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One of the things we’re passionate about here at beerlovesfood.com is the concept of “local”.

We tend to focus on New England-based businesses, and in particular, breweries.

One of the things on which we try to focus on beerlovesfood.com is how the local beer community can have an impact on the local agriculture and business community, and if there’s one message beerlovesfood.com wants to send to you, the reader, it’s this:

Local is better, because local is fresh.

Remember those silly commercials from the 80s about brown eggs? Well, they weren’t joking around.

And neither is Rapscallion Brewery. Based primarily out of Holyoke, MA, they are truly a breed apart from your typical New England brewery. 

Disclaimer: I don’t work for Rapscallion, I’ve never been paid a red cent to say anything about them, good or bad .

That said, I could not help but be impressed by the philosophy of the folks over at Rapscallion. (Not to mention their beer!)

I spent an hour or so on the windy but pleasant patio of Six Burner in the South End, with Marc Pacelli, self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades of Rapscallion Brewery, formerly known as Concord Brewery. They changed their name after several years for marketing purposes, but have been putting out the same quality beverages since 1993, when Brett Pacheco opened a brewery on the banks of the Assabet River in Concord MA.

More recently, as the microbrewery market has become more competitive, and the facilities necessary to create the highest-quality, small-batch beer have been more difficult and expensive to maintain, necessity has become the mother of invention.

Because of the tremendous difficulty involved in owning and operating a brewing facility capable of turning a profit, Rapscallion, and other breweries, have turned to a sort of “v.2.0” solution. A brewing facility of any size is an enormously expensive operation – it’s all overhead. Maintaining the mash tuns, the fermenters, the hundreds of miles of copper tubes, and countless other pieces of equipment necessary to make a decent beer costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, which leaves all but the wealthiest beer magnates out in the cold. Rapscallion, which chooses to keep itself a smaller operation, participates in what Marc calls “contract brewing”, where Rapscallion’s beer is brewed at a facility owned by another company. According to Mr. Pacelli, many other breweries besides Rapscallion are participating in this “brewery-sharing” scenario. On brew days, Rapscallion’s brewmeister heads over to the facility and oversees the process of creating a batch of Rapscallion Honey, their 1898 Lager, or Rapscallion White, a Belgian Wit-style beer.

While Marc wasn’t forthcoming on the name of the brewery with whom they’re sharing space and facilities, he speculates that “open-source brewing” is not far off, and that the day may soon come when the Bob and Doug MacKenzies of the world can rent out professionally maintained brewery equipment to brew a legal amount of beer for home consumption, and can do so with the supervision and advice of a real brewmeister with real knowledge.

Choosing Local just tastes better

Marc and I shared a few pints at Six Burner, a great restaurant in the South End, and I enjoyed the Rapscallion Honey, a pale ale infused with native wildflower honey sourced from local farmers. It’s a light yet complex ale at first, but it finishes clean and pure, and right at the end, just at the very end…it almost gets sweet, but then drops right off. It’s an amazing beer, clean, fresh and very sessionable. I paired it with Six Burner’s Chicken Pot Pie Egg Rolls, which were absolutely phenomenal, and the two together are a perfect marriage.

Rapscallion Brewery’s beer philosophy is simple: Keep it local, keep it fresh. They don’t sell outside a couple hundred miles from the brewery, they don’t bottle their beer and ship it to parts unknown to sit around for who knows how long. Fresher tastes better, and Rapscallion can prove it.  As soon as their beer is brewed, it’s kegged and trucked straight to the restaurants that serve it, and right into our beer-holes it goes! No distributors, no middlemen, no long dusty sits on shelves.  Remember folks, beer doesn’t age in the bottle.  Marc and I agreed that it’s great that you can go into your local beer and wine store and pick up a bottle of something that was made in Belgium…but with so many great styles and varieties to choose from that come from our area, why not choose freshness?

