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This month’s session is about Organic Beer, and this month is hosted by the wonderful blog Beer Activist. Already there are some wonderful blog entries from a wide variety of beer bloggers about many different organic beers. It’s my goal here to help educate you guys a little bit about cooking with organic food.

What is organic food? Wikipedia has a good (but lengthy) section about what organic food is. Here’s a good overview, taken from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia link:

Organic foods are produced according to a certain production standard. For crops, it means they were grown without the use of conventional pesticides, artificial fertilizers, human waste, or sewage sludge, and that they were processed without ionizing radiation or food additives.[1] For animals, it means they were reared without the routine use of antibiotics and without the use of growth hormones. In most countries, organic produce must not be genetically modified. however by definition GMO’s do not use pesticides or fertilizers to prevent disease, therefore are organic just not socially accepted as natural or ‘organic’.

Organic Kitchen, although maybe not the nicest-looking site, has a good set of links about Organic Gardening. Seeing that this is the time when people plant their home gardens (at least in Colorado), these links will help you get started down the path of organic gardening.

One of my favorite sites, Treehugger had a great article on organic food from about 6 months ago. It’s a very detailed blog entry, and pretty technical. But if you’re really interested in this, it’s a great resource for those looking to learn a great deal about organic food.

The organic beer trend is hardly a new one, as referenced by this Co-op America entry about organic beer. Their lists of organic beer aren’t up-to-date, but this link will give you a good idea of where the organic beer revolution began.

Looking for organic beer, but too lazy to actually go to a store to seek it out? Never fear, because Diamond Organics has mail order organic beer. Their beers are single beers, so you can get an assortment of organic beer to complement the food from your organic garden without leaving the house!

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.

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.