Cooking Bratwurst with Craft Beer

There was hardly universal agreement on the new approach to a very old food tradition. Not everybody liked it, but around the time of that muggy day at Road America boiling brats in a beer bath became a craze. Bad beer, lore had it, turned great bratwurst into tremendous bratwurst. And in Wisconsin, all the proper ingredients were both near and dear.

The Milwaukee area was a favorite destination for emigrating Germans in the early and middle decades of the 20th Century. Among those émigrés were some of the finest sausage makers (or wurstmachers) and brewers in the world.

Many of the names of the higher quality brewers are familiar: Schlitz, Pabst, Miller, Heileman, Blatz. The names of the sausage makers are less known nationally but revered by the locals. At some point along the way, their products found their way into the same pots, and cookouts have never been the same in the Badger State.

“It’s definitely a regional preference,” Megan Dorsch of Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Meats in Wittenburg, Wisconsin says of hot-tubbing brats and beer. “We Wisconsinites love brats and I think that anyone who is eating a fresh, unsmoked brat around here, we love giving them the beer bath first.”

The ingredients – with personalized twists (like seasoned salt, red pepper flakes, hot peppers, garlic) – remain constant: Sheboyganstyle bratwurst, cheap lager, chopped onion and butter.

The process is also inflexible. Boil until sausages are cooked and plumped and then, low and slow (split casings kill the gig) over charcoal or gas burners. “It adds flavor,” Dorsch says. “It gives it a rich flavor and it’s just tradition here in Wisconsin.”

Virtually everybody in Wisconsin agrees beer and brats are essential together. Not everybody agrees on what point in the process they should get together. Forget about taking sides on Governor Scott Walker’s anti-union campaign. How do you like your brats?

College friend Rob Reuteman just won’t take the plunge on beer brats. “I think it’s stupid,” said Reuteman, a native of Wauwatosa.“If you boil brats in beer, all the essential spices bleed out of the brat into the beer. You’re left with a less tasty brat.”

Jon Gabe of Usinger’s in Milwaukee also says nein to beer brats.

“At Usinger’s, we are not fond of cooking brats in beer,” Gabe said. “Similar to a brewer who carefully crafts a beer, the Usinger wurstmachers make sausages that are spiced just right. When cooked in beer, the flavor and consistency of the brat changes. We are firm believers that brats and beer go together. However, drink the beer and grill the brats, but that is as close as the two should get.”

Gabe offered to send The Beer Connoisseur some brats gratis – if we promised not to mix them with beer until they were separately introduced to the mouth.