Being part of a community

Rapscallion doesn’t stop with a freshness philosophy. They’ve dedicated themselves to being part of a community. As I mentioned above, the honey Rapscallion uses in their Rapscallion honey is sourced from local farmers, as are their hops, as are as many of the ingredients as possible that go into their beer. Is it more expensive to do it that way? Maybe, but according to Marc, “We’re all about the communities and the farmers.” Their model of local sustainability, supporting local farmers, working with charitable organizations, while at the same time contributing to the New England beer community, is making them into one of the most admired breweries around.

Keep it small, keep it simple

“Growth for growth’s sake is the philosophy of the cancer cell.”

-Richard Haas

According to Marc, “Our model is that we’re only going to distribute within 200 miles of the brewery.” Another of Rapscallion’s mission is to bring back the old-school style of business, where the artisan who creates the product develops a relationship with the business owner who sells the product. Rapscallion is creating real, personal connections between themselves the restaurants that serve their beer, and they’re doing it by spending the time with the folks there – our choice of meeting at Six Burner in the South End was no coincidence – after our interview, Marc met with other Rapscallion folks and the management of the restaurant, to talk shop, see how business was going, and generally just to let the restaurant know that they’re there for them.

Next time you’re interested in trying out a great local beer to pair with your favorite food, why not check out one of the great places in and around Boston that serve it?

Well, never let it be said that cooking with beer is an exact science.

I’m actually fairly certain that nobody has ever said that, but in an effort to proactively head off any thoughts along those lines, let me say it again:

Cooking with beer is not an exact science.

I put my lovely pork loin into brine on Sunday, May 2nd, as you’ll recall. In my original article, I advised that a loin of this size should be brined for about 2-4 days.

And into the brine she went.  We covered that well last time: the construction and application of a brine.  One thing I want you to take away from the concept of brining is this: Salt and Sugar are the two most important aspects of a brine.

Note: Brining is first and foremost about chemically altering the structure of the meat so that in the end, it’s more tender and juicy to eat.  By including aromatics, as we did in our brine, we can impart some subtle flavors, but that’s a secondary function only.   Brining and marinating are two different things. But if you’re reading this blog, you probably already know that. If you’re curious about the differences between the two, feel free to email me at beerlovesfood@gmail.com, and I’d be happy to chat with you about the two.

So anyway, it’s on to step 2 of our 10-pound pork loin!  Remember I said before how it’s not an exact science? Well, if you read the previous article, I mentioned that a 10-pound pork loin takes 2-4 days in the brine.

I left it in for 6 days.

So what happened? Absolutely nothing bad.

With 10 pounds of pork, a couple of extra days isn’t going to ruin anything, as long as you haven’t gone nuts and made a super salty brine.  Remember: when you’re first starting out with brining anything – always err on the side of less salt.  I always do, and I’ve been brining for years.

Anyway, so after six days, I’ve brined a good-looking piece of pork loin, ready for the roaster.  But without cutting it down to size, this thing is not gonna fit into the roasting pan as is.  Solution: bifurcation.

Preheat your oven at this point for 500. Yeah, you heard me.

Rub both pieces of loin all over with a 3:1 blend of Old Bay seasoning and powdered cinnamon. Yes, it sounds weird, but trust me. The piquant, spicy Old Bay is going to balance perfectly with the cinnamon, whose sweetness will be brought out by the beer and apple from the brine.

You can see here I’ve rubbed a TON of this mixture all over both sides of our two pieces of pork loin, and laid them side by side on the rack of a roasting pan.  Be sure to lay the loin fat side up: we want all that good pork fat working its way down into the meat as it cooks.

Now it’s time to bring some more  beer to the party.  Here it doesn’t matter what you use so much, since whatever we put into the roasting pan is going to mix with the pork drippings, but it’s all going to steam up and help keep our pork loins moist – so use a beer you’d drink!

In my case…it’s PBR. What can I say, I’m all class.

Get a good 1/6″ – 1/4″ of beer in the bottom of the roasting pan.  No need to go nuts, but get the whole thing coated.

