib topped with
horseradish compound butter. Served with stone ground mustard mashed
potatoes and grilled vegetables. Paired with Slipknot Imperial IPA

Dessert
Ganache Filled Chocolate Brownie & Vanilla Tillamook Ice Cream - drizzled
with Session Reduction caramel sauce. Paired with Full Sail LTD 01.

Just order the Brewmaster’s menu and Full Sail’s pub staff will serve their
current celebration of food and beer while you sit back, take in the view
and enjoy. Each menu will feature comments by the Brewmaster and Chef on
why the pairings were chosen. The cost of the dinner including beer is only
$25 per person. The menu will be served every Thursday, from 4:00PM to
8:00PM in a self-guided format. No reservations are needed. The regular
menu will also be available. Quantities are limited. The Full Sail Tasting
Room and Pub is open daily @ 11:30AM serving lunch and dinner. Brewery
tours are available daily, free of charge at 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00 PM.
For more information about the dinners call the Full Sail Tasting Room and
Pub at 541-386-2247. To view the current menu visit
www.fullsailbrewing.com.

The independent and employee-owned Full Sail brewery is perched on a bluff
in Hood River, Oregon, overlooking the most epic wind and kite surfing spot
in the world. At this very moment 47 specialists in the liquid refreshment
arts are crafting barley and hops into your next beer. The Full Sail crew
has been fermenting godlike nectar since 1987. Their award winning brews
are now available in nineteen states. The Full Sail Tasting Room and Pub is
open seven days a week. Swing by for a pint, grab a bite, tour the brewery,
or just soak up the view.

Probably not the most objective title, but I had a great time at the Big Beers, Belgians and Barley Wines Festival Brewmaster’s Dinner this evening. The food was spectacular, and the featured breweries were Odell and The Lost Abbey. The pairings were wonderful and the beers were unbelievable. My favorite brew was the Lost Abbey Veritas 002, a blend of Old Viscosity, Avant Garde, and Redstone Meadery’s Raspberry Mead, all barrel-aged together. Tomme Arthur said there were only about 20-25 cases of this made (600 bottles!). I took some photos and made a few tasting notes, I’ll aim to have something online in the coming days.

This month’s session is about Doppelbocks. Seeing as I work for Flying Dog and we just released our Collaborator Doppelbock, I figured this would be a nice time to make a Beer Dinner featuring our Doppelbock with the main course. I’ve been reading Garrett Oliver’s “The Brewmaster’s Table” periodically over the last 6 weeks, and there’s a great section on Bocks and Doppelbocks (pages 268-279). I was going to talk about the history of Doppelbocks here, but there is already lots of information out there, so check the following sites for some background. As with most beers, Bocks and Doppelbocks have an amazing history.

Bock/Doppelbock on Wikipedia
New York Times article on bocks

According to Oliver, here are a few foods that go well with Doppelbocks:

Venison (Oliver says this is the best combination)
Duck
Goose
Pork
Traditional Mexican dishes (like Mole)
Custards (flan or creme brulée)

So yesterday I decided to make something with pork tenderloin that could be paired with our Collaborator Doppelbock. More on that later. You can’t skip the earlier course, especially the tasty salad I made!

The first dish in this simple beer dinner was a Pear and Toasted Walnut Salad with In-Heat Wheat Hefeweizen Vinaigrette, paired with In-Heat Wheat Hefeweizen.

I’m not one to always follow the recipe, so instead of just red pears, I used one red pear, one asian pear (yellow), and one green pear. This added some color to the dish. You can also add blue cheese crumbles if you wish, but I decided to skip this part. It was interesting to reduce beer in a pan (from 3/4 cup down to 1/4 cup), the process took only about 5 minutes compared to the 10 minutes the recipe says. And with the walnuts, toast them right as you’re about to serve the dish so that they’re warm. The vinaigrette worked great with In-Heat Wheat, and I’ll definitely be making this again. Total prep time for the salad was about 10 minutes.

Now, to the pork and Doppelbock! I was specifically looking for something that wasn’t too difficult and something that I could grill. I had considered making a mole sauce, but the ingredient list was too long, and I wanted something that was more easily doable for more people. A search on food.com resulted in a very nice recipe for Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Mustard, Rosemary & Apple Marinade. The link has the full recipe and directions. A few things that I did differently (you don’t always have to follow the recipe). I kept the fat on the tenderloin, I think that when you grill it, the fat adds flavor and helps keep the meat moist. I used fresh thyme instead of rosemary because the supermarket I went to was out of rosemary. Instead of port or brewed black tea in the shallot sauce, I decided to use Doppelbock instead. The results were pretty decent. We cooked one 12 ounce tenderloin on Medium on our grill 10 minutes per side (20 minutes total). The tenderloin came out between medium rare and medium and I think it was perfect. We decided to add a side of broccoli to this dish, but feel free to add mashed potatoes, instead.

I felt that the malt sweetness of the Doppelbock complemented the pork wonderfully. Some Doppelbocks tend to be too smoky flavored for my tastes, but the pork really brought out the subtle smokiness that Collaborator has. The total prep time for this course was about 30 minutes, with an additional 20 spent cooking the tenderloin. I’ll definitely be making this dish again!

For dessert, I decided to make the Beer Float that Chef Scott made for a previous beer dinner of ours (it’s the last course, obviously). Being an equal-opportunity blog, I decided to use Ska Brewery’s Ten Pin Porter. I melted some Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet chocolate in the microwave (1 minute) and chocolate covered some beautiful fresh strawberries and a few of the leftover pear slices, put them on some wax paper and let them cool. When dessert came around, I threw a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of chocolate ice cream into a wine glass and poured Ten Pin Porter over the ice cream.

