The Bruery

Video - On Sour Ales

2012-01-23T10:28:00.000-08:00

Our barrel aging program has a strong focus on sour beers. Here is a short video featuring Patrick, Tyler and Jay, describing some of the basics behind sour beers.

Enjoy!

Foods made with healthy bacteria

2012-01-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

It may seem weird to some people that we brew our sour beers with bacteria, but check out some of these very common foods that are made with similar micro-organisms.

KIMCHI!

Kimchi fermentation is carried out by various microorganisms present in the raw materials and ingredients of kimchi. Among them, lactic acid bacteria which can grow in 3% brine play the most active role in the kimchi fermentation; it suppresses the growth of other bacteria which could grow under such conditions.

Among the 200 bacteria isolated form kimchi, the important microorganisms in kimchi fermentation are known to be Lactobacillus plantarum, L. Brevis, Streptococcus faecalis, Leuconostoc mesenteroides, and Pediococcus pentosaceus. Most kinds of bacteria belonging to the genus Lactobacillus have been found to be present in kimchi.

PICKLES!

All foods are continually assaulted by many kinds of microorganisms, racing to eat as much as possible. When you pickle vegetables by fermentation, you help one type of microbe win this "race."

More specifically, you create special conditions in your pickle crock that keep away "bad" spoilage-causing microorganisms, and that allow a unique class of "good" bacteria, called lactic acid bacteria, to colonize your cucumbers.

As lactic acid bacteria grow in your pickle crock, they digest sugars in the cucumbers and produce lactic acid. Not only does this acid give the pickles their characteristic sour tang, it controls the spread of spoilage microbes. Also, by gobbling up the sugars, lactic acid bacteria remove a potential food source for bad bacteria.

(http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/pickles/salt.html)

SOURDOUGH BREAD!

"Here's a sourdough bâtard from Artisan Bakers in Sonoma," says Danielle Forestier, a French-trained master baker in Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco. "I'm checking the package," she reports over the phone. "It's made of unbleached flour, water, and salt. Three ingredients, lots of taste, great texture." Yet a typical supermarket white bread has more than 25 ingredients and additives and still tastes vapid.

The difference is those fermenting bugs. The baker's yeast in supermarket bread creates a virtual monoculture of S. cerevisiae. The sourdough bâtard, on the other hand, is a product of natural fermentation involving wild yeasts and bacteria. Almost all the bacteria are lactobacilli, cousins of the bacteria that curdle milk into yogurt and cheese. "These lactobacilli outnumber yeasts in sourdough by as many as 100 to one," Sugihara says. It's the acids they make that give sourdough its tartness. Not only that, say European researchers, the bacteria also contribute carbon dioxide as well as aromatic compounds that infuse bread with flavor and delicious smells.

excerpt from http://discovermagazine.com/2003/sep/featscienceof

YOGURT!

Yogurt is made when specific bacteria are added to milk in a controlled environment and allowed to ferment.

For a dairy product to be called yogurt, it must contain two bacteria: Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus. Many types of yogurt incorporate other species as well, including Lactobacillus acidophilus and Lactobacillus casei. In many countries, yogurt must also contain live bacteria and remain unpasteurized, with pasteurized yogurts being specially labeled. Pasteurized yogurt has a long shelf life and does not need to be kept refrigerated, but it also doesn't have the health benefits of live yogurt.

Gifts: Stocking Stuffers!

2011-12-07T12:37:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we brought you some ideas for some great books to get for your favorite beer geek. Today we're moving to something a bit smaller, but possibly even more important... Stocking Stuffers!

Whatever holiday you celebrate, you are probably in need of some small gifts for coworkers, distant relatives and and your favorite brew masters...ahem...ahem... So we've collected a few ideas to inspire your shopping for stocking stuffers and knickknacks this holiday season.

Beer Soap! You want your beer loving friend to be clean, right? Why not get them some beer soap! One spot to find it is here: http://www.thebeersoapcompany.com/

Bottle stoppers! Beer geeks are always itching to crack open the newest 22oz or 750ml bottle that they got at the store, but they don't always have someone to share it with. These bottle stoppers fit in any bottle and can let someone spread their drinking over a couple of nights. http://amzn.to/twwsMw

Awesome bottle openers! Everyone has that old plastic bottle opener that they picked up free at a bar or from the floor at a college frat party, but the true beer geek needs a special, unique, bottle opener. We recently spotted these interesting ones, but there are tons more on the web, just start googling! http://bit.ly/vXZanS

ETSY!! If you haven't visited etsy before, head over there today. It's an entire community of handmade products for sale and if you simply type in the word "beer" in their search bar, you'll find hundreds of amazing products from towels to earings to coasters. www.etsy.com

A fridge magnet bottle opener! Everyone keeps their beer in the fridge, right? And how many times have you had to scour your kitchen for an opener? A few companies are making openers like this one that stick on your fridge and easily open bottles. Very handy tool!http://bit.ly/vXZanS

Gift Cards! Duh. But you often forget that you can get a gift card from major liqour store chains and even some smaller shops like The Bruery Provisions! Stop on by our store for a gift card in any denomination!

Beer notebook! Want to become a true beer connoisseur? You'll never get there if you don't keep track of tasting notes and details about beers that you've tried. Your true beer geek friends will love a cool notebook to scribble their drunken ramblings after their 10th taste of the night. http://etsy.me/thVmU9

Upcycled beer products! Wallets made from beer boxes, earrings made from bottlecaps, glasses made from bottles. Tons of pieces of beer culture are being used on a secondary market to create cool products. Search around and you're bound to find something cool like these wallets! http://etsy.me/sixUAc

BEER! What fits better in a stocking or puts a bigger smile on your friend's face than a bottle of high quality craft beer! Look for something new and interesting that they might not have yet, like The Bruery's Smoking Wood which is hitting shelves at The Bruery Provisions the week leading up to Christmas!

Gifts: Beer Books!

2011-12-06T13:22:00.001-08:00

The holidays are upon us and we know how hard it can be to think of the perfect gift for your friends and family. We'll be posting some ideas for beer lovers' gifts this week to help you get through the holiday season!

Today we're featuring some great books about beer and all the encompasses it. We've got some of these books available at The Bruery Provisions and others are available through Amazon or other book stores.

If you are looking for something a bit more special, this Thursday, 12/8, we'll have Joshua Bernstein, author of Brewed Awakening, in for a book signing! Plus, we'll have a special 'Brewed Awakening' flight featuring some rare beers that people usually have to wait in line for!

For the novice beer geek! This brand new book is perfect for your friend who is trying to track down all the 'must have' beers. Loads of craft examples of different styles and hard to find treasures.

For the novice beer chick (or dude). Written by "The Beer Chicks", The Naked Pint is a great book for the beer novice looking to learn the basics of beer styles and history be they a chick or a dude.

For the novice know-it-all. Tasting Beer is one of the unofficial textbooks for the Cicerone certification and is an easy read full of information from history to styles to how beer is made. One of the most comprehensive beer books out there without being too complex.

For the novice beer traveler. This new book is a great look at the different breweries across this great country of ours. A fantastic read for your friend who likes to visit breweries while cross the USA.

For the foodie! Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery penned this lengthy book that gives an extremely comprehensive look at how to pair beer with food and food with beer.

For the beginning home brewer! Cooked up by a craft beer couple who has spent years brewing out of their compact San Francisco apartment, this is a great start for someone who is just getting into homebrewing and needs some inpiration.

For the novice homebrewer! This book is one of the standards for learning to homebrew. Concepts on recipe formulation and everything involved in the process.

For the crazy homebrewer! Radical Brewing is just that. Does your friend need some inspiration to become the next head brewer for The Bruery? This book will lead them on the path to craziness.

For the homebrew (or professional brewing) expert. Is your friend an incredible homebrewer? They'd probably enjoy this guide on yeast :)

Another one for the homebrew expert. While some of the other books teach you the fundamentals of brewing a beer, this one gets down to the nitty gritty. We still sift through it on occasion ourselves.

And last but not least... for the expert brewer who loves sour and funky ales! Another guide on yeast, but this one focussing on the funky stuff. One of the hardest forms of brewing to perfect, this book at least gives a brewer a leg up on nature.

For the entrepreneur! Schmaltz brewing has been around for 13 years and Jeremy Cowan shares his stories of the beer world between the He'Brew and Coney Island brands which have both been influential on the retail shelf.

Another for the entrepreneur! Inspire your favorite homebrewer to go pro with this book by Sam C of Dogfish Head Brewery (whom we recently collaborated with on a beer!)

Movembeer!

2011-11-21T13:54:00.001-08:00

Sorry for being absent from the blog for a bit. We won't let that happen again!

We've been busy as always here at The Bruery for the past few weeks trying to settle into our new barrel aging facility and plan for 2012.

For those who didn't already hear, we managed to sell out all 1,000 spots for our 2012 Reserve Society by the end of the first day it was up for general sale. To help you understand how surprised and excited we were about this, last year we only sold 700 memberships and didn't sell out until the week between Christmas and the New Year. We didn't expect to sell out all 1,000 memberships and certainly didn't expect the memberships to sell as fast as they did.

We need to of course send a huge THANK YOU to all of those who nabbed up those precious spots as quickly as they did. It is a really special thing for us to have so many fanatical craft beer lovers as friends and customers. It's cliché, but we'd be dead in the water without you and you can be sure that the money we raised through the RS sale will be put towards incredible new beers!

On another note....with Thanksgiving coming in just a couple of days and with Movember in full effect, we thought it would be fun to have people paste some mustaches to their favorite beers, or just the bottles they plan on drinking with the Thanksgiving feast to add a little more festive to the festivities. Movember, for those who don't know, has become a national movement in which men don't shave their upper lip for the month of November in support of prostate cancer awareness. Help the cause by putting some mustaches on your Thanksgiving table!

Here is just one mustache that you can use for your bottles, but simply google 'mustache' and you can find plenty more. http://bit.ly/tSdKgw

Once you've printed out and pasted the 'staches, don't forget to take some photos and post them up on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/thebruery! We'd love to see the creative mustache bottle displays that you come up with!

Faster, Bigger, Better, Bolder (Gradually, Quietly, Steadily)

2011-10-11T11:11:00.000-07:00

Today we are very excited to be releasing the beer that we collaborated on with Sam Caligione and Dogfish Head! Read here for the original post on just what we got up to or just read below for the real story.

Thanks to Arne Frantzell and The Full Pint for these comics!

LA Beer Week

2011-10-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

We're distributed in quite a few cities that run great beer weeks throughout the year and we've always been jealous that we didn't have anything of the same level in our back yard. While LA isn't our homebase, it's a pretty close neighbor and we're very excited for the 2nd annual LA Beer Week. Last year there were some really fun events and a lot of restaurants and bars ran some great promotions, but this year seems to be miles ahead of what we saw in the past. There are more events than a single beer geek could possibly attend within the two weeks of LA Beer Week (ya, two weeks, someone must have been drinking when they came up with that concept).

We've got a number of events planned both in LA and OC for LA Beer Week as do many of our favorite craft breweries both from SoCal and around the country. Browse through the events calendar on their webpage and find some events in your neighborhood, there are bound to be a few that catch your interest.

Can't wait to see some of our fans out and about as we circle the LA/OC area these coming weeks!

www.labeerweek.com

New Brew Thursday - Oude Tart

2011-10-05T08:56:00.000-07:00

Check out this episode of New Brew Thursday filmed at our brewery and featuring Tyler King and several vintages of Oude Tart!

Sept 29 : Oude Tart : The Bruery on location with Tyler King from New Brew Thursday on Vimeo.

