10 bizarre beers you probably haven’t heard of

by Jessica Festa on

And you thought adding hints of blueberry and flavors of pumpkin to your brew was unique? Check out this list of 10 bizarre beers and you’ll be thinking that cherry ale is as boring as water.

Pizza Beer

Pizza Beer was created by Tom and Athena Seefurth in Campton Township, Illinois, when they had a surplus of tomatoes. The process of creating this brew involves mashing a Margarita pizza and steeping it. The essence of the pizza spices is washed off and put in a brewpot to boil. Hops and spices are added, the liquid is fermented, and, after a week or two, your pizza beer is good to go.Porterhouse Oyster Stout

This beer, created by the Porterhouse Brewing Company in Ireland, is not suitable for vegetarians, as it is literally brewed with oysters. Other components include grains such as pale malt, roast barley, black malt, and flaked barley as well as hops like Galena, Nugget, and East Kent Goldings.

Bacon Beer

Bacon Beer, which has actual bacon in it, is a creative brew created by Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett Oliver. To create this beer, Oliver infuses a brown ale with the flavor of bacon fat using a method known as “fat washing”. Because the entire process is so complicated, it is an expensive $350 a taste, according to Daniel Maurer at NBC New York. However, Oliver is attempting to simplify the process in order to make the beer more affordable to beer drinkers.

Creme Brulee Beer

The Southern Tier Brewing Company offers a beer that you can also have for dessert. This Imperial Milk Stout is made with 2-row pale malt, dark caramel malt, vanilla bean, lactose sugar, Columbus kettle hops, and Horizon aroma hops. Bonus: Other dessert beers from this brewing company include an oatmeal stout and a “choklat stout”.

Chili Beer

Originally created by the Black Mountain Brewing Company in Cave Creek, Arizona, this beer has a kick to it which can be attributed to the addition of chili peppers to the brew. While the originally brewing company has closed down, chili beer continues to be created by the Mexicali Brewery in Tecate, Mexico.

Tomato Beer

Anheuser-Busch in Missouri brings tomato flavored beer to brew lovers in their Chelada, a mixture of Budweiser and Clamato juice. With chunks of tomato and a spicy flavor, this savory beer is best served with some lime and a celery stick.

Champagne Beer

Kasteel Cru creates a Champagne flavored beer by blending water from the los Vosges mountains, malted barley, and choicest hops and adds the method of Champange yeast fermentation. Just like when sipping Champagne, drinkers can expect a crisp, clean finish.

Coffee Beer

The Southern Tier Brewing Company makes the list again with their coffee flavored brew called jah*va Imperial Coffee Stout. It is made by blending 2-row pale malt, caramel malt, chocolate malt, black malt, roasted barley, Cascade and Columbus hops, and Jamiacan Blue Moutain Coffee. With its complex flavor, the brewers warn consumers to drink this beer in moderation.

Peanut Butter Beer

While experimenting at the Blue Moon Brewing Company in Colorado, Keith Villa, the Blue Moon Brewmaster, came up with a peanut butter ale. According to Royal Griggs at OnMilwaukee.com, Villa used Jif peanut butter for this unique brew, which has even won some awards. Another idea that Villa has been toying with is creating a Black and Tan-type brew of his own using food flavors. The creation has a rasperry cream ale on the bottom and the peanut butter ale on top.

Banana Bread Beer

Wells & Young’s Brewing Company in Bedford, England, has created a Banana Bread Beer using real fair trade bananas. This dark golden ale has a crisp flavor, a malty aroma, and is tropically fruity with a hit of bitterness.

Photo of the day – BART station

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Homesickness drives today’s Photo of the Day, which contrasts the blur of a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train in a San Francisco station with a passenger’s shiny jacket. I’m a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, see, and though I’ve lived away from the region for about half of my adult life, the Bay Area will always feel like home.

BART’s once-futuristic carriages may not be at the cutting edge of public transportation design, but they are an aesthetic constant in the Bay Area. Snapped by Flickr member jrodmanjr, this image captures the dated futurism of a BART station.

Upload your favorite images to the Gadling Group Pool on Flickr. We select our favorite images to be Photos of the Day.

Ski season is officially open!

by Kraig Becker on

It may be hard to believe, considering its only the middle of October, but ski season has officially begun in Colorado. Yesterday, the Arapahoe Basin Ski Area opened for business and today skiers will hit the slopes at Loveland for the first time as well.

Early fall snowfalls have already been dumping fresh powder across the Rocky Mountains, and when combined with the artificial snow-making machines, both ski areas have a good base for the start of the season. Loveland began the week with roughly six inches of snow already on the ground, and more has fallen over the past few days, and when A-Basin kicked off the season yesterday, it was covered in 18 inches of powder.

Last year’s ski season was one for the record books, with heavy snows falling across much of the western United States. Those snowfalls continued well into the spring, which extended the season into July. That has made for a very short off-season for Arapahoe, which was closed for just 100 days this year. Long term forecasts are predicting similar weather patterns for this winter, which is good news for skiers and snowboarders.

