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!

Smoke on the beer water! German rauchbier rocks my world!

If you could bottle bacon in a jar would you buy it? I mean people all joke about how bacon is gods gift to creation, there is nothing more perfect than bacon right? Forget about Jones Bacon soda for a minute and lets get back on track.

What if you could make a smoke flavored beer, so perfect for grilled meats and sausage, bbq and what not, keep the abv low so you could slam it back but enjoy its big full body with or without a slab of babyback pork BBQ ribs... would this be possible? My friends... it is... and it is called Rauchbier or "smoke" beer (from the German word rauch meaning smoke).

The flagship producer and maker of this beer is a place that has been beechwood smoking this beer for centuries, Aecht Schlenkerla in Bamberg Germany.

This type of beer surprised me in ways I couldn't even imagine. Yes I knew it was a smoke beer but I had my doubts and many of them and the myths that come with it were shredded to pieces after tasting this fine beverage.

Watch the video below to find out... and make sure you grab a real Stein or an authentic glass and have a smoke beer (Rauchbier) for yourself too someday!

CHEERS!