Great American Beer Festival

2011-10-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

We just got back from an incredible few days in Denver, CO where the Brewer's Association was holding their 30th annual Great American Beer Festival.

For those who have never been, GABF is truly a remarkable time and we highly recommend you get there at some point in the future. Held annually in the convention center in downtown Denver, the hall is filled with thousands of people trying beers from hundreds and hundreds of breweries from all around the United States. It's an incredible time for us to showcase our beer to people from all over the country who don't typically get to see our beers and even if they do, they never get to see any of the more rare beers...like Oude Tart and Black Tuesday.

Nothing gives us a better feeling than having a line of people at our booth, super excited to try some of our beers and letting us know how much they enjoy them. This year we had people at our booth for another reason as well, however. People came by to take photos because we decided to decorate our booth with loads of images of cats as well as stuffed animal cats and cat toys. There was no true reasoning behind our cat theme, we just thought it was hilarious.

GABF is not only a festival for tasting interesting beers, but it is the largest commercial beer competition in the world, this year having close to 600 breweries enter a total of 3,930 beers to the various categories. And of all of those entries, we are very very proud to say we took home two silver medals and one gold medal! Both Hottenroth and The Wanderer won silver and Papier, our very first anniversary beer and one of the very first batches of beer brewed at The Bruery took a gold medal.

The fact that two of our sour ales and one of our biggest and most complex bourbon barrel aged strong ales took home awards just gives us that much more faith in our Quercus Maximus project. As we continue to brew more of these intricate beers, hopefully we can win some more awards in the future!

Beer Crispy Treats

2011-09-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from Nomnivorous! Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

My brother wanted to stir the chickpeas. Oh, of course he did. But in the midst of the magical father-son moment, the chickpeas went a little crazy. The molten foam splattered, my brother’s arm being the first spot of attack. It was a bad burn, and my brother was no longer curious and happy. [This is my now chef brother. Whose arms are now covered in burns and cuts after a few years in the business. Who would've guessed?]

I still remember the scene. It was the evening, because my father was home and cooking for the market. There was a giant pot of chickpeas on the back eye, simmering from dry, crunchy pellets to creamy goodness that would turn into hummus the next day. Chickpeas are easy, yet temperamental to cook. For the best flavor, simmer; don’t let them boil or they will foam and spew like a rabid dog. My mischievous baby brother, young enough to sit on my father’s shoulders, wanted to see what was happening up there, on the stove he couldn’t yet see. My dad picked him up, put him on his shoulders, and let him carefully peer at the steaming pots on the stove. [If it was a normal night, two or three things were cooking, at the least.]

This is one of the first scenes in the kitchen that I remember. I wasn’t the one curiously trying to watch my father’s bubbling cauldrons. But I remember it well. My mother, already a concerned parent, tended towards the extremes in keeping us safe, and the chickpea incident heightened her safety alert. So while my friends might have memories of helping chop onions, or stir pots, my mother kept us away from the knife block and stove eyes for the most part.

But one of the dishes I do vividly remember playing assistant on were Rice Krispies Treats. Since the kids were usually the ones begging for dessert, those were the times my mother would recruit a helper. I would measure the everything out. In our largest pot, I would add the butter and marshmallows. Mom would turn the stove on low, and I would get to stir occasionally. Once the butter and marshmallows were just melted enough, Mom would move the pot to a cool eye, and I could add the cereal. Stir, stir, stir and then, get messy! Pour the cereal mixture into a pan and squish down. Now go wash your hands and let them cool for a few minutes, my mother would shoo me out of the kitchen.

It required two dishes, three ingredients, no oven to turn on and very little cooling time for kids to nag her about, so Rice Krispies treats were one of my mother’s favorite desserts to make. And they’re absolutely one of my favorite desserts to eat. The simple, gooey, glorious delight is hard to beat. But ever since I sunk my teeth into salted brown butter crispy treats over a year ago [made by Autumn for a BK Swappers event], I’ve yearned to update the treat. What follows definitely takes more than two bowls, but I consider it a heavenly marriage of nostalgia and adulthood.

I was presented with an opportunity to develop a recipe featuring The Bruery’s Autumn Maple beer and my sweet tooth took over. When I received the two bottles of this seasonal brew, I chilled them and then took a taste. The spices were present, but thankfully the beer does not taste like pumpkin pie spice (ahem, like many autumnal beers). This California craft brewery has a keeper of a beer – it is bold and rich, but not heavy like Guinness. In-your-face dark beers sometimes overwhelm me, but there is a smooth sweetness to Autumn Maple that makes it incredibly drinkable. The spicy base had my brain spinning with dessert ideas. I wanted to stretch the beer flavor into many components, highlighting the beer in different forms but also building the layers of beer flavors across one bite. That bite would be The Bruery beer crispy treat.

Yes, I’m obsessed with making marshmallows, I will admit it to the world. They’re just so simple, but the flavors of the beer play very nicely here. The beer caramel sauce, inspired by bourbon caramel, has similar dark, spicy flavors. There is a malty, “beery-ness” to both components, but their sweetness helps balance it out. The nutty browned butter, crunchy puffed rice, and hearty dose of salt rounds out the dessert, and the dark chocolate is purely gilding the lily on my part.

Beer Crispy Treats

Each part of the final dessert can stand alone, and that is why I love this recipe. The beer marshmallows and caramel are both delicious by themselves, and the salted brown butter crispy treats are not to be missed.

For the Salted Beer Caramel Sauce

1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoon light corn syrup
1/4 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons butter
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup The Bruery Autumn Maple beer

Directions

In a small saucepan, combine the sugar, water and corn syrup on medium heat. Bring to a low boil. Gently swirl the mixture in (do not stir), and allow it to boil until it is a deep amber color, 10 minutes.
Remove from the heat and carefully whisk in the cream and the butter. Return to low heat and stir until mixture is smooth. Stir in salt and beer. Return to a low boil for five minutes. Remove from heat and cool before using.

For the Beer Marshmallows

2 envelopes (4 tablespoons) unflavored gelatin
½ cup cold, flat The Bruery Autumn Maple beer, divided
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup light corn syrup
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste or extract

Directions

In bowl of a standing mixer or a large bowl sprinkle gelatin over ¼ cup beer, and let stand to soften.
In a large, heavy saucepan cook granulated sugar, corn syrup, second 1/4 cup of cold beer, and salt over low heat, stirring with a wooden spoon, until sugar is dissolved. Increase heat to moderate and boil mixture until a candy or digital thermometer registers 240°F, about 12 minutes. The beer will cause the mixture to foam, but resist stirring unless absolutely necessary. (I stirred about 3 times during the cooking, to help reduce foam.)
Remove pan from heat and pour sugar mixture over gelatin mixture, stirring until gelatin is dissolved. With standing or a hand-held electric mixer beat mixture on high speed until pale tan, thick and nearly tripled in volume, about six minutes if using standing mixer or about 10 minutes if using hand-held mixer. Keep the fluff in your large bowl for crispy treat making,
If making beer marshmallows, transfer to a greased 9” square pan. Let set up for 2-3 hours, cut and dust with powdered sugar.

For the Beer Crispy Treats

4 tablespoons butter
8 cups Rice Krispies cereal (or any puffed rice cereal)
1 batch beer marshmallow fluff

Directions

Grease a 9 x 13” pan with cooking spray or butter.
In a large, pale-bottomed pot, melt butter over medium heat. You want to brown the butter, for a nutty, rich flavor. The butter will foam, then turn clear gold, then finally begin to brown. Stir often, scraping up the browned bits and keeping your eyes on the pan. Once the butter starts to brown, remove from the heat. The butter has a tendency to burn quickly.
Pour the butter into the bowl of beer marshmallow fluff and stir to combine. At first, the butter and marshmallow doesn’t seem to want to combine. But the marshmallows will melt a little, and after a few stirs the mixture will finally come together. Add the cereal and stir quickly to combine.
Pour the mixture into your prepared pan and spread gently with a spatula. To press into place, I recommend using a square of parchment paper that has been greased. Use it greased side down to smooth and press the cereal into the pan.
Let cool for 30 minutes, to come to room temperature and harden. Using a serrated knife, cut into small squares.

To assemble the Beer Crispy Treats:

10 ounces dark chocolate [bark, chips, or bar]

Directions

If needed, chop your chocolate into ¼” squares. Put all chocolate in a heatproof (metal or glass) bowl. Set the bowl over a small pan of simmering water - so that the bowl rests on the rim of the pan. Make sure the simmering water does not touch the bottom of the bowl. This double boiler set up will melt the chocolate.
Stir the chocolate to help melt. Once mostly melted, take the pan and bowl off the stove. The residual heat will fully melt the chocolate. Dip the top of one treat into the melted chocolate. Place the crispy treat, chocolate side up, on a baking sheet and repeat with the rest of the crispy treat squares.
Once all treats are dipped in chocolate, refrigerate the treats for 20 minutes or until the chocolate has hardened. Place treats on a platter and drizzle with cooled caramel sauce. Enjoy!

For more amazing recipes, check out

Nomnivorous!

Autumn Maple/Cinnamon Israeli Cous Cous with Napoleon of Sweet Potatoes and Maple/Brown Sugar Mascarpone

2011-09-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from Happy Home Blog! Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

For the Cous Cous
2 cups Israeli cous cous
2 ½ cups Autumn Maple beer
½ cup vegetable stock
1 tsp cinnamon

For the Sweet Potatoes
2 large sweet potatoes, in ¼ slices lengthwise
2 tbsp brown sugar
2 tbsp butter

For the Mascarpone
¼ cup mascarpone
2 tsp ginger powder
1 tbsp brown sugar

For the Autumn Maple Sauce
2 cups Autumn Maple beer
¼ cup maple syrup
¼ cup brown sugar

Preheat oven to 400*F
Begin by bringing 2 ½ cups Autumn maple beer and ½ cup veggie stock to a boil.
Add your cous cous and simmer, 8-10 minutes or until tender.
Stir in cinnamon, and set aside, covered to retain heat.
Butter a baking sheet and lay slices of sweet potato on the sheet
Sprinkle with brown sugar and pats of butter. Bake in the 400* oven until soft, about 10 minutes.
In a separate bowl, cream together mascarpone, ginger, and brown sugar. Transfer to a piping bag.
In a medium-sized saucepan, heat 2 cups Autumn maple beer, ¼ cup maple syrup, and ¼ cup brown sugar. Boil until reduced by half; watch to ensure the pot does not boil over.
To assemble: Lay down a bed of Autumn Maple cous cous. Place 1 slice of candied sweet potato, then pipe a line of mascarpone. Alternate sweet potato and mascarpone for several layers. Place Autumn Maple sauce in a separate ramekin for dipping. Enjoy!

For more amazing recipes, check out

Happy Home Blog!

Pumpkin Beer Bread

2011-09-27T11:21:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from An Open Cookbook! Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

I was recently a lucky recipient of two large bottles of Autumn Maple beer from The Bruery in Southern California. My immediate thought was...Beer Bread! What a perfect accompaniment to a nice glass of cold beer with the hint of yams and warm spice. So I scoured through the internet, cookbooks and my recipe binder and finally landed on this hearty recipe from Ezra Pound cake blog. I wanted to climb through the looking glass when I saw the picture of her beer bread. She perfectly depicted the idea of tearing off a hunk of bread from a loaf and eating it as quickly as possible.

