Get the recipe here at Craftbeer.com

Normally the “Round Up” for The Sessions comes a day or two following the day of The Sessions. My Saturday after The Session, however, consisted of preparing and packing for a trip to Belgium and London, more on that trip later. First, the long awaited and much over due round-up. Below are all the blog postings about beer dessert that were sent in. There are over twenty links to blog postings and more provided below.

In my own post about beer dessert, I mention my experience with stout cake, stout chocolate pudding, and (pictured above) tripel-poached-pear dessert.

Steph Weber of brew.cook.pair.joy writes about which beers are best for making dessert and includes a recipe for Stout Crème Brûlée.

@rnast mentioned that Founder’s Brewery had a dinnder that included a beer float made with Bourbon aged imperial stout, French vanilla ice cream, and toasted coconut sprinkles. Included is a link to a photo of the dessert.

Eddie Glick of Beerdorks.com explains how much he likes root beer and vanilla ice cream but does not like root beer floats. On the other had he loves a beer float made with Founder’s Breakfast Stout and vanilla ice cream.

The Beer Nut claims to have cheated and wrote an interesting article about beers for dessert, as opposed to a dessert made with beer.

The Aran Brew blog writes about making a beer jelly using Liefmann’s Kriek and how surprisingly easy it was to make.

BeerTaster.ca also had beer for dessert and paired it with cheese and fruit. Beer and cheese is a wonderful combination. Maybe somebody should do this for a future episode of The Sessions.

Jasmine from Beer at Joe’s made a beer cream pie and included the original recipe with step by step details about how it was made.

Lucy Saunders from The Best of American Food and Beer has a great recipe for Peach Lambic Ice Cream. It looks like it’s time for me to get an ice cream maker.

The Bay Area Beer Runner made a raspberry lambic gelatin in a brain shaped mold, you have to check out the photo of the final product.

The writers at the I’ll Have a Beer blog made not one but four different beer ice cream flavors including the recipes.

Bathtub Brewery writes about various beer desserts that they have made and tried, contemplating the best types of beer to use with dessert.

Geistbear Brewing Blog prefers beer for dessert.

Matt C. from A Wold of Brews recounts various beer desserts that he has tried, such as beer floats, chocolate mousse made with Rogue stout, and a pairing of IPA and carrot cake.

Lew Bryson of Seen Through a Glass writes that he enjoys beer as dessert and recalls a few other beer desserts that he has tried.

Peter from BetterBeerBlog went all out and made an elaborate dessert of beer brownies and framboise sorbet.

Jimmy from Hop Wild provided a recipe for a beer shake with two recommended combinations of ice cream and beer.

Jay from Brookston Beer Bulletin provided a list of beer styles that great in or with dessert.

Matt Hendy alerted us that Emeril recently made an ice cream with Peak Organic Espresso Amber Ale.

Red, White, and Brew recounts some recent articles and experiences with beer desserts.

Brewed for Thought made a chocolate sauce out of North Coast’s Anniversary ale Rasputin XII and poured it over various desserts.

Bottles of Barley used a recipe from Beer Basics: A Quick and Easy Guide by Peter Lafrance to make a dessert called Naughty Gretchen.

The Homebrew Chef has eight beer dessert recipes on the recipe page. Rochefort 10 Crème Brûlée? That’s a strong and pricey dessert but sounds great.

When I volunteered for the August installment of The Sessions, I immediately decided upon the topic of desserts made with beer. I had recently purchased a copy of Sam Calagione’s Extreme Brewing [Amazon] and I had brewed Blood Orange Hefeweizen and I had made the Smoky Maple Porter BBQ Sauce so at that moment I was eager to try out a few of the dessert recipes.

I began my exploration of beer desserts not by making some desserts myself but by asking a friend of mine, chef Andrew Giddens of Muirwood Kitchen, his thoughts on beer desserts. I provided the beer, Anderson Valley  Brewing Company’s Barney Flats Oatmeal Stout, and Andrew made a stout cake topped with brandied  cherries in a rum sauce. The cake was fluffy and delicious and the flavor of the beer was discernible and added a nice roasty and sweet malt flavor to the cake. Thank you Andrew for the wonderful dessert!

Next on my list of beer dessert to sample was a recipe that I found on Epicurious.com for chocolate stout pudding with whipped cream. The original recipe is called Chocolate Guinness Goodness and according to Epicurious “was developed by Shane Philip Coffey, the chef at Alias restaurant on New York City’s Lower East Side” for a St. Patrick’s day menu. I decided that there are much more interesting  flavors in almost any other brand of stout than Guinness so I opted for a bottle of Beer Republic’s Big Bear Black, a robust and flavorful imperial stout.

Another change that I made to the original recipe was to add about 1 tablespoon of sugar to the whipped cream. The recipe call to add reduced stout to the whipped cream and the flavor of the stout is so roasty and bitter that it needed some sugar to balance the bitterness. Finally, I used Sharffen Berger 70% cacoa chocolate to make this a California beer dessert in every aspect.

This is a very simple recipe to follow and the result is a rich dense pudding with e fluffy off-white whipped cream that makes it look like a small glass of beer. The taste has tons of chocolate goodness and a hint of roasty and malt flavor. I think the sugar and chocolate, however, overshadows the flavors of the stout a little bit. Next time I might try to use just a bit less sugar to see if that will bring out more of the beer flavor.