The first spoonful of the float was intensely bitter, due to the hop bitterness of the porter. I found that this was perfectly offset if you took a bite of the chocolate covered strawberry and then took a spoonful of the float. The pears were a nice touch, too. It’s imperative that if you make this float to offset the bitterness with some sort of sweet fruit. Total prep time was about 15 minutes, just to dip the fruit into melted tasty chocolate.

All in all, including taking photographs of this beer dinner, it took about 2 hours to prepare and eat. The total cost for 3 people was about $50, but we had a bunch of the ingredients already. But you get an exquisite meal at the fraction of the cost that you would, if you went out to a fancy restaurant.

The Session is a unique blogging event in the beer world. Every 1st Friday of the month, beer bloggers unite to write on a common theme. We at beerdinners.com are happy to contribute! This month’s topic is Winter Beers, which was thought up by the Barley Vine blog. Winter seasonals are presented at beer dinners all around the world this time of year, and it’s a great chance to get to to sample some smaller batch beer.

ENJOY A BEER DINNER AT A RESTAURANT
It seems to many that the concept of a fancy beer dinner in a restaurant for $50 and up can make people a little uncomfortable. However, the beer dinners I’ve attended have been casual get-togethers where friends eat great food and discuss great beer. You don’t have to be an expert to have a good time at a beer dinner. There seem to be a wide variety of beer dinners nationwide now, and don’t feel like you can’t attend a beer dinner because you aren’t a beer expert. The odds are that you’ll be sitting near someone who is a beer expert and they’d most likely be happy to answer your questions (don’t be afraid to ask!). Many of these beer dinners will have food paired with Winter Seasonal brews, and it’s a great chance to explore a brewery’s beers (from their year-round styles to these smaller batch seasonal beers).

DIY BEER DINNERS
But as Stan Hieronymous of Appellation Beer points out, “Shouldn’t every dinner be a beer dinner?” and we heartily agree. Anyone can put on their own beer dinner in the comfort of their own home! These beer dinners can be as complex or as simple as you want to make them. The Holiday season is a great time to spend with your friends, and doing a DIY beer dinner could be just the right motivator to get your friends together! Winter seasonal beers provide an excellent option for your beer pairings, and there are a wide variety of winter seasonal beers throughout the country.

Picking the perfect Winter Seasonal beers for your beer dinner is definitely up to your individual tastes. I found a really nice article about Seasonal beer and food pairings - which helps you pair a winter beer style with various types of food.

I spoke with Matt Brophy, the analytical brewer of Flying Dog Brewery, and he gave me some tips on pairing K-9 Cruiser with food. It was really easy to get Matt to contribute here since we both work at Flying Dog (and he’s a good guy who wants to help out).

K-9 could be classified as a Strong Ale. Matt directed me to the Brewer’s Association site, where I found this:

Strong Ales are light amber to mid-range brown in color, with medium to full body with a malty sweetness. Hop aroma should be minimal and flavor can vary from none to medium in character intensity. Fruity-ester flavors and aromas can contribute to the character of this ale. Bitterness should be minimal but evident and balanced with malt and/or caramel like sweetness. Alcohol types can be varied and complex. A rich, often sweet and complex estery character may be evident. This process often softens the perceived bitterness.

K-9 is more balanced to the sweet side so it may not be best for balancing spicy flavors, so keep that in mind.

Matt also gave me a list of foods that go well with K-9 Cruiser:
Cheeses: Gouda, Havarti, Swiss
Meats: Beef, Pork (Grilled / Smoked)
Deserts: Chocolate

RECIPES ONLINE
Can you follow directions? That always helps when preparing food for your beer dinner. The internet is a wonderful resource for finding dishes that can complement your winter seasonal brew. Here are a few of the sites I consult when cooking at home:

FoodNetwork.com: They have their own television station, complete with recipes from all your favorite cooking shows. I think it’s the best resource around. Beer can be paired with food, but don’t forget that beer can be a key ingredient in your recipes as well. I did a search for “beef and beer“, and 95 different recipes came up.

FoodPairing.be: Another nice resource for preparing your own beer dinner is foodpairing.be. The website allows you to see how various ingredients complement your dish (look at the roasted beef page to get an idea of what I’m talking about). This site is an interesting resource for the more adventurous chef.

BeerCook.com: Lucy Saunders (author of “Grilling with Beer” and “Cooking with Beer”) has a nice site devoted to food and beer. She’s been getting a lot of blog love these days, and it’s well deserved.

CookingByNumbers.com: A sort of handy site that allows you to find recipes based on what you have in your fridge.

The Women’s Lighthouse Project helps women who have HIV and AIDS. Flying Dog Brewery was one of the sponsors of their 10th anniversary fundraiser, a sort of Iron Chef celebrity cook-off. Denver celebrities were paired with chefs from notable Denver restaurants. They were given a mystery bag that included a wide variety of ingredients, including Rocky Mountain Trout, bison, pumpkin, and even a couple Flying Dog beers. The contestants for this fundraiser were given 45 minutes to create a four-course meal for two people.

The event was held at Mise En Place, a downtown Denver cooking school. Their facility was ideal for observation of these chefs working their magic, and event-goers were encouraged to walk around to see what each chef and their celebrity partner were preparing.

Click To Play

We are in contact with the chefs and are hoping to get their recipes for their dishes.