An American evening

Artifex said:

Btw, which American beer do you like best of these (the ones I could find here): Heineken, Miller draft or Budweiser? I never drink beer, so I have no idea.

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I'm going to be the voice of dissent here and say American beers abroad tend to be better, actually. I grew up in St. Louis and I swear the Budweiser there tastes immensely better than it did in Miami (and I like it just fine here in England).

I'm all for artisan beers, but sometimes an ice-cold bottle of American beer is delicious. Miller or Bud would be fine. But like I said, it has to be COLD. Serve it warm and it's nowhere near the same.

shawkins said:

LOL. Seriously? I don't mind, but I reserve the right to give you a hard time about it. I'll take a photo next time I'm in the grocery store & you can pick out the, ahem, flavors.

Anybody else? I'll have to buy it at a grocery store miles from my house where no one recognizes me, so I only want to do this once.

/effete boob

Atlanta has a pretty big immigrant population, so all around the city you can find these little grocery stores that have Mexican, Indian, Asian, etc. ingredients. I get into quite a few of them when I'm hunting for ingredients for my latest fad. ( Try finding chicken feet at Publix/Kroger/Wal Mart.) I bet somewhere in London there's a little hole in the wall grocery with shelves of Hamburger Helper, Smucker's grape jelly, Juicy Juice, Chips Ahoy!, etc.

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Seriously.

(Of course, I tend to dress mine up, as well, with Worcestershire, extra onion, stuff like that.)

There are American food places here--usually mail-order--where one can get grape jelly etc. at outrageous prices. We found Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey's Kisses at an Asda (Wal-Mart) about an hour away. One small bag of Kisses was about £3--$5 or so.

The problem with the mail-order places is their selection is by necessity rather limited, and they run out of stuff a LOT. I'd also pay an awful lot for some cake flour, since you can only get self-rising sponge flour here (regular cake flour is literally unheard of). It's workable, of course, you just leave out the leavener in the recipe, but I'd still like some real cake flour.

Sigh.

I'll agree with Stacia about one thing. If you're going to drink American mass produced beer, drink it very cold.

Beer, I suppose like everything else, is a matter of taste. I agree that Sam Adams is good. A long-time favorite of mine is Coors. But one of the best beers I ever drank, and it was on American soil, was Asahi, a Japanese beer. I'd gladly claim it as American any time.

Artifex said:

Btw, which American beer do you like best of these (the ones I could find here): Heineken, Miller draft or Budweiser? I never drink beer, so I have no idea.

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I don't like beer. I'm so glad mead and cider are becoming more popular lately. What I've got in the house currently are concord wine, blueberry cider-style wine (which means fizzy and about 9% alcohol), and vanilla honey cider (about 8% alcohol, sweetest cider I've ever had).

How do Finns drink their beer? If they like it at 'room-temperature', just serving it ice-cold might be novelty enough, regardless of which American beer you have. If they've seen any US beer ads, they'll probably have noticed that 'ice-cold' is a favoured description.

Artifex said:

Thank you all for the wonderful ideas! It was difficult to choose what to make... "Fortunately" I cannot get ingredients needed for some of the dishes here (like Boston baked beans and steamed brown bread), but I can save those ideas for the next time I'll come here!

So far, I've decided to make BBQ ribs with some potatoes, some kind of a veggie dish (haven't decided what exactly yet), salad, peach cobbler and homemade lemonade. I've also got some soft pretzels and French's yellow mustard, which I happened to find in the store here, and some American beer. There will be something else, too, but not sure what yet.

Btw, which American beer do you like best of these (the ones I could find here): Heineken, Miller draft or Budweiser? I never drink beer, so I have no idea.

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Like the menu. Would you have room on the BBQ to roast ears of corn in the husk? If, indeed, you can get ears of corn in Finland.

frimble3 said:

How do Finns drink their beer? If they like it at 'room-temperature', just serving it ice-cold might be novelty enough, regardless of which American beer you have. If they've seen any US beer ads, they'll probably have noticed that 'ice-cold' is a favoured description.

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Yeah, American beer really needs to be ice-cold. It's like how Corona (of which I'm not particularly fond) is meant to be served with a wedge of lime in it to get the right flavor from it.


I like beer, and I like all kinds of beers. I don't always go for American beer, because sometimes I want a "better" beer (although actually I think there's fun to be had in less "gourmet" experiences, and the point of American beer is to drink a lot of it cold, which is why it's lighter and thus less filling. Like I said I grew up in St. Louis where Budweiser is king, and until the 70's you couldn't even get many other brands of beer there).

But I think for an American-themed meal, especially with barbeque...that's what American beers are made for, is to drink very cold at a barbeque!



(BTW, Sunandshadow, I love mead! One cool thing here is that unusual wines etc. are easy to find. I love elderflower wine, too. One of these days I'm going to make my own wine/mead. It just seems like so much fun, and there are so many different things to make it from. Peapod wine is apparently fantastic.)

Haggis said:

I'd definitely serve the *cough* American Heineken. American beers, unless they are craft beers, are, shall we say, not very good.

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*wraps self in flag*

You can say what you like about *me*, you wee little communist dog you, but I'll not sit here idly while you slander the good name of Adolf Coors.

Haggis said:

Maybe you could find a good German beer to accompany your meal. That's one thing about eating and drinking in America.

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Yeah, yeah. I think I saw some Freedom down there in office party--if you hurry, you might be able to piddle on it before it gets away.

I will admit that Coors Light is a bit on the watery side, however.

shawkins said:

*wraps self in flag*

You can say what you like about *me*, you wee little communist dog you, but I'll not sit here idly while you slander the good name of Adolf Coors.

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Ha! I make Coors every time I...well, you know where I'm going with this.

Glad the dinner went well, Artifex. Of course Peach Cobbler is so good it makes you forget anything else you might have had.