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!

Hefeweizen beer battle, or how I like to butcher the German language.

Hefeweizen. It seems to be one of those beers that has been sort of bastardized of late. People get a real skinny glass and throw a lemon in and that's it. Is there more to this than that? Turns out there is. First off... skip the lemon.

I can say that this isn't my favorite style of beer, but if you want to have a good one try one of the two I had here. Weihenstephaner is a product from Germany that claims to be the oldest brewery in the world. Reading the bottles on these was enough to make my head spin as I probably butchered the pronunciation of all the German language I could.

For comparisons I grabbed also a bottle of Edel-Weisse Mein Grunes from Scheneider & Sohn a green grenade sporting a USDA organic seal.

Turns out there was much imbibing joy to be had. These definitely feel like summer beers, so while there is loads of snow outside it felt hard to get into character. But for the price point for these beers, they just can't be beat.

Check them out. CHEERS!