Americans like to celebrate their independence with beer:
July 4th is the biggest beer-selling holiday in the country. Supermarkets alone are projected to sell 24 million cases for a total of $41 billion in retail sales.
If you’re serving beer, look for craft brews for thematic names:
Samuel Adams, is available in most places.
Yards Brewing Company in Philadelphia makes Thomas Jefferson’s Tavern Ale, based on Jefferson’s original recipe.
What could be more perfect than Independence Pale Ale, from Independence Brewing in Austin, Texas.
You also can contemplate George Washington’s own hand-written recipe for beer (the original is in a notebook owned by the New York Public Library):
Take a large Siffer [Sifter] full of Bran Hops to your Taste. — Boil these 3 hours then strain out 30 Gall[ons] into a cooler put in 3 Gall[ons] Molasses while the Beer is Scalding hot or rather draw the Melasses into the cooler & St[r]ain the Beer on it while boiling Hot. let this stand till it is little more than Blood warm then put in a quart of Yea[s]t if the Weather is very Cold cover it over with a Blank[et] & let it Work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask — leave the bung open till it is almost don[e] Working — Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed.”
That’s too much work for us—we’ll just head for the Samuel Adams in the fridge.
They may not be familiar between-the-bun choices, but they’re terrific and also healthier than beef—lower in fat, calories and cholesterol. (In fact, we prefer them to beef burgers.)
Check with your butcher, or consider a sampler pack from Blackwing Quality Meats, a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week and North America’s leading producer of certified organic meats.
A seven-pound sampler of tender, delicious “alternative” ground meats includes all of the varieties above plus Piedmontese beef, a uniquely lean and tender heirloom cattle breed that originated 25,000 years ago in the foothills of the Italian Alps.
Check out the sampler at iGourmet.com (search for “ground sampler”).
Want to stick with beef? Snazz it up with our 35+ burger recipes: more than a month’s worth of different ways to serve a burger.
Yesterday’s posts focused on tea. Now coffee gets its turn—in the form of coffee candy.
The artisans at How Do You Take Your Coffee?, a confectioner in Reno, Nevada, like their coffee so much that they freshly roast their own beans prior to making four different types of coffee candy.
The candies are innovative and sure to please the coffee lover—and the chocolate lover, too, since there’s a touch of chocolate in each.
The line is very different from Caffe Acapella coffee bars, a prior Top Pick Of The Week. Caffe Acapella make a chocolate bar-like product that’s all coffee.
How Do You Take Your Coffee? has bite-size candies—like the Java Rocks in the photo plus coffee and chocolate in a candy shell (think coffee M&Ms). The company uses fairly-traded coffee beans to make its products.
Check out the four different types of coffee candy line in the full review.
Zhena’s Gypsy Tea is perfectly packaged in a
metal container with an airtight lid. Photo by
Hannah Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.
June is National Tea Month—drink those antioxidants up!
Tea is a fragile product: oxygen, humidity (moisture), heat, light and other aromas are its enemies. They cause the tea to go stale (lose its flavor) and equally bad, to take on other, unwanted flavors.
Under ideal conditions, black and oolong tea can remain fresh between 2-3 years and green and white tea can remain fresh for up to 2 years.
However, when you purchase tea, you have no idea how long ago it was picked and processed. The tea could have been sitting in a warehouse for a year or two before it was made into bags or sold as loose tea to a distributor. And that means even more time until it gets to the retail shelf. Thus:
Don’t buy more tea than you’ll use in 6 months (green tea) to a year (black tea). After the container is opened, oxygen interacts with it and the flavor begins to slowly dissipate. Jumbo boxes of 100 tea bags are no bargain unless you’ll use two bags per day.
Store tea in airtight containers, preferably metal, away from a heat source. Just because a container has a lid doesn’t mean it’s airtight—but it’s a start.
Everyone in the South knows about sweet tea, but it’s lesser known in other regions. Sometimes non-Southerners will come across “Southern-style tea” or “extra-sweet tea”—which is the same thing.
If you favor adding three or more sugars to your tea, this is the iced tea for you.
The extra sweetness comes from adding a generous amount of sugar to the water before it boils (or while it’s boiling). Adding the sugar to hot water, as opposed to chilled tea, enables the liquid to hold more sugar. In chemistry terms, that’s known as supersaturation.
After brewing, the tea is chilled. Sweet tea is such a popular beverage that West Bend sells an iced-tea maker with a “sweetener chamber” at the top, to conveniently dissolve sugar or other sweetener into the tea as it brews. (We brew iced tea daily without sugar and are in love with the Breville Tea Maker.)
MaryAnna’s all-natural bottled sweet tea is a nice introduction to quality sweet tea: It tastes like fresh-brewed. The Summer Sweet Tea has just the right amount of lemon juice to brighten the flavor without making it “lemony.” The Berry Sweet Tea is flavored with raspberry; the effect is one of fresh, infused berries. The teas are made with filtered water, premium tea and cane sugar.
Both flavors hit the spot. The only caveat is the sugar/carb count: one 16-ounce bottle has 160 calories, 38g of sugar and carbohydrates. A sixteen-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola, by comparison, has 192 calories. But the sweet-of-tooth don’t read nutrition labels, and these sweet teas are brewed to please.
