9 Ways to Cook with Beer

Except for the day after when you open your fridge to a liquor store’s-worth of unopened cans and bottles. 

Sure, you could drink it over time. It won’t go “bad.” 

But, you could also cook with it. Beer is a surprisingly versatile ingredient that brings depth, lift, and flavor to all sorts of recipes. 

Here are nine ways to use it up.

For most of our recipes, we prefer to use a mild American lager, such as Miller High Life or Budweiser. Its crisp, refreshing flavors make it both subtle and versatile. Copper-colored Belgian-style beer, like Blue Moon or Stella Artois, work well too. Save dark stouts for hearty stews and even dessert! The roasty, malty flavors of stout pair wonderfully with chocolate.  

Avoid strongly flavored, hoppier beers, like IPAs, as their bitterness will overpower your dish once cooked.

A warm, comforting bowl of beer and cheese soup is a great way to get through a brisk winter night. For our Wisconsin Cheddar Beer Soup, we combine a can of lager with both American and sharp cheddar cheese. The combination of cheeses ensures a velvety, non-grainy consistency. Throughout our tasting, we found the malty flavors from a mild lager to be the perfect complement to the tanginess of the cheddar.

As Cook’s Illustrated’s Dan Souza says, “beer batters are awesome.” Whether you’re frying fish, pickles, or onion rings, beer makes a big difference in the results. The bubbles in the beer provide lift, while the proteins and sugars create a crisp coating with great color.

To us, fondue will never go out of style. But fondue is more than just melted cheese. Often, recipes call for an acidic component to cut through the richness of the cheese, and beer serves that purpose perfectly. The flavors pair nicely together and the beer’s liquid helps prevent the fondue from seizing up. We also opt for a cast-iron skillet or slow-cooker to keep your fondue melty and warm for hours.

Beer works really well as a braising liquid, especially with pork and beef (particularly brisket). Slow cooking short ribs or bratwurst in beer brings out the meatiness of the protein. As it cooks down, the beer’s malty notes concentrate into a complementary flavor that tastes hearty and elevated. Depending on the recipe and the flavors you want to bring out, you can use wheat beer, lagers, pilsner, or even a brown ale.

Yeasted bread is great. Beer-yeasted bread? Even better. Quick and easy beer breads are perfect for when you need bread on the table in a flash. In recipes like our Cast Iron Beer-Batter Cheese Bread, the yeast gets replaced with beer, providing both lift and flavor. Often paired with cheese (sensing a theme?), beer-batter breads are a delicious way to showcase your leftover lager.

Guinness and beef stew are a match made in hoppy heaven. For some recipes, the cooked stout can turn disappointingly bitter. For our Guinness Beef Stew recipe, we countered the bitterness in two ways. First, we added a little brown sugar to round out the flavor. Then, we added stout in two parts: at the start of cooking to develop the pleasant bitterness, and freshly poured in at the end to give it a robust flavor.

Giving seafood like shrimp and clams a quick steam bath makes for a perfect weeknight meal. But rather than water or stock, use beer! The infusion of beer adds a pleasant malty flavor to your seafood. Plus, it’s so easy. Simply sauté your alliums in a Dutch oven, top it with a steamer basket, pour in your beer, add your seafood, put the lid on, and let it do its thing. 

Beer and chicken work well for both indoor and outdoor cooking. Adding beer to your chicken brine tenderizes and infuses great flavor into your chicken. And roasting a chicken over an open can of beer produces a terrific chicken. The beer in the open can simmers and turns to steam as the chicken roasts, making it remarkably juicy.

We’ve got four words: Chocolate-Stout Bundt Cake. Wine and chocolate are a classic pairing, but the combo of malty stout and chocolate is equally as delicious. After all, stout has notes of chocolate on its own! Here, the beer gets used both in the batter and in the indulgent glaze that gets poured over top.