Session #47: Cooking and Blogging WITH Beer.

I usually cook with beer. That is not to say that I usually put beer in the food. What I mean is that when I am cooking, I am usually with beer.

I was cooking with beer tonight. I grilled cheeseburgers, and I was with homebrew.

This homebrew is a sneaky one. It's an extra pale ale hopped only with Sorachi Ace. Light on the bitterness but heavy on flavor and aroma hopping. Sorachi is supposed to be the lemony hop, but this is like a glass of oranges. Specifically, this is my seventh glass of oranges tonight. Sneaky, I tell you. The strength is around 4.5% abv while I've dialed the bitterness back to about 25 IBUs. At first I thought it wasn't quite bitter enough. But the sneaky stuff won't stop sneaking down my hatch.

Aren't we supposed to be talking about cooking with beer? OK. Once I made a carbonnade with Westvleteren. What a damnable waste.

The sneakiness of this beer has me thinking about balance. It is not always apparent with the first glass, when you are looking more for flavor than for drinkability. You don't taste drinkability so much as prove it.

How many times have you had a big IPA or imperial stout and thought, "Ooh, that's really drinkable," and then after that glass you're either done or on to something else? My point is that we are not really qualified to judge drinkability after just a few sips. Some of you would disagree, but I respectfully request that the argument be carried out in person, in a decent establishment, with plenty of time to spare. No note-taking or fancy picture phones. Just beer and bullshitting. And counting.

Cooking. Yeah. We were babysitting a 5-year-old tonight. After a few bites of the cheeseburger I made for him, he decided it was too peppery. Plenty of flavor but not eatable, you might say.

I don't know. I ate one and a half of the damn things. With beer.