I made a hefty loaf of bread in my spring form pan. So every time I ate it (which was quite frequently), I concocted a different topping. In the picture below you see butter and honey in a little bowl. The first time I ate it, I slathered a slice with the butter and honey. The next time I took a bowl of bread over to M's house, and melted the honey and butter together and we gave the bread a dip. Yes. This is by far the way to go...syrupy, salty coating for every bite. The bees would have been proud and the bread sort of falls apart from the hot honey butter. All the more reason to lick your fingers.

I am sort of relunctant to say that the weather seems to have taken a slight crisp turn, but as a consolation, we have beer and beer bread to keep us happy and warm. If you are lucky enough to have access to beer such as Autumn Maple, do yourself a favor and buy double the amount. Half for cooking and half for drinking...you kind of need both.

Pumpkin Beer Bread

Adapted from EzraPoundcake blog
Yields one hearty loaf

Beer bread is a great centerpiece or accompaniment to a meal that you can share with your friends and family. The pumpkin puree adds a hint of autumn and little flecks of orange. Use a good quality beer like The Bruery's Autumn Maple for a richly flavored bread. Serve with a nice pumpkin soup and a slab of butter and honey.

2 cup all purpose flour

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour

2 Tbsp sugar

1 Tbsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

12 ounces beer
½ cup pumpkin puree (canned or made from fresh)

2 Tbsp butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, combine the flours, sugar, baking powder and salt. Slowly pour the beer into the dry ingredients, stirring with a wooden spoon as you go. Add in the pumpkin and stir just until combined.

Line a bread loaf or spring form pan with parchment paper. Pour half of the butter into the bottom of the prepared pan and tilt it around until the butter is evenly spread. Spoon the batter into the pan. Evenly pour the remaining butter on top of batter. Slide into the oven. Put a baking sheet on the shelf below the bread in case the butter drips (which it probably will).

Bake about 60 minutes, or until the bread is golden brown on top and done in the middle. Remove from oven and let cool. Serve with melted butter and honey and a glass of beer.

For more amazing recipes, check out

An Open Cookbook!

Peanut Butter Panang Beer Curry with Chicken and Rice Noodles

2011-09-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from the Fat & Happy Blog! Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

Did you need to read that title twice? There's a lot going on in it- especially the beer in a curry sauce. But I do like to put my own slight twist on recipes; even more so when beer is involved!

The Bruery sent me a few bottles of their Autumn Maple beer in exchange for a recipe as part of their Facebook Blogger Invitational - I was all too happy to play around with a new beer.

This beer, which is brewed with yams, is their answer to the many pumpkin beers found on the market today. I found it to be a bold beer that is reminiscent of all things fall - bold, earthy and warming with a hint of spice and happily not too sweet.

There are a lot of obvious pairings with fall beers, but I wanted to go just beyond the typical. In this dish, coconut milk and red curry paste are an obvious combination as is the chicken and rice noodles. And often a dish like this would call for a fish sauce, but using a full-bodied fall beer helps to give this sauce an earthy undertone.

The peanut butter marries well with this spiced beer and rounds out the richness of the sauce while giving a nutty crunch (if you opt for a crunchy peanut butter.)

Bring on the Autumn chill - I'm ready with a Fat and Happy warm fall dish that's slightly off the beaten path.

Fat and Happy Food Blog Tips and Techniques: Adding the peanut butter to the sauce too soon seemed to cook away the flavor and richness so I prefer to add it towards the end of the cooking process.

Peanut Butter Panang Beer Curry with Chicken and Noodles

2 tomatoes, chopped or crushed

1 cup beer

1/2 can coconut milk

2 tbl red curry paste

1 cup sliced red pepper

1 tbls brown sugar

1/3 cup peanut butter (crunchy is optional)

bean sprouts

green onions, chopped

parsley or cilantro, chopped

olive or peanut oil

1 lime, cut into wedges

4 oz rice noodles

Marinate the chicken as directed below. Allow the chicken to come to room temperature before cooking it. Heat a pot of water to cook the rice noodles. Heat a medium-size skillet over medium high heat, add a drizzle of oil and brown the chicken on all sides. Set the chicken on a plate and set aside.

To the hot chicken pan add the tomatoes- use a wooden spoon to help scrape the tasty scraps off the bottom of the pan. Add in the beer to complete deglaze the pan. Add in the coconut milk, curry paste, red peppers and brown sugar and bring to a simmer.

Now add the chicken to the sauce, cover and simmer about 10 minutes until the chicken is done. Boil the noodles according to package directions. Add the peanut butter to the sauce and simmer uncovered for another 5 minutes.

To serve, place chicken and noodles in individual bowls along with a big scoop of the panang sauce. Top with bean sprouts, green onions and parsley. Squeeze a little lime over the top (optional).

Curry Beer Chicken Marinade

1/2 can coconut milk

2 tsp red curry paste

2 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped

1/2 cup beer

1 tsp brown sugar

1/2 tsp black pepper

6 chicken drumsticks (or 1.5 lbs of pieces), skin removed

Add all the ingredients in a large ziplock bag and seal tight. Carefully shake and mix everything together. Allow the chicken to marinate overnight in the refrigerator.

For more amazing recipes, check out

The Fat & Happy Blog!

Autumn Maple Beer Pancakes

2011-09-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's is a special one for our vegetarian and vegan fans. It comes from Veggie Alchemy! Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

I love getting stuff in the mail. With the exception of bills (blech, who needs 'em?!) I'm like a kid when packages arrive. In fact, I'm probably driving my neighbor crazy with all the Amazon orders that get sent to his place instead of mine. Needless to say, I was STOKED to get a couple bottles of Autumn Maple Beer from The Bruery in the mail. Recently, my friend Veronica suggested I participate in The Bruery's Facebook Blogger Invitational. Participants were given the opportunity to concoct recipes using one of their newest seasonal brews, Autumn Maple. If you live in Southern California, you are probably familiar with this small craft brewery located in Orange County. They produce Belgian style ales, many of which are totally vegan, that are inventive as they are delicious. The Autumn Maple is no exception. The Bruery challenges tradition, using yams instead of pumpkin. It's a new spin on an old classic. The end result is rich, slightly sweet, bold and spicy. It is truly Autumn in a bottle.

This recipe accomplishes a couple things. One, it fuses all those familiar fall flavors (say that five times fast!) with traditional maple-y breakfast stuffs. What you get is fluffiness, spice and Autumn Maple's rich maltiness. Two, it's a hell of a way to treat a hangover! Hair of the dog, anyone?

Autumn Maple Beer Pancakes with Warm Apple Compote

Spiced Apple Compote

1 1/2 cups water
1/3 cup vegan sugar (turbinado sugar, evaporated cane juice or any organic sugar)
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/2 vanilla bean pod, split down middle or 2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 tablespoon dark rum or brandy (optional, but awesome)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
1/8 teaspoon ground cardamom
4-5 apples (gala, golden delicious, fuji or honey crisp) peeled, cored and cubed
pinch of salt

Method

In a large sauce pan, over medium-high heat, combine water, sugar, maple syrup, vanilla (entire pod), rum or brandy, salt and spices, and bring to a boil. Gently boil until all sugar is dissolved and mixture becomes slightly thickened, about 5-7 minutes. Add the apples to the mixture and bring back to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and remove vanilla pods. If any seeds remain in the pods, scrape seeds and add to the apple mixture. Mixture will thicken as it cools. Serve warm over pancakes. It also makes a delicious topping for desserts and ice cream.

Autumn Maple Beer Pancakes

2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour
1/2 cup non-dairy milk (preferably soy)
1/2 cup water
1 cup Bruery Autumn Maple Beer, chilled
2 tablespoons oil (vegetable or canola)
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 teaspoons molasses
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground clove
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

Oil spray, vegan margarine (I like Earth Balance) or oil for cooking

Method

Set your griddle pan over medium-high heat while you get your batter prepared. In a medium bowl, combine non-dairy milk with apple cider vinegar and set aside to curdle for a few minutes. In a separate bowl, combine dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, sea salt and spices, and mix well. Add the remaining wet ingredients (water, vanilla, oil, molasses, maple syrup and beer) to the non-dairy milk and vinegar mixture. Stir to combine. Slowly pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture and gently whisk ingredients together to form a batter. Do not over mix. A few turns of the wire whisk will suffice. Some small lumps will remain, just be sure there are no dry spots. If you find the mixture is too thick for your liking it can be thinned with a tablespoon of water or non-dairy milk.

Your griddle pan should be nice and hot now. Lightly grease the pan with your margarine, spray or oil. Using a pour spout container or ladle, carefully pour some batter on your griddle pan. Spread it around into a circle with the back of a spoon or bottom of a ladle to the desired diameter. After a few minutes the top, uncooked side will begin to set, creating little bubbles around the edges. Using a spatula, you can carefully lift up the edge and peek for doneness, if you wish. If the batter feels pretty set, you can give them a flip. If the pancake isn't golden brown enough, turn the heat up a little more. If it is too brown, turn your heat down a little. When done, remove from pan and stack on a plate. Pancakes can be kept warm in a 200 degree oven until ready to serve. Re-grease your griddle and continue with the rest of the batter until it is all gone. Serve with warm apple compote and/or real maple syrup and vegan butter, such as Earth Balance.

Recipe yields 4-6 pancakes

For more amazing vegan recipes, check out

Veggie Alchemy!

Spinach and Butternut squash Gratin with Autumn Maple Sauce

2011-09-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from one of our regular contributors, The Beerista Blog! Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

When we think about cooking with beer, the first place our mind often goes is to meat. Beer can chicken, stout ribs, beer braised pulled pork…You don’t see too many vegetarian main dishes that call for beer. I eat a primarily vegetable focused diet, so when I was mailed multiple bottles of The Bruey’s Autumn Maple to experiment with in the kitchen, I wanted to work in a vegetarian dish. Given the make-up of the beer: yams (17 pounds of them per barrel in total used to make the beer), nutmeg, allspice, maple syrup, and cinnamon, I focused my attention on winter squash based dishes. All of those flavors go great with winter squash, so I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

I’ve made butternut squash lasagna in the past that was really good, so I went to work figuring out how I could alter that to work in the beer and make it lighter. My end creation was a flavor packed but light gratin made with butternut squash, spinach, an Autumn Maple sauce, and cheese. For those of you that are curious, a gratin is simply cooking technique that produces a browned crust on top of a shallow baked dish, often using breadcrumbs or grated cheese.

To make this lovely dish, I layered thin slices of butternut squash, spinach, and Autumn Maple sauce then topped it off with a layer of cheese. It gets baked in the oven until golden brown and bubbly. The flavors in the beer shine in this dish and add great richness to it. To round out my meal, I served the gratin with a roasted mushroom, arugula and red onion salad. It made for a light, healthy, and delicious autumn meal.

Autumn Maple Sauce

Ingredients

2 cups of the Bruery’s Autumn Maple
¼ cup all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons butter
2 cups whole milk
Pinch of nutmeg
1 tablespoon fresh thyme, chopped

What you need to do

Put the beer in a large pot and heat over high to bring to a boil. Once the beer begins to boil, bring the heat down to low and simmer the beer to reduce down to 1 cup. This should take about 15 minutes, but everyone’s stove is different, so pay close attention. Also, watch for boil overs when you first start heating the beer. They will happen, and fast! Once the beer is reduced, turn the heat off and set aside.

Put 4 tablespoons of butter into a sauce pan and melt it over medium heat. Add ¼ cup flour to the pan and whisk 1 minute. Next, whisk in the 2 cups of milk, then the reduced Autumn Maple beer.

Bring the sauce to a boil over medium-high heat, and then reduce to low. Simmer the sauce for 5 – 10 minutes, until it thickens slightly. Turn the heat off and add a pinch nutmeg, thyme, salt, and pepper.