Now get your meat thermometer (you do have an instant read probe thermometer, right?) and insert it into the center of the thicker of the two halves.

Set your temp alarm for 145F.  Contrary to what you may have read in various alarmist’s cookbooks, NOTHING bad for you can survive in pork beyond 144F.  144F in pork is a very medium rare, which a lot of people find a bit off-putting, mostly because we’ve been trained by the food industry to be scared out of our minds of trichinosis.  But reality check: trichinosis dies at 144F.

(If you REALLY like well-done pork, with all the juices dried up, set your temp. alarm to like, 155.  If you remove your pork at that temp, it’ll finish up at about 160, which is as well-done as I can advise eating pork in good conscience.)

Your oven should be up to 500 by this time, so get it in there, and set your timer for 3o minutes.  What you’re doing here is crisping AND melting that layer of fat on top of the pork, as well as charring and baking that crust of Old Bay and cinnamon.  Good things are happening here.  After 30 minutes at 500, reduce the oven temp to 350, and just wait till the temp alarm on your thermometer goes off at 145F.

Removing your roasting pan, and tent it with foil, to allow the residual heat in the pork to finish the internal cooking, what we call “carry-over cooking”.  This will leave the final temp of the loin around 150-155 – which is PERFECT for pork – just a shade of medium rare, and that’s exactly how ours turned out.

The flavor is truly magnificent.  A long brine in a flavorful solution imparts all sorts of lovely subtle flavor to the meat, without changing the essential…well, porkiness of the pork.  We get hints of the cinnamon from the rub, and apple from the brine.  We get a little smoke and tang from the Old Bay rub, and we get a delicious hint of hop from the beer, but all in all, it’s just a great bouquet of flavors that really melds well.  On top of that, the natural juices of the pork loin have been intensified, so what you’ve got is the most tender, juicy, and complexly flavorful piece of pork you’ve ever had.

Now, what you decide to do with 10 pounds of perfectly brined, roasted and flavored pork loin is entirely up to you!

A twice-baked potato, or perhaps my signature beer-mashed potatoes, and some simple, blanched, shocked green beans, tossed in a hot skillet with butter, salt and pepper when you’re ready to serve, and you’ve got yourself one killer meal.

And as always, don’t forget the beer!

See you next time, folks!

“Would you like me to get you anything at the grocery store?” My vegetarian wife asked me innocently, keys in hand.  Surprised, and happy I didn’t have to go out, I swallowed the last of my PBR, and muted ESPN’s WSOP coverage.

“Sure!” I responded brightly.  “Let me make a list for you!”

We’d been down this road before.  A few times.  My wife and I have been married for a little less than a year, though we’d been dating for about five years before that. We know each other pretty well, but as any married couple will tell you, it’s all about learning about each other every day.

One of the things we learned about one another recently was that my wonderful wife, who is a vegetarian, while she is more than willing to pick up meats for me at the grocery store, is not familiar with, nor does she care to become familiar with, the nomenclature of the butcher shop.  Fair enough, any reasonable man would conclude, so let us make sure we define our terms.

A quick look at that week’s supermarket circular revealed that whole pork loins (4-5 pounds each) were selling for $1.99 a pound, which sounded great to me.  I printed the page of the circular, and sent my wife on her way.

She returned during a particularly hilarious episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and put most of the groceries away before I could get up off my fat ass to help her.  I finally managed to help her out, and had unpacked the rest of the vegetables into the fridge, which was when I saw it.

A ten-pound whole pork loin.

The thing is the size of my leg, and just looks angry, sitting there taking up the whole bottom shelf of the fridge.  I straighten up in alarm, and meet the smiling gaze of my wife, who tells me that not only did she consult the butcher, she showed him the circular I printed.  They just didn’t have any more of the small ones, she explained, and rather than come back empty-handed, she picked up one of the ones they had left.

I’m torn between feeling love for my wife (and her devotion to my carnivorism), and trepidation over the fact that I’ve now got ten frickin’ pounds of pork I’ve got to figure out what to do with. I kiss my wife and thank her.

