The closest thing to a “beer festival” in L.A. just a few years ago was the annual German sausage-fest and lederhosen horror-show that occupies a Torrance parking lot off the Long Beach Freeway. Oh how the times have changed.
In honor of this year’s L.A. Beer Week – not one, but dozens of events will be un-corked throughout the city’s beer bars, breweries, homebrew clubs, restaurants and beer sommeliers that range from the mainstream accessible to the psychotic. For our part, Hot Knives is hosting a “Cheese Pairing Symposium” next week at Verdugo Bar along with much-acclaimed local beereos (beer heroes) the Bruery – or how we like to call them, “the only fucking reason to go to Orange County.” (If you’re a blogger, you can still enter the contest to get a free ticket to the pairing.) For the rest of you who might wanna celebrate L.A. Beer Week quietly at home with loved ones or alone with your spiritual leaders, we’ve thought of that too!

Over the last month, we embarked on a crazy scientific experiment that involved cracking open a beer every morning. No, not for drinking… We made Franziskaner Pancakes, Russian Imperial Stout Bran Muffins, and “hop-berry syrup.” There were Coconut Porter Cupcakes, Belgian Candi-topped Muffins and even fresh Hop Butter for Guinness Flapjacks. Thankfully, there was also plenty of water and laps around the park.
In the end, we believe we found our favorite baking recipes combining both raw brewing ingredients (malt extract, malt sugar, and hops) and beer (just substitute any beer of your choice for the milk or water in a recipe). We love Heffeweissen Banana Bread and Hop-Berry Muffins. Stock up on malts and grains and give ’em a try. The best part? Now, you don’t even need a homebrew kit to shop at your local homebrew shop! Think of it like your neighborhood Trader Joe’s aisle. Except without the little complimentary cups for coffee, and fewer chances for casual sex. And let us know what morning beer you love most, here.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
3 ripe bananas
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine (melted)
1/2 cup barley malt syrup (or white sugar)
1 1/2 cup Heffeweissen (room temp)
1 Tbs. whole cloves
1 tsp. whole coriander
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
zest of one orange
zest of one lemon
1 Tbs. Belgian Candi Sugar (or more barley malt syrup)
1. Measure out your flour and baking powder and stir in a large mixing bowl. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a second large mixing bowl, combine wet ingredients and spices: Peel and mash your ripe ‘naners and combine with melted margarine. Add malt syrup, or sugar, and the beer while stirring with a spatula.
3. Grind coriander and clove in a mortar and pestle or coffee grinder (or simply with a knife) and add to the wet ingredients along with cinnamon and nutmeg. Finally, zest an orange and a lemon over your cutting board. Add half of each to the bowl, and reserve half for garnish.
4. Combine wet and dry ingredients and combine well, stirring until lumps disappear. Pour batter into a canola or margarine-greased bread pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes. Test the middle, should be slightly gooey but not wet. Remove and immediately cool on a cooling rack to prevent burnt bottom. Rub the Belgian candi sugar or barley malt syrup on top, and sprinkle with zest for garnish.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 cup Grape Nuts cereal
1/4 cup shredded coconut
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cup fresh strawberries
12 oz. hoppy red ale of choice
3/4 cup sugar
2 large organic eggs
3/4 cup melted butter (unsalted)
1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl, including flour, baking powder, Grape nuts, salt and coconut. And stir to mix.
2. Wash and slice strawberries into thin pieces. Place a small saucepan on high heat with your red ale and sliced strawberries. Let reach a rolling boil and add sugar, stirring well and reducing to a simmer. Let continue to cook for 2-3 minutes. Then remove from heat and cool for at least 10 minutes.
3. Combine sweetend-beer and dry ingredients. Crack eggs and whisk and add to mixture along with melted butter. Stir well with a spatula until all lumps (except Grape Nuts clusters) disappear.
4. Grease muffin tray and pour batter into each, about ¾ to the top, leaving a centimeter or so to rise. Bake for 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool in muffin tray before serving. Glaze with topping of choice.

Now that the curd-grease has settled (and our butter burns have healed) we’ve had time to reflect on last month’s Grilled Cheese Invitational – a claustrophobic, mostly lucrative, without-a-doubt triumph in which we graduated from grilled cheese champions to commercial capitalists and busted our food-truck cherry.
That last bit just meant we rented a 4-wheel kitchen, not that we engaged in any sort of lurid sexual acts inside a taco truck. (Although we did watch a coupla pedigreed chefs toke medical-grade weed in our ride).