You can make the sauce a day ahead of time and store it in an airtight container in the fridge. It can be used any place you would normally use a cream sauce, keeping in mind the distinct flavors of the beer.

Butternut Squash and Spinach Gratin

Ingredients

4 pounds of butternut squash, peeled (2 large ones should do the trick)
3 pounds of spinach, fresh or frozen (for this round I used fresh spinach, but next time I’ll use frozen. Way easier.)
1 small white onion, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced
1.5 tablespoons butter
1 recipe Autumn Maple sauce from above
1.5 cups grated cheese of your choice (2 if you want it really cheesy) – Gruyere or Swiss work well

What you need to do

Start by getting the spinach ready. If using frozen spinach, thaw it in a colander, then using your hands, squeeze out as much water as you can from it. You want the spinach to be as dry as possible.

If using fresh spinach, heat about an inch of water in a large pot over high heat. When it is boiling, add handfuls of spinach at a time to the pot and toss with tongs. Continue tossing and adding until all the spinach is wilted. I did this in two batches. Once all the spinach in the pot is wilted, drain into a colander and rinse with cold water. When it is cool enough to handle, squeeze out as much water as possible.

Place the dry spinach on a cutting board and chop into bite sized pieces and place in a bowl.

Now, heat a skillet over medium heat and add the butter. Once the butter in melted, throw in the onion and garlic. Satue 4 – 6 minutes until the onion becomes tender, then add to the bowl of spinach. Mix the onion/garlic satue into the spainch, season with salt and pepper, then set aside.

Next, prep the squash. Cut the neck from the bulb. Then, cut the blub part in half and scrape out the seeds. Cut the neck of the squash lengthwise into strips as thin as you can get them without chopping your fingers off. Then, cut as many thin strips from the blub as you can (the goal is 1/8 of an inch thick). I ended up with pieces of squash varied both in shape and thickness, but this adds a charming rusticness to the finished product. If you have a mandolin, that makes this step MUCH easier.

Now you are ready to assemble

Using an 11×7 baking dish, spread a thin layer of Autumn Maple sauce in the bottom. Then, cover the entire bottom of the dish with squash slices, slightly overlapping the pieces. Spread ½ of the chopped spinach on the squash, then ladle on about a cup of the Autumn Maple sauce. Repeat the layering (squash, spinach, sauce), then top with a final layer of squash. Cover the top with sauce, then grated cheese.

You can assemble your gratin a few hours before you want to bake it. Just be sure to cover it and keep it in the fridge.

Almost there. It’s baking time!

When you are ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees. Cover the gratin with foil and bake in the oven for 40 minutes. After 40 minutes, remove the foil and bake uncovered an additional 15 minutes, until the cheese is browned and bubbly. Let it cool for 5– 10 minutes, cut and serve!

For more amazing recipes made with beer, check out

The Beerista Blog!

Fall inspired, beer soaked beauty: The Autumn Maple Pulled Pork Sandwich

2011-09-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

When The Bruery first contacted me about cooking up some delicious food with their equally delicious beer, my mind started racing. A complex and flavorful beer like Autumn Maple has so many possibilities to be transformed into a great breakfast, lunch or dinner. I knew I wanted to try multiple recipes, and before I knew it I had a list 20+ ideas deep on what to make. There was one recipe I was dead-set on making from the start, however: Autumn Maple braised pulled pork. I used the same technique in the past to make a porter braised pulled pork that was a key ingredient in my award winning grilled cheese sandwich “The Beer Baron”. The sweetness of the yam and maple syrup combined with the spicy notes of nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon in the beer sounded like a fantastic braising liquid for pork. That alone would make a great meal and is really easy to make, but I didn’t stop there! I wanted to create a fall inspired sandwich to highlight this fall inspired beer.

My final creation ended up being a grilled sandwich on sourdough with the Autumn Maple braised pulled pork, gruyere cheese, and Autumn Maple cranberry relish. I paired the pork with a Carolina style BBQ sauce (mustard and vinegar as opposed to the more traditional red BBQ sauce) as I am a big fan of the maple syrup/mustard combo. The flavor of the beer came through really well in the pork. The spices complimented the meat and it had just the right amount of sweetness. The beer flavors didn’t come through as strong in the cranberry relish, but it was addicting none the less. I found myself dipping crackers in it as a snack for days after making it.

The pork and cranberry recipes below are fantastic on their own and could be put them to good use in countless ways. But, together the pork/cranberry/cheese combo is fantastic. Once the components are made, these sandwiches come together for a quick and filling meal. I served them with a roasted fig, red onion and walnut salad and had a table full of satisfied and happy customers. Now bust out those slow cookers and get to work!

Autumn Maple Braised Pulled Pork

Ingredients

1.5 pounds pork shoulder or pork butt
Spice rub (pick your favorite kind. I used Rub with Love)
1 750ml bottle of The Bruery’s Autumn Maple
½ bottle mustard based BBQ sauce

What you need to do

This pork is super easy to make. First, coat the pork with a moderate layer of the rub on all sides. Place the pork into a slow cooker and pour about ½ of the bottle of Autumn Maple over the pork. It should be a little more than half submerged in the beer. Cover the slow cooker and let it do its thing on low for 8-10 hours. I like to do this part before I leave for work in the morning, so that I can come home to an amazing smelling house, and a near-ready meal.

Once the pork is finished cooking in the slow cooker, remove it and flake it apart with a fork – it should be tender and fall off easily. Move the pork into a large skillet with high sides. Pour the rest of the beer over the pork and add about ½ the bottle of the BBQ sauce. Mix the pork to combine and turn the heat on high to bring to a boil. When the liquid starts to boil, lower the heat to simmer the pork for about 15 – 20 minutes or until most of the liquid is gone.

When most of the liquid is gone, you are left with super tender and flavorful pulled pork that is ready to eat.

Autumn Maple Cranberry Relish

Ingredients

1.5 cups of The Bruery’s Autumn Maple
¼ cup sugar
10 oz bag of whole frozen cranberries thawed or fresh cranberries if you can get them (do not use canned)
1 granny smith apple, cored, peeled and cut into pieces

What you need to do

This is also an easy recipe to make and can be used with many dishes (and might even find a home on your Thanksgiving table). I made this the day before I wanted to make my sandwiches as it needs to set in the fridge for at least 6 hours before eating.

To make the relish, heat the Autumn Maple in a sauce pan over medium heat until it begins to boil. I would advise paying close attention to the beer for the first few minutes of the reduction as messy boilovers can happen quickly (not to mention you are wasting beer). If (when) the beer starts to foam up and threatens to boilover, just remove the pan from the stove for a minute and let it settle down. Then put it back and continue.

Once the beer boils, lower the heat to low and simmer until it is reduced to ½ cup. This took about 30 minutes for me, but everyone’s stove is different, so keep an eye on it. It can be hard to tell how much the beer has reduced sometimes, so I am not above periodically pouring the beer into a measuring cup to see where I am at, then adding it back if I need to keep reducing. Reducing beer concentrates the flavor and is often a key step when cooking with beer.

Once the beer is reduced, turn off the heat and add in the ¼ cup of sugar. Stir until all the sugar is dissolved and set aside to cool.

When the beer reduction has cooled, place the cranberries and apple in a food processor and pulse to coarsely chop. Add the beer reduction to the food processor and pulse a few more times to create a relish-like consistency. Transfer the relish to a bowl, cover and refrigerate 6 hours or overnight.

Finally, it’s sandwich making time!

Ingredients

Good quality bread
Gruyere cheese
Butter
Autumn Maple pulled pork
Autumn Maple cranberry relish
A big appetite

What you need to do

Lay 2 pieces of whatever type of bread you feel like using on a work surface (I used sourdough – extra points if you make your own bread using White Labs WLP655 sour mix yeast). Butter one side of one of the pieces of bread. On the other, put down a layer of cheese (I like to use grated), a layer of pork, a generous layer of cranberry relish and then a little more cheese. Top with the other piece of bread (butter side up) and get ready to grill.

Heat a pan that is large enough to fit your sandwich over medium heat. Add about ½ tablespoon of butter to the pan and let it melt. Swirl the pan to evenly distribute the melted butter, then slide your sandwich in. The non-buttered side goes down into the pan.

Press the top of the sandwich with a spatula, or use a sandwich press if you have one. Grill for about 3 minutes or until the cheese is melting and the bread is golden brown, then flip. Grill on the other side until the same result is achieved, then transfer to a cutting board. Let the sandwich rest for a minute or two if you can wait, then cut in half. Triangle or rectangles both work great. Lastly, but most importantly, get to work eating this fall inspired, beer soaked beauty of a sandwich.

For more amazing recipes made with beer, check out

The Beerista Blog!

Beer for breakfast: Autumn Maple Oat Scones with Raisins

2011-09-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

A beer that is brewed with yams, maple syrup, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice is just begging to be used to make delectable baked good. It’s not often I get to have beer for breakfast, so to fix that problem and to put The Bruey’s Autumn Maple in its place, I decided to whip up a batch of oat scones using the beer. This recipe came together quickly and produced an excellent scone that had just a hint of sweetness and faint notes of the Autumn Maple beer. Simply split open and topped with butter served alongside fruit and coffee made for a fantastic start to my day. Move over Starbuck’s blueberry scone, the beer scone has arrived!

Autumn Maple Oat Scones

Ingredients

1 ¾ cup flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup oats
1 tablespoons baking power
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
½ pound + 3 tablespoons butter, cold, unsalted and diced
1 + ¼ cup autumn maple (to be used separately)
2 eggs, lightly beaten
½ cup raisins (optional)
1 egg, beaten 1 tablespoon of water (egg wash)
3/4 cup powder sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla

What you need to do

Make the dough

Start by putting 1 cup of Autumn Maple in a sauce pan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Once boiling, lower the heat to simmer the beer. Allow it to simmer until it is reduced by half to 1/2 cup of beer. Watch carefully for foam-ups and boilovers. You don’t want to lose any beer! If it starts to foam up on you, just remove the pot from the stove for a few minutes until it settles down. Once it is reduced, remove the pan from the heat and allow the reduction to cool completely. You will use ¼ cup of this reduction for the dough, and the other ¼ cup for the glaze.

Next, preheat your oven to 400 degrees while you work on the dough. Combine the flours, oats, baking powder, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Using an electric mixer on low speed, mix in the cold, diced butter until pea sized crumbly dough/butter pieces form. This can take a while, so be patient.

In a separate bowl, combine ¼ cup Autumn Maple beer (straight from the bottle, not reduced),¼ cup of the reduced beer and 2 eggs lightly beaten. Once mixed, quickly add the wet mixture to the flour mixture and blend until just combined. If using raisins, add them in and mix to incorporate. The dough is pretty sticky and loose still. That’s OK.

Roll out, cut and bake the scones

Turn the dough onto a well-floured surface. Dust your hands and a rolling pin with flour. Roll the dough out to ¾ inch thick. Cut the scones into your desired shape and place them on a greased baking sheet. I just used the rim of a small juice glass to cut round scones since I don’t have a proper cutter. It worked great. You could also simply cut the dough with a knife into squares or the popular triangle shape.

Once all the scone are cut and on the baking sheet, brush the tops of the scones with the egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon of water) then in the over they go! Bake them for 20 – 25 minutes, until the tops are beginning to get golden brown.

Make the glaze

While the scones are baking, make the yummy glaze. To do this, simply combine the other ¼cup of reduced beer, powdered sugar and vanilla in a bowl. Mix until smooth and all of the sugar is dissolved. You want it to be thick, but still pourable. If you think it is too thin, add a bit more powdered sugar.