And I need a beer.

Not just to drink, but to make a brine with.  It’s going to take me a few days to organize the kind of personnel support it will take to take this bad boy down, and the brine not only gives me the time to scrape up the friends to enjoy this pork loin with me, but it’ll also make the meat more tender and flavorful.  Off I go to Liquor Land, which I wish had a better name, but has all the craft beers a beer schemer could ask for.  I have no idea what I’m going to use, but I figure a good assortment can’t hurt.

From left to right: Sapporo Reserve, Blue Hills Brewery IPA, Peak Organic Maple Oat, Peak Organic IPA, and just for kicks, Brouwerij Boon’s Kriek Boon.

Obviously I was in the mood for an IPA, and that’s what I cracked first.  Peak Organic IPA is crisp, clean and floral, without a chokingly overpowering hop signature.  It’s a great local New England IPA, and I’m happy to be drinking it while I assemble the ingredients for my brine.

So I do a quick raid of the spice cabinet, and find what I need for a great pork brine.  We want to make a balanced brine – both sweet and savory – since pork is a great “neutral” palette onto which to assemble a bouquet of flavors.

So lets try this:

The two white bowls contain:

-          1 ½ cups coarse kosher salt

-          ¾ cup sugar

Then on the left, we’ve got, counterclockwise from left, into center

-          1 T black peppercorns

-          2 bay leaves

-          1 T white peppercorns

-          2 T Old Bay seasoning

-          1 T whole Moroccan Spice Rub (http://www.lacollinatoscanausa.com) or check your local spice vendor

-          2 whole dried habanero peppers

-          ½ T whole mustard seed.

We’ve also got a full bottle of Blue Hills Brewery IPA and a Fuji apple, cut into sections.

Assembly: Boil a large saucepan o’ water, (about 3 cups) and add your salt and sugar to it once it reaches a roiling boil.

Stir the salt and sugar into the boiling water until they dissolve, then add the remainder of the ingredients, minus the beer and the apples.  Your pot will look a little…well, like Sunday morning’s bog.

Kill the heat, and stir till all the Old Bay is dissolved, and let the whole mess cool.  Use ice cubes if you need to accelerate the process.

Have another beer.  This time, try the Blue Hills IPA we used in the brine.  It’s got a great floral bouquet, but has a really interesting sweetness at the finish that is incredibly distinctive.  Great beer.  Have a couple. Don’t stress about the timeline of your brine.

When you’re ready, and your brine is cool, put your pork loin in a pot large enough to hold it, and pour your cooled brine mixture over the loin, then add enough water to just cover the pork.  Add the beer and throw in the apple slices.  Cover the pot,  and keep in the fridge for 2-4 days.

I promise, when you roast this (bleep)er, it’ll be the best piece of pork you’ve ever had.

Hey guys -

Well, it’s been a busy couple of weeks in beer land.  We’ve had great spring weather here in Boston, and we’ve begun to emerge from our holes, squinting and pale, to stare out at the odd little green things that are starting to grow on the ends of the big pointy wooden sticks in the ground.

One of my favorite beers recently has been Black Hawk Stout, made by the Mendocino Brewing Company.  Stouts are a tough beer to get right – if you’re doing it wrong, it tastes like potting soil. The folks at Mendocino, though, have been making Black Hawk Stout, and making it well, since 1983.  It’s truly a fine brew – both sweet caramel and chocolate flavors combine with a dry, subtly hoppy finish to make this a stout worth traveling to!  Check it out at Parish Cafe on Boylston St. or Mass Ave. in the South End.  Pair it with their “Steak And Blue” sandwich from Lydia Shire.

We’ve got a number of great beer events coming to the area, all of which will be covered by Beerlovesfood!

This Saturday, April 10, 2010, from 1:00 pm to 4:00 p.m. at Gordon’s Moody Street location is the Grand Beer Tasting, you don’t need to register or anything…and best of all it’s FREE! These fine folks are going to give us a chance to taste some great local beers – let’s see what we can come up with for pairings, shall we?

