Sometimes, when you’re surrounded by beer, weird ideas come into your head. This is one of those ideas. Thankfully, I had the help of some friends and this idea was able to make it off the ground. The idea: smoke some ribs with a barrel used to age beer.
First, there are the ingredients. The main ingredient in smoking ribs is always the ribs. Thank you to the Sonoma County Meat Buyer’s Club for supplying the ribs. In this case it was two racks each of beef and pork. If you’re looking for meat and want to ensure your meat is farmed locally, this is a great resource. Please, visit their site and look into their programs. They are definitely friends of Brewed For Thought.
The second ingredient in this experiment is the wood. The inspiration for the experiment came from the trend of aging big beers in bourbon barrels. Bourbon, beer, wood and ribs seem like a perfect collaboration, and local brewery Lagunitas had recently emptied some 15 year old Heaven Hill barrels used to age their Crusin’ with Ruben and the Jets.
Since this was an experiment, I felt the need to approach this in a scientific manner. It was with that in mind that I chose both beef and pork ribs. I also wanted to taste how the smoke affected the meat on its own and not just in conjunction with my dry-rub. When everything was ready, I had applied the dry-rub to one beer and pork rack each and a simple salt and pepper to the others.
The process was rather simple. First, take an axe to the barrel, turn it into wood chips. During the process I discovered remnant beer in the bottom of the barrel. I set this aside and used it to soak my wood chips over night. First thing in the morning, I fired up the coals and got the ribs started.
Throughout the day I added soaked chips to the coals at 30-45 minute intervals. Everything went as planned with the exception of a sticky residue that seemed to creep out of the edges of the barbecue pit. My guess, the soaking liquid was an Imperial Chocolate Stout that had picked up some bourbon, lots of sugar steaming off of the wood and all over the pit.
After 8 hours of smoking, the ribs were complete. My initial concern was that the smoke would overpower the pork. While it was a valid concern, the pork really picked up the impression of dipping your head into this empty barrel, while the beef managed to subdue the flavor of the barrel while embracing the smoke. My final verdict was that the pork was the better of the two, but I may be biased as I love just about all things pork.
As I said before, special thanks to the Sonoma County Meat Buyer’s Club for supplying the meat, to Lagunitas for the barrel and also to Joseph Tucker of RateBeer and Ken Weaver of RateBeer’s Hop Press. Joe provided the setting for our rib tasting and Ken brought along a bottle of the Ruben and the Jets for us to enjoy along side the ribs. Having had my backyard filled with the aromas of the empty barrel, engulfed in the smoked from the wood and tasted the product of the process, the beer brought me back to what the base of this project was and that’s the marriage of meat and beer. Thank you to everyone involved and I look forward to my next mad scientist experiment with food and beer.
I’ll leave you with a slide show of pictures from through the day as well as some nice “after” shots of the ribs fully cooked.
Barrel Smoked rib Experiment Slideshow