When the scones are done, remove them from the oven and place on a piece of aluminum foil or a cooling rack to, well, cool. After about 15 minutes, dip the tops of the scones in the glaze and place them back on whatever you were using to cool. Let the glaze settle for about 5 minutes, then enjoy!

The scones keep for 5 days (assuming they last that long) on the counter in an air tight container.

Note: You can make this recipe up to the part where you cut and place the scones on a baking sheet, but instead of baking them, you can put the tray in the freezer. Once the unbaked, but cut scones are frozen, put them in an airtight container or zip block bag and keep them in the freezer. You now have ready to bake scones. Pull out and bake 1, 2 or 15 at a time to curb you beer scone craving.

For more amazing recipes made with beer, check out

The Beerista Blog!

Autumn Maple Sweet Potato Cupcakes

2011-09-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from The Cupcake Friday Project. Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

The Bruery’s Autumn Maple is a Belgian-style brown ale brewed with 17 pounds of yams per barrel, taking a slightly different route than the traditional fall seasonal, the pumpkin ale. The beer is sweet and malty, a definite sipper on cold evenings. Spices of cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice play along with vanilla, maple syrup and molasses. Basically, this is the perfect beer to work into a cupcake. My buddy Randy Clemens knew this, so as soon as he heard about The Bruery’s first annual blogger invitational, he reached out to me and put me in contact with them.

I pitched my cupcake recipe idea based on playing off of Autumn Maple’s backbone, which is the yam—or sweet potato. I thought a sweet potato poundcake recipe would work best, and decided that instead of simply using beer as my liquid, I would instead create a concentrated syrup to deliver a flavor punch.

The Autumn Maple Beer Syrup that I concocted then became the workhorse of this recipe, being featured in the cupcake, the frosting and as a drizzle garnish.

Autumn Maple Sweet Potato Cupcakes

Yield: 16 cupcakes

Autumn Maple Beer Syrup Ingredients

3 cups Autumn Maple beer

1 cup brown sugar

2 tbsp maple syrup

4 tsp cinnamon simple syrup

1/4-3/8 cup heavy cream

Cupcake Ingredients

3 medium sweet potatoes, baked, skinned and mashed

1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup light brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup buttermilk

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tbsp Autumn Maple beer syrup

Frosting Ingredients

3 3/4 cups confectioners sugar

1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cups) unsalted butter, room temperature

4 1/2 tbsp Autumn Maple beer

2 tbsp beer syrup

1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions
• Autumn Maple Beer Syrup: Combine beer and brown sugar in a small pot over medium high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Simmer for 5-10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add the maple syrup and cinnamon simple syrup, stirring to incorporate. Simmer for an additional 20-30 minutes until mixture has reduced and thickened to a maple syrup-like consistency. Taste to check bitterness—if too bitter, add a tbsp of brown sugar, stir to incorporate and taste again.

Remove the Autumn Maple Beer Syrup from the heat and add the heavy cream slowly, stirring to combine. Cool to room temperature before using.

• Cupcakes: Two hours before you bake the cupcakes, preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit and position the racks toward the center. Bake the sweet potatoes for 45 minutes. When ready, the potatoes should be soft and the skin slightly shriveled. Cool for 15 minutes, then skin the potatoes. Place the potatoes in a bowl and mash. Let cool for an hour before adding to cupcake batter.

Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg in a bowl; whisk to combine and set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the butter until fluffy. Add granulated and brown sugar and beat for an additional 5 minutes. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well to incorporate. On low speed, add the mashed sweet potatoes, about 1/4 cup at a time. Mix until incorporated.

In a measuring cup, combine buttermilk, beer syrup and vanilla extract. On low speed, add the flour mixture and buttermilk alternatively, beginning and ending with the flour mixture.

Divide the batter between 16 wrappers in cupcake tins and bake for 20-25 minutes. Cool on a wire rack completely before frosting.

• Frosting: Beat the butter until light and fluffy. Add 1 cup of confectioners sugar, beating until combined. Add the beer, beer syrup and vanilla extract, then add the remaining sugar 1 cup at a time. Whip frosting for about 5-10 minutes on high once all the ingredients have been added, until light and fluffy. Using a 1M Wilton star tip and piping bag, pipe frosting onto cupcakes in a swirl. Take some of the remaining Autumn Maple Beer Syrup and drizzle over the frosting.

The recipe is a bit involved, but it’s totally worth it. You also end up with a surplus of syrup, which can then be used for more cupcakes or other recipes.

For more incredible cupcake recipes, check out

Cupcake Friday Project!

Breakfast Pork Sliders w/ Autumn Maple

2011-09-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from i Flip For Food. Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

If there's one thing we're as passionate about as food and cooking, it's drinking - and, more specifically, drinking beer. Luckily, the two passions are never in competition for our affection and in fact, pair rather nicely with one another. Such was the case when we were invited to participate in The Bruery's Facebook Blogger Invitational and given the chance to create a recipe using one of The Bruery's newest seasonal brews, the Autumn Maple. The home cooks inside of us were eager to get cooking, but the beer drinkers inside of were even more excited to get our hands on a few of these bottles.

For the uninitiated, The Bruery is one of our favorite Southern California microbreweries. Located in Orange County, the small brewery puts out a bold collection of innovative Belgian-style ales. Their small-batch specialty brews like the Black Tuesday are widely sought after and their seasonal brews are annually anticipated. Such is the case for The Bruery's Autumn Maple, a Belgian-style brown ale that is a unique alternative to the Pumpkin Ales that typically hit shelves at this time of year. Brewed with yams (17 lbs. per barrel), cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, vanilla, molasses, and maple syrup, this spicy, 10% ABV brown ale exemplifies autumn.

Having grown up in Vermont, I can't think about maple without thinking about breakfast, so we decided to use the Autumn Maple to help make a sandwich we could enjoy for breakfast (or any time of the day, for that matter). We settled on the idea of pork sliders braised in beer and served with a fried egg, arugula and a maple hollandaise sauce inside a toasted English muffin.

For Autumn Maple breakfast pork sliders:

1 lb ground pork
8 oz breakfast sausage patties
4 slices thick cut bacon, finely diced
¼ cup finely diced sweet onion
1 tbsp dried parsley (or 2 tbsp chopped fresh parsley)
1 tsp dried thyme (or 2 tsp chopped fresh thyme)
1 tsp ground cayenne
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tbsp olive oil
½ cup Autumn Maple beer
4 English muffins
2 tbsp melted butter
4 fried eggs
Arugula
Maple hollandaise (recipe below)

Mix together ground pork, breakfast sausage, bacon, sweet onion, parsley, thyme, cumin, salt and pepper. Form into small patties about 3/4” thick.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Brush both sides of each English muffin with melted butter and toast in the oven for about 10 minutes. Keep warm until the sandwiches are ready to assemble.

Brush a grill pan with olive oil. Heat on the stove over medium heat, then add the patties. Without moving them around (so you don’t disturb the searing process), baste the top of patties with Autumn Maple every couple of minutes. After 6-7 minutes, turn the patties over and cook another 5-6 minutes, again basting the top of each patty with Autumn Maple beer. Turn the patties over one more time and cook an additional 1 minute, slightly smushing the patties with a spatula. Remove from heat.

For Maple Hollandaise:

3 egg yolks
1 tsp maple syrup
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp kosher salt
½ cup melted butter

Place egg yolks, maple syrup, lemon juice, and salt in the blender, cover and pulse just once to combine. Open lid, set blender to low speed and slowly pour the melted butter into the blender in a thin stream. Once all the butter is incorporated, keep warm until use.

For the eggs, heat 1 tbsp of oil and 1 tbsp of butter over medium low heat. Crack a couple of eggs into small bowls, then carefully ease them into the heated pan. Cook for a couple of minutes, spooning the hot oil over top of the eggs and sprinkling them with salt and pepper, then cover the pan, remove it from heat, and let it sit another 5 minutes.

Place each pork patty on one half of an English muffin. Layer on a fried egg, then a bit of arugula, then drizzle with maple hollandaise. Finish with the top half of muffin. Enjoy with a glass of The Bruery's Autumn Maple Belgian Style Brown Ale. I know we said this was a breakfast post and it's not even noon, but you've earned it.

Don't forget to check out the original post and even more recipes at

I Flip For Food!

Baked Pumpkin Autumn Maple Doughnuts

2011-09-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple. Today's comes from the Food + Words blog. Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

so you know the phrase, “go nuts for doughnuts?”

if you know me, you know i say that all the time, whether it’s about doughnuts or not. i just like that phrase. it’s silly.

i’m going to drop some stone-cold truth on you right now: i have never actually gone nuts for doughnuts. at all.

my whole entire life, i’ve just never really…liked doughnuts. that’s crazy, right? i know. everyone loves doughnuts! they’re sweet and sometimes colorful, and can be filled with delicious things, and topped with sprinkles…what’s not to like?

in theory, i should love doughnuts for all of those reasons listed above…but i don’t. i’ve sworn a lifelong allegiance to another round, holey breakfast treat. my heart belongs to bagels. me + bagels = love.

however, i think i finally found a doughnut i can love.

these pumpkin autumn maple doughnuts are baked, and that’s one of the many reasons why i love them!

i’ve never been a huge fan of fried food, with the exception of fried chicken and french fries, so it makes sense that i could never fully get on the doughnut bandwagon. i’ve always found them to be a bit too greasy and oily for my taste.

plus, many commercial doughnuts are so beyond overly sweet that i can’t stomach them. i mean, one bite makes me feel like i’m slipping into a doughnut-induced diabetic coma. not a fan.

don’t get me wrong: i love sweets, obviously–otherwise i wouldn’t be specializing in baking and pastry at culinary school! i just feel that desserts should be sweet without being overly saccharine or cloying.

enter: baked pumpkin autumn maple doughnuts. they’re chock full of pumpkin, wonderful autumn spices, and coated with cinnamon sugar.

oh, did i forget to mention that they also have beer in them? yes, beer!

recently, i was contacted by The Bruery, a California brewery that specializes in craft beer. they asked me to develop a recipe featuring their Autumn Maple seasonal offering, and i jumped at the challenge. i love cooking and baking with beer, wine and spirits, and i knew i could come up with something amazing for fall!

i’m not a huge beer drinker, but i’ve always loved the pumpkin ales and lagers that are available during autumn. The Bruery’s Autumn Maple beer is a spicy, sweet take on the pumpkin-style beers that i love so much. each barrel is brewed with 17 pounds of yams–that’s a lot!

as soon as i tasted the Autumn Maple beer, i knew it would be a perfect compliment to a pumpkin dessert. i’ve been wanting to make apple cider doughnuts for an incredibly long time now, but i decided instead to use the Autumn Maple beer to make sweet, spicy pumpkin doughnuts, full of delicious fall flavor.

these doughnuts are crazy-good, people. the beer lends a wonderful depth and spicy quality to the doughnuts, while the cinnamon sugar crust on the outside provides the perfect amount of sweetness. i’m in love!

we had an evening last week that was cool, crisp, and beautifully autumnal. we sat outside in our backyard as the light of the day faded away with a paper bag full of warm, just-baked doughnuts and two mason jars full of Autumn Maple beer.

we ate these doughnuts like it was our job. we consumed them like they were going out of style. we licked our cinnamon sugar-coated fingers and sipped Autumn Maple beer and reveled in the wonderful weather. it was a damn good night.

make these pumpkin autumn maple doughnuts this weekend, and share them with the people you love. once they taste these doughnuts, they’re apt to love you just a little bit more. pinkie swear.