The big one this month, of course, is the Boston Beer & Bacon festival.  Unfortunately, the tickets for that event are all sold out, but look for my podcast of the event to be up in a few weeks.

Take it easy, beer lovers – and don’t forget to try a new brew every week!

Let’s get real, people.

Beer Loves Food is all about that – pairing up great food with great beers.  Each week, we’ll feature our favorite pairing of flavors, plus a recipe that’ll let you try it out for yourself.  This week’s favorite is Irish Bangers with Sweet-Savory Dipping Sauce & Guinness Draught.

If you’re like me, you remember a time not too long ago, when the only way to get a REAL Guinness was to go down pub, and have your barman pull you one.  Sure, we had Guinness Extra Stout in bottles, but it’s a whole different flavor. Good, but different.

Of course, any beer drinker worth his foam today knows that a decent likeness of a pint of Guinness can be had at home with the help of their famous little nitrous oxide insert.

Old news.  Anyway, go grab yourself a six of Guinness Draft in a bottle, and find a good ethnic food store, because you definitely want to get traditional Irish Bangers for this recipe.  Irish sausage is steamed, rather than smoked, and is a mixture of pork, spices and rusk (breadcrumbs).  If you can’t find them in your neighborhood, google them up and order online.

Grilled Bangers with Sweet-and-Savory

Guinness Dipping Sauce

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoon butter
• ¼ cup chopped shallots
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
• ¼ cup Guinness Draught
• 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 3 tablespoons ketchup
• 1 tablespoon Sriracha Chili Sauce
• 2 teaspoons honey
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and grated
• 4 teaspoons rice vinegar
• 2 tablespoons sugar (to taste)
• salt and pepper (to taste)
• 2 pounds fresh sausage (like Irish bangers)

Instructions for Dipping Sauce

1. Heat the butter on a grill or in a skillet over medium heat. Heat the shallots and garlic until the shallots are just soft. Remove from heat and reserve garlic and shallots.

2. In a large mixing bowl, combine Guinness, lime juice, fish sauce, ketchup, sriracha, honey, ginger, and rice vinegar. Mix well until combined. Add shallots and garlic. Transfer to blender and blend well.

3. Pour into medium saucepan over low-medium heat, stirring well until heated through.
When sauce is heated, taste for seasoning. If it’s too sharp, add a teaspoon of sugar, stir for a few minutes and taste again. If still too sharp, add a second teaspoon of sugar and stir again.
Continue to heat, stirring, until desired consistency is reached. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Keep warm.

Instructions for Bangers

1. Grill your sausages, getting nice sear marks all over each one.

2. When sausages are cooked through, slice into bite-sized pieces on a diagonal. Arrange slices on a plate, or pile into a large bowl, and serve with the dipping sauce along with plenty of toothpicks for spearing, and Guinness for drinking.  Remember to use the proper glassware.

Slainte!

(original article published on foodthinkers.com on March 10, 2010)

Well, well! Looks like my favorite local cheapo brew is having a birthday!  Narragansett, the Rhode-Island based brewery responsible for crafting one of the more drinkable “affordable” beers available on the market, is 120 this year! To celebrate, they’re throwing 120th anniversary parties at a bunch of New England-area bars and restaurants throughout the year.

On March 31, the ‘Gansett team (including the ‘Gansett Girls!) will be at the Warren Tavern in Charlestown, MA.  The Warren is Massachusetts’ oldest bar,  the place where Paul “Sure, Make Up Stuff About My Midnight Ride, Whydoncha” Revere used to hork down pints, and where General Washington himself stopped by for a few pops back in the day.

Come down on Wednesday to support a local brew, maybe win some fun prizes, and hoist a tankard in the most historic tavern in the Commonwealth!

And check out ‘Gansett’s Recipe of the Week – this week’s feature, Littlenecks in ‘Gansett & Garlic.

Slainte!

