Beer – it IS for breakfast, after all

Beer at breakfast, actually just brunch really, is something I’ve long advocated.  My two best memories of brunch beers are:

• Sipping a Deschutes Obsidian Stout on a sunny morning on the back patio of a restaurant Ashland, OR, amidst the hubbub of the Shakespeare Festival.  This was during one of my two road trips from Portland to San Francisco last summer, beer was very much at the top of my mind, and it just seemed like the perfect time for it.  Who needs coffee when there’s stout?
• Sharing a 750mL of Allagash Curieux with friends over a brunch of 3 kinds of banana bread, BLT chicken salad, french toast with strawberries, and tomato-onion-cheese tart.  My friend’s apartment, which he was subsequently booted from for no apparent reason (would you kick out someone who cooks you french toast? Or shares Curieux with you?), sat on a hill near Dolores Park and looked out over the downtown skyline.  The vanilla and tropical notes of the Allagash managed to meet the high expectations created by the food and the view, and I got to turn a whole new group of friends onto what has quickly become one of my favorite beers.

But now it seems that the idea has caught on big time and is popping up all over the place, ok, just two places, but I still smell a trend in the making here.

This Saturday, the folks from MateVeza are hosting Beerunch at Bambuddha Lounge in San Francisco. They are serving seven beers with traditional brunch dishes, in a series of pairings that go from “ho-hum, I expected that” (Kona Brewing’s Pipeline Porter served with… Kona coffee), to “yeah, that’s a pretty good one” (North Coast Pranqster in mimosas), to “huh?” (Bittersweet Lenny’s Rye IPA with grilled cheese of gruyere on rye – I’ve just never had grilled cheese, nor IPA, at brunch before, though this sandwich does sound tasty and I do have a bottle of the Lenny’s RIPA calling my name from my fridge).

Tickets are $40 pre-sale, $45 at the door.  I don’t mean to undercut the MateVeza folks, but two of your seven courses are drinks, one is cookies, one is crumb cake, one is bacon (since when is bacon a course?), and what you’re left with huevos rancheros and grilled cheese.  I’m sure that is enough to get you full, but then so can Denny’s with a Grand Slam breakfast for about $7.99.  What I’m saying is this: this might be great, but there’s little here you can’t make yourself for much cheaper.  Which brings me to our second beer-at-brunch sighting of the week…

Sean Paxton’s ‘Cuisine A La Biere’ piece for the newest issue of BeerAdvocate magazine.  Sean is The Homebrew Chef and specializes in taking beer meals several steps past pairing, often brewing beer for them himself, cooking with the beer, or as I noticed several times in this article, cooking with the ingredients that went into a beer.

Forget mimosas (however much I may like the Pranqster), Sean’s got no fewer than five beer cocktails for you to serve at brunch.  Belgian wit and mango bellini anyone? Red eye stout?  Or maybe you’ll go for the De Struise Breakfast Drink which my respect for the copyright of the BeerAdvocate folks prevents me from explaining here, except to say that it’ll take a braver woman than I to down that one.

From Danish donut-hole shaped pancakes made with oatmeal stout and dry malt extract, to Belgian waffles complete with Belgian strong golden beer, to the tiny details of beer butter, beer syrup, and beer-soaked fruit, Sean’s got you covered.

So, pick up a copy of the latest BeerAdvocate, or consider coming to Sean’s dinner at the Northern California Homebrewers Festival so you can talk some secrets out of him (you probably don’t even have to – so many of his recipes are on his site), and get going!  That is the one downside of a beer brunch – making Danish pancakes from scratch the morning after a big beer night can be tough to say the least.  But if I know anything, it’s this: when I’ve had a big night, a there’s nothing like the ‘hair of the dog’, and pancakes, to get me going again. Cheers!