Want the recipe? Click on over to the Food + Words blog!

More Wet Hops!

2011-09-15T18:12:00.000-07:00

We got in another 60 pounds of fresh off the vine hops today. This time, Chinook and this time for dry hopping. We're putting these beers into a bright tank and filtering the fermenting beer through them to get them all nice and California style hoptastic. This beer already smells like a forrest of pine and citrus and this addition of Chinook is going to make it that much better. Can't wait.

Propagating Greatness

2011-09-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

We got a new delivery in today!

Our yeast propagator came in the mail!

For those who don't know, we primarily use a single strain of yeast for about 85% of our beers. It's a Belgian-style yeast strain that is highly attenuating (it eats a lot of sugar) leaving our beers with a very desirable, dry finish. It's attenuation is also important because we make a lot of beers that are over 8% or even over 10% alcohol and it takes a very strong yeast strain to keep on working and break the sugars down until we get to that strength of beer.

A problem that we often run into because of this yeast and our massive use of it is that we often don't have enough. Many of our strong beers basically destroy a yeast pitch after it is done fermenting because of how strong the beer is. Some of our other beers are simply too unique to reuse the yeast from them for another beer. For some of our smaller beers, however, we can re-pitch the yeast from one fermentor into another, often up to 8 or 9 times. In fact, yeast can multiply while fermenting, it must get excited while making all that beer, and we can end up with more yeast after a fermentation than we started with. Because of this quality of yeast, homebrewers and professional brewers alike will make propagation batches. In a homebrew, this might just be taking the small vile of yeast that you pick up from a homebrew shop, adding it to a small flask of wort (sugar water made from malted barley) and after a few days of fermenting you'll have enough yeast for a batch of high gravity homebrew.

Here at The Bruery, part of the reason that we often make low alcohol, draft-only beers like our Humulus ales or 714 is because besides the fact that they are exciting to brew, it works as a giant propagation batch that we can harvest yeast from. We love making these one-off beers and will continue to do so, but the problem with using them as prop batches is that it means we have to fit them into our brewing schedule at specific times and they take up fermenters that we might need more for something else.

So, we finally got ourselves a yeast propagator. This bad boy, a 120 Liter Newlands, is going to be our savior. It's only job is breeding yeast. We add some wort and some of our house yeast and it efficiently feeds and aerates and does everything that yeast needs to grow up big and strong. It's like hiring a nanny for our yeast babies. Now we can get back to making beer while Newlands takes care of the yeast until we need it.

carefully and frightfully unloading our new toy.

Only the best gifts need a drill to unwrap.

Everybody is so excited to see it!

Tada!

One last thing... Jay must bless the propagator.

Wet Hops

2011-09-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

If you know The Bruery, you know we don'y make many particularly hoppy beers, but that doesn't mean we don't love ourselves some classic west coast IPA's. Right now, the beginning of September, is hop harvest season and we couldn't resist getting our hands on some fresh hops. Yesterday morning a truck dropped off about 60 pounds of fresh Citra hops picked just for us. We're going to use these in a fresh hop ale that will soon grace the draft lines at our tasting room. In a few days, we have another shipment of 60 pounds of hops coming in, this time of Chinook hops and we'll be using those to dry hop the heck out of this beer. Though is it really called dry hopping when you are using wet hops? That's a question for the hop gods.

We definitely can't wait to try this one, but don't fret, it's not an IPA. We've still never made an IPA.

The label on the box of hops picked just for THE BRUERY!!

YUM!

Cleaning all of these hops out of the whirlpool is not going to be fun. Neither will getting the hops out of the boil kettle. Or the fermenter. But it's worth it.

Down the drain

2011-09-01T09:38:00.000-07:00

The beer in that glass of Iniquitous looks pretty great. Unfortunately that was poured from a keg, not a bottle.

We planned on releasing Iniquitous as our Provisions Series beer for the month of June. As can happen with bottle conditioned ales, it wasn't quite carbonated enough for our liking so we pushed it to July. Then August. Then September.

We had hope that this beer would magically turn a corner and go from the not-so-good bottled version to the great tasting draft version (that is force carbonated). We tried a few tricks that brewers have to help the yeast get to work and eat up the extra sugars in the bottle. We agitated the bottles, flipped the cases to get the yeast back into suspension, wrapped the pallets in black and put them out in the hot Orange County heat. We honestly did anything we could think of to make this beer live up to it's potential but maintain it's integrity.

We tasted Iniquitous once a week for 3 months. Always hopeful. But always let down. Uncarbonated and just not tasting right.

Tyler did some testings on a few bottles of Iniquitous, doing yeast cell counts to figure out what the true chance of it turning a corner was; it wasn't good.

So, the time came when we had to face the facts and admit that this beer just wasn't going to make the cut.

It's a very hard decision to trash a beer. A lot of money goes into every batch of beer that we make. We use a lot of quality ingredients, not to mention, these beers have already been bottled and labeled as well. But it isn't just hard financially; it's an emotional decision. We put a lot of care into every beer that we brew here at The Bruery and to come to terms with making something that didn't turn out as we envisioned it is tough. Tougher still would be to lie to our customers, tell them it tastes great and try to sell something that we don't believe in.

Therefore, we are holding these bottles indefinitely, most likely never to see the store shelf. We might use some for a food recipe that would work well with it at a future party or slowly take it home for our personal marinade use, but it's doubtful these beers will ever be drunk as intended.

Perhaps it's only fitting that Iniquitous translates to being "characterized by a gross injustice". There is no justice for a beer that goes down the drain.

It's Tuesday, must be time to blend something

2011-08-23T16:52:00.000-07:00

It may not be a black Tuesday here in Orange County, but that's not reason we can't break out some barrel samples of Black Tuesday ale and figure out just exactly how we want to blend it for this year's release.

This will be the third year that we've released the infamous imperial stout that is aged in bourbon barrels and for the third time, it will have subtle differences in it's composition. With a beer this big that spends so much time in oak barrels, there are many nuances that are hard to control. Creating a beer of this style is similar in ways to creating a fine bourbon or whiskey. The reason that companies like Jack Daniels or Maker's Mark can release a very consistent product is that they distill tens of thousands of oak barrels for every release and blend the majority of them together, creating a standard flavor from year to year. If, however, you've ever had a single barrel varietal or have had bourbon or scotches from one of the smaller producers, you've probably noticed that the flavor and aroma can change ever so slightly from batch to batch.

As we explained a few weeks back as we blended the 2011 Oude Tart, the blending process is extremely important in barrel aged beers and can help balance the different brews. While one barrel might be particularly sweet and another be particularly hot (alcoholic), finding the perfect blend of batches can result in great balance and the ideal beer to release.

We were quite happy with the final blend we agreed on today and can't wait to hear what you think!

For further info, visit www.thebruery.com/blacktuesday

twitter hashtag #blacktuesday

Tyler measuring out exact blend percentages.

Gotta try the original one of course.

And gotta try last years while we're at it.

Several different blend variations...which one will it be?!

Beer Battered Asparagus

2011-08-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

We've teamed up with The Beerista to start bringing you some great recipes to go along with your beer, make using your beer or even make using the spent grain that many homebrewers just throw out (or in our case, donate to a farmer). Stay tuned for more from The Beerista including some special recipes just for our own beers.

What better way to eat your vegetables then soaked in beer and fried! Your mom and dad would be proud. As part of an afternoon soirée I had at my house, I made beer battered asparagus for the first time using Allagash white. It was easy and they turned out great. In my experience I have found that you can fry almost anything and it would be good, but with a tempura beer batter, these were crisp, light, and not too greasy. I served them alongside a garlic lemon mayonnaise dip and they were a hit. Another plus with this recipe is that it’s a versatile dish that feels right at home at for an afternoon of college football or a fancy cocktail party.

If you want to whip up a batch of your own, here’s what you do:

Ingredients:

1 cup white ale, heffewizen, or pale ale
1 pound asparagus – ends trimmed and cut into 3 inch sized pieces
1 cup flour
1 tablespoon lemon zest
Salt & pepper to taste
About 4 cups vegetable oil

What you do:

Whisk the flour, beer, lemon zest, salt, and pepper in a bowl until smooth and well combined.
Heat up about 3 inches of oil in a large pot or deep fryer. The temperature should be around 375 degrees. If you drop a small amount of batter into the oil and it immediately rises to the surface with bubbles around it, the oil should be hot enough and ready.
Drop handfuls of the cut asparagus into the batter, ensuring they are completely coated. Pull them out, allowing excess batter to drip off.
Drop the batter coated aparagus in the hot oil. You should fry the pieces in batches, being careful not to over crowd the pot–if you do, the temperature of the oil will drop too low, creating soggy, sad asparagus.
Fry until golden brown, about 3 – 4 minutes. Pull out with a slotted spoon and drain on a paper towl.

And that's it! We're talking about less than 15 minutes between you and beer battered asparagus goodness. Mixing up a bit of mayo with lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper makes a great dip. But, get creative. These would also be good with peanut sauce, a miso based sauce, or any kind of aioli. And they taste great with beer.

View the original blog post and more by The Beerista

on her blog www.thebeeristablog.com

Our New Theme Song

2011-08-17T09:15:00.000-07:00

Pizza & Beer - 2

2011-08-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

read part 1 here if you haven't yet.

The easy part of having a great chef cook us a pizza and challenge us to create a beer to pair with it was eating the pizza. The hard part is actually creating the beer.

After Kelly and Peter and the crew left us with nothing but the memory of a pizza a few weeks back, we sat down and started thinking about a few ideas that might pair well with the challenge pizza.

If you recall, that pizza was made using a special dough from Peter that incorporated rye flour and even a bit of caramel malt that had been crushed to a fine powder. The dough was then topped with super fresh burrata, squash blossoms, white sardines, fresh arugula sprouts and flowers, preserved lemon and fennel salt along the crust. It was cooked in a brick oven that was close to 1000º F creating an incredible texture.

So what does one pair with such a unique pie? Patrick had some ideas and they, as usual, were obscure. A Biere De Garde brewed with roasted zucchini, lemon peel and fennel seed. He laid out the concept and Tyler went to work figuring out how to actually make it a reality.

We work all summer with our BBQ, roasting yams for Autumn Maple, so that would work similarly to the way we'd work in the roasted zucchini which should give the beer just a slight vegetal taste to pair nicely with the fresh arugula. Lemon peel, or citrus peel in general, is fairly common in brewing. Fennel isn't something seen too often, but we know the flavor well, that of black licorice, and we know how to use spices around here in a subtle way. Fennel, however, was the one thing we really weren't confident on the proportions for. We had to do some small tests on a beaker of one of our other beers that was somewhat similar in flavor to get an idea of how much fennel we'd want to try in the pilot brew.

Today, we tasted the pilot and started in on a full scale batch of this pizza challenge beer. We'll be unveiling the ale and it's accompanying pizza at an event in Denver surrounding GABF and we can't wait.

roasting some zucchini.

tasting the pilot.

Spent Grain Coccodrillo Bread with Brown Ale

2011-08-03T08:30:00.000-07:00

In a quest to cram even more beer into my life, I came up with a recipe for spent grain bread that involves beer in the dough in addition to the spent grain. To my delight, this was my first really successful attempt at making spent grain bread. I have tried multiple times in the past and ended up with hard, dense bread that was not palatable, but this time I got it right.