Last, but certainly not least, in my beer dessert adventures was a recipe from Extreme Brewing for Tripel-Poached-Pear Dessert, a wonderful and fairly simple dessert of poached pears in a sauce made of a Belgian-style tripel ale. Since I was leaving for Belgium 4 days after I made the recipe, I decided to try the recipe with a Canadian tripel, Unibroue’s La Fin Du Monde, instead of a Belgian-made tripel. I halved the recipe and used vanilla extract instead of vanilla bean. The recipe is as follows:

• 4 ripe pears
• 5 oz. La Fin Du Monde tripel
• 3 teaspoons honey (from Xinjiang, China)
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cinamon stick
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ¼ cup fresh mint leaves
• vanilla ice cream

First, I made some incisions into the bottom of the pears. I’m not sure what this was for but I did it anyway. I dropped the whole pears into boiling water for 45 seconds, which should have been longer for my pears were a bit under-ripe. Next, I dried, pealed, and quartered the pears.

For the sauce, first I poured some of the La Fin Du Monde into a glass and sampled it. Delicious! Then I poured the amount for the recipe into the saute pan and heated a bit before adding the honey, sugar, vanilla extract, and cinnamon stick. When adding the sugar and honey, I made sure to dissolve it in the liquid before proceeding. I brought the sauce to a boil and then reduced it to a simmer. When the liquid was thick enough, I mixed in the pears and simmered for another 5-10 minutes and then I removed the pears. Next, I added the mint leaves and cooked those in the sauce for about 1-2 minutes or about long enough for them to wilt and release their aroma. I removed the mint leaves and the cinnamon stick and the cooking was done.

I served the dessert with vanilla ice cream topped by the pears with everything covered in the tripel sauce. This dessert was delightful. The beer added a bit of malt sweetness but more than that added a clove spiciness and a hint of banana that is so characteristic of Belgian-style tripel ales. Since I had a glass of the beer while cooking the dessert, it was unmistakable that the beer was essential to the flavors of this dessert. I highly recommend trying this recipe, just be sure to use ripened pears.

You may have tried, or even made yourself, a few different savory dishes made with beer such as beer brats, BBQ sauce, beer can chicken, or beer battered chicken/fish. Beer seem to work well with this savory dishes but what about sweets and desserts? Beer may not be a common ingredient in desserts but when it is used properly, the results can be very delicious. A couple of desserts that I’ve tried making in the past have been beer brittle (pictured above) and stout chocolate cake. Another common beer dessert is a beer float.

For the August 2009 edition of the The Session, Beer 47 will hosting an online discussion about Beer Desserts. What beer desserts have you tried and liked? Disliked? What beer styles work well with dessert and which ones do not? Do you have any beer dessert recipes that you enjoyed and would like to share? To participate in the August 2009 Session, write a blog entry about beer desserts before August 7, 2009 and let me know about it by either leaving a comment here or sending me an email using the contact form. On August 7, I will post my own article about beer desserts while reading all of the other submissions. On August 8, I will post the “roundup” article with links to all of the beer blog submissions and a little summary for each.

If you’re not a blogger, you are still welcome to participate. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post about any of your favorite beer desserts.

For more information about The Sessions, check out The Sessions page at Brookston Beer Bulletin. It explains in greater detail  The Sessions and includes a complete index of all of the past Sessions. There are some great articles to be found in The Sessions.

In addition to tasting and making beer, I enjoy cooking and finding new and delicious recipes to try. When I purchased Extreme Brewing [Amazon] by Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, I was very pleased to find several recipes that use beer as an ingredient. The first recipe that I decided to try was the Smoky Maple-Porter BBQ Sauce on p. 167.

I didn’t have any Belgian candi sugar so I substituted with Chinese rock sugar. I also reduced the amount of olive oil used. The following is the slightly modified recipe that I followed. You can see all of the ingredients in the picture above.

• About 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil or just enough to fry the onions and garlic
• 1 chopped white onion
• 4 cloves of chopped garlic
• 12 oz. of Sierra Nevada Porter (I flattened mine by leaving it out overnight in the fridge)
• 3 beef bullion cubes
• 1/2 cup of Chinese rock sugar
• 1 cup of maple syrup
• 12 oz. of tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon of liquid smoke
• 2 teaspoons of crystallized gingered chopped
• 1 teaspoon cumin powder
• 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
• 2 teaspoons of black pepper

After preparing all of the ingredients, the rest of the process was simple and straightforward. First, using the olive oil, I sautéd the onions followed by garlic until lightly browned and not burned. If you burn the garlic, it will taste bitter. After the onions and garlic were cooked, I added the beer and brought it to a simmer. Next, I added the beef bullion cubes and the rock sugar. The bullion cubes reduced down quickly but the big chunks of rock candy were taking a while and I was starting to lose liquid to evaporation. After about three-quarters of the sugar was melted down and one-third of the liquid reduced, I added all of the remaining ingredients and mixed them well to produce a thick sauce. I let it simmer for a little bit and took it off the heat.

The end result is a very sweet BBQ sauce with a touch of smoky flavor. The spices give it some depth and interest and the cayenne and black pepper give it a subtle kick without being spicy hot. Some BBQ sauces can be a little too tart from using vinegar but this recipe uses none.

After making the sauce, I used it for three different meals. For the first meal, I made grilled BBQ chicken by simply spreading the sauce over the chicken, letting it marinade for about 30 minutes and then cooking it on the grill slowly. For the next meal, I used the sauce to make homemade BBQ chicken pizzas. I mixed a little sauce with the cooked chicken that I used as a pizza topping and also used the BBQ sauce as the sauce for the pizza. Finally, I made BBQ bacon cheeseburgers with onions rings.

If I were to make this sauce again, I would try to make it a little bit less sweet. I prefer a balance of flavors in my BBQ sauces and this recipe is heavy on sugar.  To reduce the sugar I would first crush up the rock sugar so I can add a little bit at a time and I would also start with half the amount of maple syrup and add more as I would see fit.