The Smoking Bottle

2011 was yet another great year. The highlight was obviously the addition of a second little one to our family. This blissful year didn’t really carry over to the blog though. I have a back-log of grilled treats I would like to share since the grill was fired up quite a lot (not so much [...]

I’ve had a few chances to play around with the Gueuze barrel chips now and thought I’d share my findings (on both grilling use and beer use). The Beer side: When I first opened the bag of chips I immediately threw some into starter wort to try and grow up the critters living on the chips. Not [...]

Every once in a while I feel like writing something a bit different. I could hop on the beer trend bandwagon and do pieces on beer and food pairings, but I find all that a bit ridiculous. Not the beer with food, that’s just logical to me, but everyone seems to be making this a [...]

The monks at the Sint-Sixtus abbey have been well know for brewing up some top-notch beers. Look at any beer ranking site and Westvleteren 12 is sure to be close to the top. It is also one of the facts that every Belgian likes to spout at Americans who start talking about beer. That statement [...]

Summer seems to have already ended here in Belgium. Ok thats not completely true beacause Summer never really showed up this year. With the end of Summer also comes the end of my vacation days. Now its back to the harsh realities of the working world. Thankfully I do have some new sources of inspira

Spelling aside, I turned a year wiser. Ok, it was actually a couple months ago but let’s not get carried away with details. To celebrate I decided to cook up some Ribs. Realizing I have never written a real post about ribs, I thought I’d throw this one out there. First the meat: In Belgium [...]

I recently had my last brew day as a father of one child. The beer was brewed to mark the very closely approaching arrival of child number 2 (I’ll have to think of a better name than Child Number 2). When the first lil’ Smokey was born I brewed New Addition 2008. Not only was  “New Addition” a nod t

Roasting a chicken on the grill has never been a real problem, but I always felt that it could be done better. The skin was never crisp enough, some parts were more juicy than others, and you have to tend the meat quite a lot. I wanted better results with less work. Thanks to a [...]

Belgium can be a bit of an outdoor-cooking wasteland. When the sun comes out everyone does love to run out in the back yard and blacken some meat, but it is rarely taken seriously and is never combined with the idea of high quality food. Often if I talk about cooking a very nice cut of meat [...]

Cooking on a wooden plank has been popular amongst the grilling kind for a while. For some reason I have only now gotten around to trying it, but I now know what many others already discovered, cedar planked salmon is damn tasty! The plank was soaked for an hour in water, with a coffee mug on top to