I needed to create a recipe for the bread of a grilled cheese that I was entering into a competition (the Grilled Cheese Invitational – more on that later). The name of the sandwich I was entering was The Beer Baron and it consisted of homemade spent grain bread, porter braised pulled pork, Vermont cheddar, and picked onions. Bread is a pretty critical ingredient in a grilled cheese, so it had to be great. I started off by trying a few recipes I found online for spent grain bread, but was not happy with any of them. I needed a rustic bread with nutty flavors to hold up to the pulled pork and cheese. I decided to modify a recipe for Coccodrillo bread (a special Italian bread) from my Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking cookbook. The recipe called for dark beer, so thought I would try it. Spent grain and beer in the bread?!?! That was taking the sandwich theme to a whole new level. My modifications worked out great and the bread was perfect. The sandwich went on to win a judge’s award at the competition, complete with a ridiculous trophy. Here is what I did:

Spent Grain Coddodrillo – Makes 2 loafs (adapted from Willams-Sonoma’sEssentials of Baking)

For the sponge:
1 package (2.5 teaspoons) active dry yeast
¾ cup dark beer, at room temperature (I used Lost Coast’s Downtown Brown for the nutty flavor, The Bruery's Rugbrød would also work great)
3 cups cool water
1 cup spent grain flour (dried spent grain processed to a fine powder in a food processor)
2.5 cups all-purpose flour

For the dough:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup spent grain
1 tablespoon sea salt

What to do:

Start by making what is called “the sponge”. To do this, in a large bowl combine:
Yeast
Beer
Water
The flours (spent grain and all-purpose)

Whisk them all together until combined, then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit over night or for 8 hours at room temperature. The sponge will grow in size and look like, um, a sponge when ready – light and airy with some holes in it.

Once the sponge is ready, add the flour for the dough, spent grain, and salt to it. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes together. The dough will look a bit shaggy and messy – that’s OK. It’ll get its act together later. You just need to give it some time.
Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a floured work surface. You will probably need quite a bit of flour since the dough will be sticky.
Knead the dough until it is smooth and elastic, about 5 – 7 minutes. Continue to flour the dough as needed to prevent it from sticking. Don’t overdue, however. The dough is supposed to be soft.
Form the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough raise in a warm, draft-free place until it doubles in size (about 2 hours).
When the dough has finished doing its magic, dust your counter and a sheet pan with some flour (yes, more flour).
Get out a little aggression and show the dough who’s boss by punching it down (for those of you not familiar with baking, this literally means punch the dough to get the air out of it). Then, scrape it out of the bowl onto the floured counter. Bounce it around a few times shaping it into a large, round loaf.
Put the loaf on the floured baking sheet, cover it with a towel, and let it have a little rest again in a warm, draft-free location to recover from all the activity. 30 – 45 minutes should give it enough time to rise again and double in size.
When the bread is almost finished napping, move a rack in your oven to the lower third and pre-heat it to 400 degrees.
When the bread is ready for action, sprinkle the top with all-purpose flour and using a sharp knife, cut the loaf right in half. Separate the two half’s and turn them a quarter turn so that the cut side is now facing up. You will end up with two oval shaped loafs
Space the 2 loafs apart and bake until they are brown and hallow sounding (give the top a tap to determine this). Should take about 35 – 45 minutes.
When they are done, turn the oven off and let the bread sit for 10 minutes without opening the door. I know it will be hard to not sneak a peek, but resist your temptations and leave the door closed!
To reward your awesome baking skills and patience, take the bread out, let it cool, slice, and top with all sorts of goodness. I recommend cheese, peanut butter, pulled pork, jam, butter… (not necessarily all at one time)

The Beer Baron in all its glory.

View the original blog post and more by The Beerista on her blog www.thebeeristablog.com

Meet The Bruery - Benjamin Weiss

2011-08-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

We're starting a new feature here on our blog where we hope to eventually introduce you to the entire cast of characters that make up our company. Since Benjamin is the guy who controls the blogosphere on a day to day basis, we'll start with him and add someone new every couple of weeks.

Benjamin came to us from the music industry where he used to work in the business affairs department for Interscope Records. While the brewing world doesn't lend the opportunity to drink cognac with Snoop Dogg in the lobby or enjoy a private conference room concert with Dashboard Confessional during lunch, homebrewing has been a great hobby of Ben's and he wished to pursue that hobby as a career, leaving the Cristal, Alize and Dr. Dre behind.

The first true craft beer that Benjamin recalls ordering (and instantly loving) was Craftsman Brewing's "Orange Grove" ale from a bar called Lucky Baldwin's out in Pasadena, CA when he was a student at USC studying business. In all honesty, he ordered it because he thought the row of simple, wooden Craftsman tap handles looked cool and rustic, plus he always enjoyed trying new things. From that day on, he was always trying new beers when he was at a bar where they were available and while he wasn't yet a complete beer geek, he was well on his way.

Ben began homebrewing with his friend Jared in 2006 where they spent many of their Saturdays whipping up different styles of beer from pale ales to spiced holiday stouts. A member of West LA's homebrewing club "Pacific Gravity", he'd attend meetings, learn about new beers and brewing techniques, buy the ingredients and go home to try it. Ben and Jared even made a name for their little "brewery", but it isn't quite appropriate to post on this site. We can let you know, however, that they had some fantastic brews, such as "Right in the Eye.P.A." or "Swallow Wit".

In a well documented moment, on November 9th, 2007, Benjamin took a small step for his afternoon, but a giant leap for his career by commenting on this very blog, letting Patrick know that he'd be interested in learning more about professional brewing and helping out at this fledging company. A few months later, once The Bruery was built, Ben had left his job in music and was hired on part time as The Bruery's second employee, working right along-side Tyler and Patrick. He bottled beer, labeled beer, and of course, brewed beer. Infamously, Benjamin was present and involved in the Black Tuesday debacle in 2008 which was the first time he got some recognition on this blog. Shame it couldn't have come for a slightly more inspiring day of work, but at least everything turned out well in the end with that particular beer.

Today, 3 years later, Benjamin is the manager of sales & marketing for The Bruery. He hung up his boots to get back into an office and let some more skilled brewers handle the hard labor. While he misses being on the brewing floor at times, he never planned on being a professional brewer his whole life and is happy handling some of the creative aspects of the brewery that don't involve recipes (and lifting heavy things).

Tune in soon to learn about some more of The Bruery's hard working staff like Kevin, our brewer with the biggest beard or Patrick, the warehouse worker with a heart of gold.

Black Tuesday - A Comic

2011-07-29T14:23:00.000-07:00

For more craft beer comics, visit The Full Pint

Bugs

2011-07-27T09:00:00.000-07:00

Pediococcus plated on The Bruery's lab media

Meet some of the microorganisms that are responsible for the beer made at The Bruery.

Yes, it’s true, you are sharing your beer with other living things. Since all of our beers here at The Bruery are unfiltered, they are indeed alive when you sit down to enjoy your drink. The delicate and bold flavors produced through fermentation help give beer the unique properties you experience along with the quality of the ingredients used. While there are a variety of cultures used at The Bruery, some are more important than others. They are Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus. Their importance is because of their roles as both fermentative species and contaminants.

Brettanomyces is considered a wild yeast and is noted for the “farmhouse” flavor profile that it produces in beer. Lactobacillus and Pediococcus are lactic acid producing bacteria. They are used in the fermentations of food products such as sauerkraut, yogurt, cheese, chocolate, and kimchi. Lactic acid bacteria are used in the production of lambic-style ales, Flemish-style red ales and other similar beers; they produce the lactic acid that gives these beers their characteristically sour taste.

While these organisms can be used to make wonderful and complex beers, they can also prove to be persistent contaminants. The flavors created through their fermentative action can frequently produce unfavorable sensory characteristics in beer in which their presence is not intended. Simply put, we want to control microbial fermentation in our beer so that the flavors we target are found only in the final product of specific beers, not all of our beers.

To this end, the quality control process is our greatest tool. Since brewing uses living organisms, we are at the mercy of these yeast and bacteria. Exhibiting control over the process gives brewers the power to create the final product that they have in mind. There have even been historical European brewers quoted as saying that god is truly the maker of beer, we simply help guide it along it's path.

Long before the bottle reaches your lips, steps are taken to make sure the quality is maintained. We utilize a number of preventative measures to ensure that a 'bad beer' is never something that you, the consumer, have to experience in connection with our brand.

These measures include regular and thorough tank cleaning, and lab testing at many intervals in the brewing and aging process. In short, all our beer is sampled and tested at various stages during their fermentation and development - including bottling and kegging. All samples are plated on selective and differential media that allow us to see what, exactly, is in our beers. Rest assured that when you are enjoying a hand-crafted Bruery beer, much effort has been invested into ensuring that you receive the finest fermented beverage on the market.

--Kristen Bennett
Laboratory Intern and Technician

Brettanomyces plated on The Bruery's lab media

Close up of Lactobaccilus bacteria. Hello little friends!

Lactobaccilus bacteria plated on The Bruery's lab media

Patrick the Comic Strip Star

2011-07-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Our friends at The Full Pint recently began working with a talented comic strip writer named Arne Frantzell. He's been writing some super geeky, but rather hilarious comics about the craft beer scene, starring some of the better known brewers and breweries from around the country. So far, two of these comics have featured our very own Patrick Rue and we bring them to you for your reading pleasure. If you enjoy them, head on over and read the rest of them here.

Pictures

2011-07-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

Usually I only post when my "Anniversary" comes around; I would tell you about what has changed in the past year and maybe give you a hint about what's coming up in the future. When Ben asked me to blog, I couldn't think of anything to write about that would be interesting to other people. I went through all my old photos and decided to write just a little about each one; plus, who doesn't love a book with pictures!

The entire Bruery staff back in 2007!

Patrick & I just finished placing all of the brewing equipment.

The first oak barrel I ever got to work with. It took a long time to try and convince my previous employer to buy me one. I picked it up myself from from a winery in Temecula. I still have a bottle of wine that came from it.

A picture of me from the first article ever written about me making beer; I was 22 years old at the time. The Daily Titan (Cal State Fullerton's newspaper) heard about me from a friend and they wrote an entire feature. This article led to a radio interview a few days later.

One of the first things I did at the Bruery was set up our QC program. Even before we made our first batch of beer, I wanted to make sure that the brewery would do its best to make "clean", consistent beers. The QC director at my old brewery trained me on making different types of media; I flew up to Reno and spent 24 hours learning about agar and different chemicals. This photo includes a recipe for one type of media and my "blueprint" for the layout and piping of our current brewhouse.

My original desk and "office" when we first opened. Back then I really didn't need one. I spent most of my time in the brewhouse: brewing, bottling and labeling each bottle by hand (physically sticking on the front & back labels!) Now, I spend a lot of time in my office making sure that our brewing and packaging teams have everything they need to get the job done.

Our original tasting room back when Patrick and I were the bartenders. We had 8 faucets but could barely fit 8 kegs into the kegerator. I spent about 3-5 days making this bar; just recently I finished building a second bar for our current tasting room. I definitely don't miss the long days of having to work in the brewhouse and then serve beer. It didn't make me a happy bartender!

I'm standing in front of a mound of hops in Yakima, WA. I went to Hop School with my old brewery (note the Bruery shirt...) and had the time of my life! Hopefully I can make it back sometime soon!

The start of our barrel collection in what is now our packaging area. Last time I counted, we have around 600 oak barrels filled and about 200+ ready to be filled. We are currently in the process of moving almost all of our oak barrels out of the brewery and into our new warehouse.

My view from the very first talk I gave at the CBC. I was on a panel with the brewmasters from Deschutes, Ommegang, Allagash and Boulevard with Karl Ockert moderating. I was honored to be next to them as well as scared out of my mind!

