Here's to Beer! Cooking with Beer

It’s a familiar conversation that I have had with a number of people. They say, “I tried cooking with beer once but it just came out…meh.” The overall sentiment is always one of enthusiasm, which gives way to disappointment in the final product. In cooking with beer, I find one simple tip will go a long way towards helping you be successful.

The tip is this: If cooking with beer is new to you, play it safe and avoid using beers that are heavy in hops content. The reason I make this suggestion is because of a principle of cooking called reduction. Simply stated, reduction is the evaporation of water from a liquid which concentrates the flavor and thickens the body of said liquid. As you can imagine, you can use reduction to your benefit in the making of sauces. However, keep in mind that there is a concentration of flavor in this technique. While usually that is a good thing, if the flavor is bitter, as is the case with hops, the finished product will become intensely bitter. Deglazing a pan with an IPA may sound like a good idea, but the end result may be unpleasant to say the least. While drinking an IPA with your finished dish is great, cooking with it can be difficult.

Conversely, using beers that are high in residual sugars will yield a much more pleasing result. When you concentrate the sugars and proteins of malt heavy beers, the body of the sauce will take on a silky texture, and sweet flavor. Some of the ideal beers for reduction are dark German lagers. Bocks, Doppelbocks, and Marzens are all great to cook with as they have high sugar content and relatively mild hops content. Stouts, especially sweet stouts, also work well in this regard.

In fact, you can reduce a very malty beer down to a syrupy glaze and brush it on a grilled piece of meat. Take some Doppelbock, a few spoons of honey and a splash of balsamic vinegar and, using medium heat on your sauce pan, reduce to one third original volume. Use on burgers, steak, pork, or chicken to get a quick beer flavored glaze.

Resist the urge to use cheap beer in your cooking. I know lots of people will throw some PBR in their chili, for example, but try using something like Bohemia lager instead, and I think you will see a big difference. Just as with wine, if it’s too cheap to drink, you may want to reconsider cooking with it. Again, realize that whichever flavor you use is going to be concentrated during the reduction process, so the quality of beer you start with makes a significant difference in the finished product.

These are some generalizations, which are by no means absolute, but hopefully will help out those of you who are new to using beer in your cooking endeavors. I could write a long and thorough book on the subject of cooking with beer, however someone has already beat me to it. “The Brewmaster’s Table” by Garrett Oliver is an excellent read, and will tell you all you ever wanted to know and more on the subject. Cheers!

Rich Coffey is a chef and Certified Cicerone. If you want to learn more about how the shortrib for this post was made, check it out here.