My Tenth Entry - Avery Brewing Company's Joe's Premium American Pilsner

If you had asked me last year (or pretty much any of the last ten years or so) what kind of blog, if any, I'd be writing in 2014, I would not have laid claim to beer writing aspirations. I've always liked beer, but it was not my raison d'être.

Food, glorious food, would have been my first and only answer.

It has been, as it is for most of us, a lifelong love affair. My first job was in the food industry - cleaning grease traps and doing general maintenance at age 16 at a Grandy's Fried Chicken in Lewisville, Texas.  I graduated to better jobs in the restaurant, doing counter work, salad bar, rolls - everything but frying the chicken itself.  That was hazardous duty reserved for the big bicep guys who could lift the huge fryer basket with one arm and dump the chicken in the eye-level window, laughing as the grease splattered their arms and faces - not in my wheelhouse being 6-2 and 130 pounds in those teen years.

It was at Grandy's that I learned about the subtleties of comfort food. I remember one lunch break when I sat down next to an assistant manager who looked at my plate and shook his head.

"Four breasts and a roll?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," I said. "They're the best part of the chicken."

"Give me that plate."

He went back to the counter area, shoved the breasts to the side of my plate, and, reaching over with his tongs to the small trays on left side of the heating window, he filled the remainder of my plate with wings, livers, and gizzards, then poured cream gravy into a cup.

"Okay, taste test," he said.  "Take a bite of the breast."

I did.  It was delicious.

"I'll bet you think that's delicious," he said.  "It's not. It's boring. I've worked here for three years, and I stopped eating breasts two-and-a-half years ago. We marinate the [bleep] out of them and they're still just one note."

He then pointed to the knob of one of the wings. "That piece right there is the sweetest part of the whole chicken. Don't know why, but it is." I tried one. I may have been suggestible at that young age, but it sure seemed like he was right. It was like that knob of meat was where all of the chicken's, well, chickeniness was concentrated.

He took a second wing, twisted the middle part from the drumstick and the flapper, and deftly yanked the two bones out of the breaded meat.  "Instant McNugget," he said and laughed, popping the whole piece into his mouth.

He then forked one of the livers into the gravy, which he had sprinkled with black pepper.

"Try this," he said.

I looked at the liver. My mother cooked beef liver now and then, and I was no fan of the mealy organ meat. But I recognized this as a learning opportunity from an adult who was, in his way, trying to mentor me.  I ate the liver.

It was good, better than I expected. There were textures - the liver was smooth and firm, and there was a nice crunch from the breading - and the peppery Southern gravy softened the metallic taste of the meat like a thick patchwork comforter over an Army cot.

I grew to love those livers and wings, but I never understood the appeal of eating the gizzard.  It was like chewing on a deep-fried rubber eraser.

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When I graduated from high school, I turned down the assistant manager job Grandy's offered me and went to the University of Texas.  There, I learned how to cook on the cheap - food like chili dogs, mac and cheese, ramen soup, and an occasional freezer pie made from Cool Whip, Eagle Brand, and concentrated limeade.

I liked to cook (because I liked to eat), but I was intimidated away from serious cooking. It seemed like a vocational skill not for dilettantes, kind of like metal shop. It wasn't until Esquire Magazine, of all places, told me that men could cook too that I tried my first sophisticated recipe.

It was a pecan pie. Thirty years later, it's still the best dessert I make, and I've made it probably two hundred times (as you can see from the condition of this recipe card).

I remember the first time I made it: I was in my mother's kitchen with the store-bought pie shell, the bag of pecans, the mysterious Karo syrups (light and dark), and a bottle of "fine bourbon," the secret ingredient the recipe called for.

"What's a jigger?" I asked my mom.

She handed me a shot glass.

I was not a stranger to shot glasses after my first year of school. I had thrown back tequila, rum, Jagermeister - even ouzo at a Greek restaurant where they smashed plates - with the same panache as men drinking rotgut whisky at saloons in old cowboy movies.

But not bourbon. I had no idea what that stuff tasted like. It wasn't something me or my friends indulged in.

My mother was watching me cook this pie with the expression of a scientist watching a brain-damaged lab rat trying to navigate a maze. I decided to impress her.

I poured a jigger of Old Granddad into the shot glass.  "One for the recipe," I said, and poured it into the mixing bowl.

I poured a second jigger into the shot glass.  "And one for the cook!" and I threw the bourbon into the back of my throat.  And I promptly started coughing.

Turns out that there's a reason they call it sipping whiskey. My mother tells this story to this day, describing my face in great detail. Ask her some time, and she'll tell you. She tells everyone.

After the EMTs revived me and left our kitchen, I finished making the pie, which turned out to be first-rate. The bourbon offset the treacly sweetness of the brown sugar and corn syrups and complemented the woody notes of the pecans.  And the broken pecans in the filling kept the pie from being gelatinous goo, like the pecan pies you get at Luby's.  It's my second-favorite dessert and writing about it makes me want to make one right now. (My favorite dessert?  Tres leches, which I still haven't learned how to cook correctly, but which is sublime practically anywhere I get it in Houston.)

I still trust Esquire's recipes.  Here is a super-simple roast chicken recipe I do about four times a year (and should do forty times a year), and which you should try on your next dinner.

Enough of my food saga for today. Next time I write about food, I'll detail my man-crush on Alton Brown, who is living one of my alternate reality lives, the one where I went to culinary school and learned how to charismatically deconstruct a recipe and make millions of dollars on the Food Network.

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Time instead, at 10:11 p.m. on Tuesday night (I know, I'm late again, but the weekend got away from me) for this week's beer, which is Joe's Premium American Pilsner, the second entry in the Fifty Beers from the Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, Colorado.

I would not have chosen a repeater this early in the blog, but I dispatched my daughter to get me one from the garage refrigerator, and this is what she brought me. Who am I to quibble with her choice?

The can has panache. Don't know who the Joe is on the label, but the rakish tilt of his fedora tells me that he's good company (or a dangerous guy with good stories). The tasting note (always a plus) is helpful:

You're holding a contemporary rendition of a classic style. Hopped with purpose, Joe's is beautifully bitter and dry with an abundance of floral, Noble German hops. Über-sessionable. Utterly American. This is Premium American Pilsner.

Brewed with Rocky Mountain water, malted barley, imported German hops and German yeast.

It makes me wonder whether the Rocky Mountain water is actually a significant ingredient, like New York City water is supposed to be for bagels.

And it also makes me wonder how a drink that is based on imported Noble German hops (Bravo and Hersbrucker, according to the webpage) and German yeast is "utterly American." Pilsners are actually Bohemian, according to Beer Advocate, but Steve Breezley's helpful video on the Avery Brewing Co. webpage for Joe's Pilsner explains that the beer is "a nod" to the light American lagers the brewers at Avery grew up with. I guess that's the American side of it.

The beer itself is just fine. Not much happening in the nose as I sniff into the glass (even though Breezley promised a "blast" of Hersbrucker aroma), but the drink is hoppy and nicely fizzy. It's light on the alcohol too, with an ABV of 4.7%.

This is a good beer, well-intentioned and worth trying. Not better than the Bittersweet Lenny, which remains the champ, but just what I needed for a Tuesday night before an early-Wednesday morning run.

Good night for now, and wish me luck.  I am on a trip east this weekend to see something I can't decide whether I should share with you.  We'll see.

See you then.  (And ten beers down, forty to go!)