One of the first beer fests we attended as a brewery. My dad and I built this tiny replica of our tasting room bar the night before the fest. After seeing this photo of the bar when it was brand new, I realize just how much it's been used.

Some of you may know that Sierra Nevada is my favorite brewery. I recently had the privilege of touring their brewery with Jay, Doug and Jarred. This is a photo of their open fermentors which I believe at the time had Celebration in them. We left this trip with a new found passion for beer and a few ideas to help make our beer better.

This day was HUGE! For the first few years we were open, the brewhouse was using 3/4" water lines. Needless to say, if you were brewing and someone flushed a toilet you would know. About one year ago we ripped up the parking lot and ran a 2" water line from the main into the brewery filter. I'm currently working on increasing the line size post filter so we can finally utilize this pipe 100%.

Another HUGE day for us was the purchase of a bottler. Previously it would take us 15+ hours to bottle 30bbls on our gravity filler, with our new filler it would only take about 5 hours! We still use the gravity filler for all of our sour beers. Just recently we packaged close to 60bbls of Oude Tart; our packaging team finished it in two days! Good job guys!

Pizza & Beer

2011-07-13T14:45:00.000-07:00

A rather unfortunate misconception about beer is that it only pairs well with 3 foods: burgers, sausages and pizza.

Anyone who knows us and our beer knows that we push the boundaries on beer and food pairings. We've done quite a few beer dinners and they almost always incorporate some truly delectable dishes from hamachi crudo to sous vide caribou to rabbit confit or pastrami cured duck breast...and sometimes dishes made from vegetables too. We love working with competent chefs who understand flavors and respect our beers in the same way that we respect their food.

Burgers, sausages and pizza aren't necessarily a bad thing though. There is a reason those foods are so popular - they are delicious. And of course, there are some beers out there that perfectly compliment a simple cheeseburger or a slice of pepperoni pie and there is a time and place for everything. But, what makes us giddy is a chef who can turn a simple classic concept into a work of art. And what makes us even more giddy is being challenged by that chef to make a beer good enough to pair with his food.

That's what brings us to today's post. Wine dinners and beer dinners have existed for years and they follow a simple planning formula: taste several wines or beers and come up with dishes to serve with each. But what if we turned that on it's head in the same way that a gourmet chef deconstructs a burger, rebuilding it into something different, yet similar. What if the food came first and the beer came later?

We were recently approached by the great people of Pizzaquest.com with this very question. Our answer was to bring it on.

Pizza Quest is helmed by the great Peter Reinhart, who is, for lack of a better term, a bread baking deity. He has written several cook books on baking including winning a couple of James Beard awards for cook books such as The Bread Baker's Apprentice. More recently, Peter wrote a fantastic book about his search for the perfect pizza and that is what brought him together with the producers of Pizza Quest. He's a dough guy with a pizza fetish.

Second came in Chef Kelly Whitaker of Pizzeria Basta in Boulder, CO. Kelly is a kick ass chef who's only source of heat in his entire restaurant is a wood fire brick oven. He can cook just about anything in that thing from pizzas to short ribs to scallops. He's an impressive guy and paired with Peter's knowledge of dough, he's seemingly unstoppable.

Thus came the challenge. Peter and Kelly would team up on a special pizza for us to try and we would then have to concoct a beer to pair with that pizza.

The whole Pizza Quest team showed up at our brewery early in the morning just a couple of weeks ago and when we say team, we do mean it. Peter, Kelly, the PQ producers, a special cheese delivery of cheeses made just the night before from a local artisan, and of course...a portable wood fire brick oven.

The day was incredible. Peter filmed a segment on creating a couple of different pizza doughs, including the special one he would use for our "challenge pie". That particular crust delved into the world of beer, which is, after all, liquid bread. Besides some of the more standard flours and yeasts that he normally uses in his doughs, Peter added a bit of rye flour and shockingly, a bit of ground crystal malt. Yes, he used malted barley, ground finely like flour, in the pizza dough!

Peter and Kelly cooked us pizza after pizza, just demonstrating their skills and trying their best to go through the gallons of fresh tomato sauce and pounds of burrata cheese that had just been made 12 hours earlier that we had at our disposal. It was a good day.

But then, when the oven was just at the right temperature, Kelly whipped out two different possible "challenge pies" for us. One was a white pie and one a red pie. After taste tests by everyone within reach, the white pie was decided on for the ultimate challenge. It was a pie made on top of Peter's special dough using super fresh burrata, squash blossoms, white sardines, fresh arugula sprouts and flowers, preserved lemon and fennel salt along the crust. All of the ingredients had been picked up earlier that morning at the famous farmer's market in Santa Monica by Kelly and they combined on this pizza to form something extraordinary.

Our job now is to create a beer recipe to brew and debut at a party outside of the Great American Beer Festival that will pair perfectly with this special pizza.

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

We had an incredible time learning about dough and bread with Peter and we highly recommend you check out his blog post from this day as well as his others to learn something yourself.

Brick Oven outside of our brewery

Peter setting up his work station to make some dough.

Peter and Kelly discussing sauce.

Patrick about to take our guests on a tour.

This was the alternate challenge pie. It had pistachios and some sort of lardo on it plus more. Delicious.

Tasting the challenge pies.

Our intern Kristen is a bit of a bread geek and a huge fan of Peter's.

About to put Kristen's pizza in the oven.

The challenge pie.

Blending Oude Tart

2011-07-11T14:06:00.000-07:00

Blending beer is an art.

There are certain breweries in Belgium that are world renowned for the beers, often being sited as the best of their style in the world that don't actually brew their own beer. One large example is 3 Fonteinen brewery outside of Brussels. They were founded back in the late 1800's as what they called a "guezery" or a brewery that specialized in blending multiple lambic beers from other breweries into the gueze style beer that they would bottle and sell.

Here at The Bruery we obviously spend most of our days brewing our own beer, but we send a lot of that beer away to rest in barrels. Some of those beers have been aging since our very first months of brewing 3 years ago, while others are of course much younger. Oude Tart, our gold medal winning (GABF & World Beer Cup) Flemish-style red ale is no different.

Today we brought out samples of several different batches of this beer that has been aging away in oak barrels. Some of the barrels have instilled a heavy oak quality, some a real funk, some a clean acidity, some a roasty quality, some a more wine-like quality, and many other different enjoyable flavors. The key to a well crafted oak aged ale, however, is blending properly to get just enough of each characteristic that will make the beer great.

We make several test blends with different percentages of each barrel of beer, constantly tasting and discussing the qualities that we like, dislike and want more or less of. New blends are made, all of the percentages being carefully tracked so that they can later be scaled back up to a full batch number for the final product.

It's a very fun process, no doubt, but it is definitely tough to keep your palate tuned into the flavors. And of course, we had a bottle of our first batch of Oude Tart, the one that got all the awards, sitting on the side for us to compare flavors. Beers brewed with bacterias and oak are very hard to replicate year after year since so much is left to nature. Hopefully we've created a blend for Oude Tart that will compare or outdo the original batch that we all loved so much when it was released back in 2009. We think it will.

Dogfish Head

2011-07-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in our previous post, we are attempting to revive this blog and make it a great destination for you to learn about what we are doing as a company as well as some tidbits about craft beer and all that surrounds it. So, we're going to jump backwards a couple of weeks here and talk about an epic day in our life as a brewery that occurred in mid-June.

We've done a couple of collaboration brews at this point in our short life. About 2 years ago we had Wayne from Cigar City Brewing out at our place to create what eventually became Marron Acidifié and earlier this year we had Sean Lawson of Lawson's Finest Liquids out here to work on Acer Quercus with us. Both of these beers were very exciting to make as it's extremely fun to be challenged with ideas from a brewer that we don't typically work with. As with many things in life, we sometimes need a change in the way that we do things in order to bring back a little more heat to our fire, and getting to collaborate with other great brewers really helps the creative process in this way.

When Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head brewing asked us about doing a collaboration with him, there was no hesitation. Sam is not only one of the biggest names in the craft brewing industry, but his passion for styles beyond the norm are very similar, yet totally different from what we do here at The Bruery. We knew it would be a fun process.

A number of phone calls were made between Sam and Patrick and some of the other folks at our respective breweries. We each came to the table with several ideas for beers that we thought were out of the box enough to be what someone would expect when our two breweries combined forces, yet still sounded tasty. The list of ingredient ideas being traded back and forth over the telephone lines between California and Delaware was enough to make any TSA official who may have been listening in become a bit suspicious.

When it all came down to the final few ideas, the answer became quite clear. A Japanese inspired beer that we could brew with a laundry list of herbs, spices and fruits lending themselves to the citrus, spicy and umami flavors often associated with the profound subtlety of Japanese cuisine. Plus, we could donate a portion of the proceeds to the brewers and breweries in Japan who were suffering from the large Earthquake that recently hit their northern shores.

Sam planned his trip out west to coincide with the National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego and arrived at our brewery straight off of a plane from Philly Beer Week. He's a busy man.

We were prepared with all of the possible ingredients needed for the recipe that had been discussed. Everything from kumquats to ginger to chili powder to sesame seeds to seaweed. Flaked rice, brown rice syrup and some standard malts. And of course, sake yeast.

Sam came roaring into our brewery with the smile and friendliness that we all came and knew to love from his short-lived television show, "Brew Masters." He asked us questions about every inch of our brewery while being taken on a small tour. He made a point of learning every employee's name and all in all, he was just an amazing guest. You'd think that he had had more than 2 hours sleep the night before...

The rest of the day was simply a pleasure. We began by tasting through some test batch beer that had been brewed previously on our 10 gallon system and mixed in some of the possible spices to get a feeling for what flavor we enjoyed the most. Sam helped Kevin mash in between discussions with Patrick and Tyler about everything from the beer at hand to the bocce ball tournament that we were all participating in that coming weekend. Kumquats were emulsified, random Japanese treats were munched and, of course, several beers were imbibed.

Overall, the day was a big success. We all had a great time coming up with a recipe together and getting to know each other while discussing war stories from the brewing trenches, plus it was probably the most hands on brewing that either Sam or Patrick have done in some time and it's always fun to put your boots back on.

The beer is currently in the final stages of fermentation and hopefully we will be releasing it upon the world soon.

The Project is under way

2011-07-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

Seems like we can't go more than 8 months or so here at The Bruery without taking on a new construction project of some sort. Whether it was building our brewery from the ground up, simply painting the walls and moving in desks to new office space or reconfiguring and building a retail store on our own, we seem to always be busy.

These past few weeks have been no different. We signed the lease on our new warehouse location, affectionately known around here as "The Grove" due to it's street address on Grove Ave, just a few weeks back, but construction has been moving along furiously. The floors were redone and resealed, the insulation in the warehouse was completely redone so that we can cool our barrels efficiently, offices were painted and some of the ceilings were ripped out and repainted in order to give it that cool and trendy 'industrial' feel. Funny that we had to change something in a warehouse office space to make it even more industrial...but it's beginning to look very cool. Besides having enough warehouse space to efficiently store close to 3,000 oak barrels in our current configuration plan (more if we decide to change some of our original thoughts), but the office space is big enough to house a staff about 3 times larger than the one we currently have. It's going to take some getting used to this whole concept of "personal space."

Anyhow...we just wanted to let you know that things are going well with the expansion and Project Quercus Maximus and also let you know that we plan on updating our blog a whole lot more in the coming months. We know it's been left to die a bit, but we hope to resurrect it with information on what's going on around here as well as other cool things about the craft industry, beer and beyond.