Over the course of the next few weeks, other ski resorts will begin to open throughout the U.S. as the new season gets into full swing. For now, those of us not lucky enough to live close enough to one of these hills, is going to have to sit and wait.

Expat fusion cuisine: combining foreign foods with favorites from home

by Meg Nesterov on

Part of the fun of traveling is trying new and exotic foods. Many travelers try to eat only locally and eschew the familiar, though eating at American chain restaurants abroad can be its own experience. But when you make a foreign country your home, you have to adapt your tastes and cooking to what’s available locally while craving your favorites from home. I’m lucky enough to live in Istanbul with an amazing food culture heavy on roasted meats and grilled fish, fragrant spices, and fresh produce. Some foreign foods like pizza and sushi have been embraced in Istanbul, but Turkish food has remained largely uncompromised by outside influences and passing trends. Convenience foods are still a new concept in Turkey but you can always grab a quick doner kebab or fish sandwich on the street if you aren’t up to cooking.
In my own kitchen, I’m learning to work with Turkish ingredients and dishes and mix in some favorites from home, creating some “expat fusion” cuisine. Meat-filled manti ravioli gets an extra zing with some Louisiana hot sauce. In the hottest days of my pregnancy this summer, I craved pudding pops from my childhood, making them more adult with some tangy Turkish yogurt. One ingredient I miss here is maple syrup, which is generally only produced in North America, and hard to find and expensive in the rest of the world (a small bottle in Turkey costs about $20!). One of my American friends brought me a bottle this summer and I poured it over pancakes (surprisingly easy to make from scratch when you can’t get a mix) and my favorite Turkish treat, kaymak. Kaymak is a clotted cream popular on the breakfast table, served with a crusty loaf of bread and honey, available in most local supermarkets but best eaten fresh in a cafe like Pando’s Kaymakci in Istanbul’s Besiktas neighborhood. I draw a lot of inspiration from my friend and fellow expat Joy, who was a professional pastry chef back in Baltimore and now chronicles her mouth-watering cooking in her Istanbul kitchen on her blog, My Turkish Joys. She posts beautiful food photos and recipes with both American and European measurements to help US and Turkish readers recreate her dishes such as sour cherry pie. Afiyet Olsun (that’s Turkish for bon appetit)!

Gadling readers, have you created any expat fusion foods with ingredients from your travels? Make us hungry and leave us a comment below!

Interview with a Forager

by David Farley on

Meet Johanna Kolodny. She’s a forager. Which is something like a hunter-gatherer, minus the grunts, fear of fire, loin cloth, and cave paintings. I met Johanna in the Press Lounge, which sits atop the Ink 48 Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Johanna spends her days finding ingredients for the lounge as well as for the ground floor Print Restaurant.

It’s not every day you ask someone what they do they can say with a straight face: I’m a forager. Then again, these are heady times for the dining landscape in the United States (and elsewhere in the world). As competition grows to be the most locavore friendly and use sustainable farm-to-table ingredients, some restaurants are stepping it up by having on-staff foragers in the house.

Over a cocktail (made with some ingredients that she foraged) in the Press Lounge, as the lights of Manhattan twinkled below us, I asked Johanna more about her intriguing food-industry job.

Gadling: So, you’re a forager. What’s the biggest misconception about your job?
Johanna Kolodny: People don’t believe it’s my day job. Also, I’m not combing the beaches for seaweed and the forest floor for nuts and mushrooms.

Gadling: So then what exactly do you do?
JK: I scour the farmers markets as well as farm and food producers for the best possible ingredients for the restaurant here. I’m really more of a “gatherer” than a forager–but that’s the title they gave me here. I’m at the Union Square farmers market every day it’s open, for example.

Gadling: I see. So do other foragers–those people who really do comb the beaches and forests–resent that your title is “forager”?
JK: [Laughs] Not yet. There’s a certain set of foragers who prefer what they do to be called “wild crafting.”

Gadling: That sounds like a way of describing getting risqué on Etsy. As a forager, what is your biggest challenge?
JK: Getting people to eat some of the less-common things that I find. Like certain types of fish you don’t see on menus everyday. A while back I found great golden tilefish and amberjack but, sadly, they didn’t sell when we put them on the menu. The other challenge is getting the chef to consider some of these “new” ingredients as well.

Gadling: What did you want to be when you grew up (And don’t even say “forager”)?
JK: I was always interested in food, travel and culture, but I didn’t know how to parlay that into a career. Then, in my last year of college, I took a class called “Russian Food & Culture” I realized I could study food and follow my interests.

Gadling: What do foragers talk about when they get together?
JK: Like a lot of people in the same field, we bitch together a lot. And, of course, we talk about things that we find.

Gadling: Is there a Michael Jordan of the foraging world?
KB: There’s a woman in California named Kerry Clasby is who great. She travels up and down the state and hits as many as 300 farms. She finds amazing stuff.