Beer and Bratwurst! Beer and food and pure love

I really love to cook, and one of the great simple things in life is to make something simple.  Poaching sausage with just some simple onions does the job, but what if you could combine bratwurst and try different beers?

I decide that when I was viewing some recent threads on BeerAdvocate.com, a place I spend probably far too much time on.. there was a good discussion on cooking with beer and bratwurst.

I get great sausage from my farmers market from a place called Smith Meadows.  I really REALLY love their Sweet Italian Sauage but I digress...

I bought some of their bratwurst and decided that I should try to cook them, trying and tasting them with different beers and seeing how the results went.  I picked a very common light produced mass lager, a true great German Pilsner,  DC Brau's the Corruption IPA, and finally the grand daddy of them all, one of my all time favorite beers, Aecht Schlenkerla Eiche, a very malty doppelbock that is smoked with oak.

I loved this beer so much I decided to make a gravy with it also.  The results of this cooking experiment were quite fascinating.  I video taped my experience (they make tapes?) and the experience is below, feel free to watch my experiment below.

CHEERS!

Grabbing a beer with Greg Engert beer director of Churchkey Birch & Barley

There has been a lot of changes lately in the craft beer world since I can remember. Living in the Washington DC area for many years gave me a real good opportunity to witness such changes, particularly when a new establishment came along called Churchkey.

Churchkey Birch & Barley, is a craft beer bar that has 50 taps and 5 casks, and is managed by beer director Greg Engert, a former employee of the Brickskeller.

I sat down to talk with him about the birth and growth of craft beer and his establishment.  It was quite an interesting and if you want to see it grab a drink and spend 1/2 hour watching the video below.  Cheers!