Who doesn’t love this combination! And no, that’s not a question.  If you don’t love this combination, I don’t want to hear about it.

On Saturday, April 24, from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., the 1st annual Boston Bacon & Beer Festival is coming to the SoWa Power Station building, on the corner of Harrison Avenue and Waltham Street in the “South of Washington” (or SoWa) district of Boston.  The festival will feature local breweries, bacon-themed dishes from a bunch of Boston’s best restaurants, live music from East Coast Soul, pig butchery demonstrations featuring Chef Will Gilson from Garden at the Cellar, Vadim Akimenko from Akimenko Meats, Jamie Bissonnette from Toro / Coppa., and Jason Bond from Beacon Hill Bistro.

All the proceeds from this event will benefit Community Servings, Share our Strength, South End Youth Baseball and, The Juniper Fund.

Yours truly will be out at the BBB doing a podcast. I’ll be the guy wearing a badge that says BEERLOVESFOOD.COM, you can’t miss me. Come say hi, and join me for a pint!

Look for some of the highlights of tasting combinations from the event, coming soon!

Pints up!

The phenomenon of Pabst Blue Ribbon is, by now, well-known.  Hipsters everywhere have revived the once-flagging beer brand, embracing the old-school Milwaukee brew for a blend of reasons, from its cheap price tag (3 bucks a pint even in some of the swankiest beer bars in Boston) to its image as a retro-cool brand, to simple sheep-imitation.  Personally, I find nothing specifically wrong with Pabst Blue Ribbon.  It’s cheap, and tastes so, but doesn’t have the skunky, goat-piss taste of a Budweiser, or the sharp bile flavor of Miller High Life.  PBR is just a plain, mild, sessionable ale that goes down relatively smoothly.

But the days of buying PBRs with sofa change may well come to an end this year.  PBR’s sometimes preposterously cheap price tag comes with just that: a price tag.  The company that owns the Pabst label, S&P Company, is a not-for-profit, tax-free charitable trust, set up after the death of Paul Kalmanowitz, late owner of Pabst Brewing Company.   The IRS says charities owning beer companies is a no-no, and ordered S&P to sell Pabst or risk losing its status as a tax-free organization. In 2005, after finding no buyers at market, S&P applied for an extension to 2010, which was granted.  Now the deadline looms, and one enterprise, “buyabeercompany.com” has stepped up to the plate with what appears to be an innovative solution.

On the surface, Buyabeercompany.com looks to be an interesting, “web 2.0” scenario.  Through “crowdsourcing”, this joint venture between Forza Migliozzi and The Ad Store seems poised to give ordinary people the chance to purchase a portion, however small, of the Pabst Brewing Company. Crowdsourcing is defined by Wikipedia as “…the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing  them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.”

Scratch below the surface, however, and this enterprise is fraught with a series of unanswered questions.  The website insists that the campaign is not a solicitation for money, but rather requests for “pledges”, much like an NPR fund drive.  Potential buyers are offered $5, $25, $100 and $250,000 pledge categories, and the website asks only for your name and email address in order to make such a pledge.  What will happen if buyabeercompany.com reaches its pledge goal of $300 million? The website does not offer any information.  It seems unlikely that the two advertising/marketing firms would control any stake in Pabst Brewing, and yet…

The fate of Pabst and our beloved $3.00 (and often cheaper!) pints is uncertain.  The catch-22 of the situation is that the status of S&P Company as a tax-free charitable trust is, in part, responsible for the beer’s extremely competitive price point.  That price point, in addition to targeted marketing and clever brand placement, has helped Pabst revive itself with a new, younger crowd.  Should a for-profit enterprise take over the brewery, would they be able to keep the brand alive as is?  These days, who even wants to try to compete with Anheuser-Busch InBev, the towering megacorp that manages 200 beer brands and controls much of the beer distribution in the world?

Will the hipsters of tomorrow be able to buy a tallboy with sofa change?  Perhaps you and I can pitch in together and answer “yes.”