For this year’s Grilled Cheese Invitational – which we’ve competed in thrice and won, errr, fice – Hot Knives rented a food truck from the company Road Stoves. Our buddy Tucker Neel set to making a psychotic truck banner of neon stripper knives slicing into the gooey center of a muscleman sandwich. We sold three different grilled cheese sammiches for $2 a slice. We burned through more than 50 loaves of bread, 18 pounds of Vermont butter, 13 pounds of homemade kimchi, and 2 tiny summer truffles (off-menu, motherfuckkah). The line at times sprawled several city blocks and, we were told, lasted 30-40 minutes. We needed no fewer than four assistants to manage the beasts. And between noon when the gates opened and about 4:30 we served just over 1300 slices.
At some point during the crush of the mid-day crowds, with our truck out of battery, the fridges warming and the health inspector about to board our bus, we looked at each other and exchanged ‘what the fuck are we doing’ looks. How did we get here?
It started with whiskey, of course. We were drinking several months ago with GCI Founder Tim “Cap’n Shady” Walker when he asked us to consider being vendors at this year’s festival in his quest to offer more festival goers the chance to eat copious amounts of cheese. Whereas in previous years, the 100 or so attendees would easily consume vom-levels of dairy just by showing up, it’s gotten a lot harder to please 8,000 people, he told us. So Tim was courting all manner of chefs from Mark Peel to Eric Greenspan to the Border Grill ladies to placate the huddled masses. After mulling it over (sober) we said yes and set to grilling. It seems like we spent the entire month of April debating the merits of thick bread and the magic of using steam to melt cheese quicker (it works).
After trying numerous iterations of flavors we set on the following sandwiches:
Band Camp: Hook’s and Fiscalini aged cheddars with Ha’s Apple Butter
Lemon Sunn: Cana de Oveja sheep’s milk cheese and lemon oil
White Light/White Heat: Beemster goat gouda with homemade kimchi

But rather than deal with customers walking up to the window saying, “Gimme two Band Camps, one Lemon Sunn, and… what’s goat gouda?” we implemented a Soup Nazi-like system of giving people no options. Chef’s Choice, we called it. Take it or leave it. Each sandwich had a stage time and we served it until we ran out. And we did run out. So other than raking in green, what were our fondest memories? Well for starters, we met Chef Roy of Kogi fame outside one of his trucks at the Road Stoves depot. And Dave from the Grilled Cheese Truck let us in on some fascinating trade secrets for how to grill 1200 sandwiches in three hours (can’t tell).
Now, picture this, if you can. It’s 7:30 the morning of the festival and the two of us are pulling the truck out of the truck depot south of downtown L.A. only to find that bicyclists are passing us. The truck won’t go faster than 5 miles per hour because we are… Out. Of. Gas. So we pull over to an already bustling Chevron near the Staples Center and we yank the sliding door to hop out. Except the door is jammed and it won’t budge no matter how hard we pull. Okay… Sweatshirts are taken off, and sleeves rolled up. Nothing works. And it’s the only exit. Not until we started really sweating (just imagine not showing up to a massive festival you’ve helped promote because your dumb ass is locked in a truck at a gas station) and we started prying at the door clasp with our grill tongs did it finally creak open.

Other classic memories include: mind-blowing street mural at the Road Stoves depot of a cop spray painted with “187”; borrowing a dozen lemons from a grandma in a taco truck, putting us in karmic debt; passing our health inspection with flying colors (they tried to shut Tillamook down); abusing our bullhorn by making all sorts of announcements to the crowd; and watching our friend Juvenal who manned the grill with us for the first half of the day furiously chop at big piles of our kimchi on the griddle with spatulas like some deranged Mongolian Barbecue chef. Whatever next year holds, we know this: We will butter the ever-loving shit out of it.

When we first caught wind of Brewdog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a 32-percent alcohol stout that they froze in ice cream vats, we tried to order it online. No luck. The brewery had already sold out of the first batch.
So we kept trying. We wrote publicists. We tried to make friends with people who had squirreled away bottles of the stuff. Rebuffed.
A couple of months ago one of us convinced the Los Angeles Times to buy an article we’d write about Brewdog’s high-octane brewing experiments and what it says about the beer market’s growing, if still niche, obsession with beers as strong as liquor. The piece ran today. In it we survey brewery and bar experts like Stone’s Greg Koch on why extreme beer is an important, and increasingly sexy, part of the beer industry.
Being the magna cum laude graduates of the Gonzo School of Reporting that we are, we would never ever ever think of publishing a work of beer journalism about beers we hadn’t actually imbibed! So we dutifully cleared our calendar one Saturday in March when Brewdog’s CEO James Watt was making an appearance in West Hollywood for a rare tasting of the strongest beer in the world – Brewdog’s Sink the Bismark and Tactical Nuclear Penguin.
Hot Knives showed up at the Surly Goat early and tried a couple of the “weaker” Brewdog beers. The 5AM Saint was our favorite: a kilt-lifting, red-bearded nectar that could easily be consumed at 5AM after a night of heavier drinking. The Punk IPA was alright, but the 18-percent Tokio was totally evil. A good taste of things to come.
An hour later, the Scottish brewers showed up to a bar packed with geeks waiting for them. Watt gave a 10-minute spiel about the beers and then had everyone squeeze into two single file lines to gulp a couple sips of the killer Kool-Aid. What did it taste like, you ask?
Click the video above for our “tasting notes.”

Lube your gullets folks, because this Saturday is the Grilled Cheese Invitational. And this year Hot Knives will be in full force selling hot slivers of rare cheeses grilled to perfection from a truck! Here’s the gooey plan: we’ll be making three different iconic grilled cheeses and serving each one throughout the day, as we see fit, and for a small price. That mean’s it’s chef’s choice, no ordering! And while we’re one of a dozen impressive vendors this year — we believe our “cheese-forward” classics will win you over. And win us our sixth trophy as part of the brand new “People’s Choice Award!” Details here.
OK. If we lost you at “grilled cheese invitational,” here’s the history lesson:
Our induction to the cult of the grilled cheese came one cold night in the winter of 2006. We came. We shook hands. We ate breast milk-and-marijuana grilled cheese sandwiches while flame throwers toasted bread 10 feet in the air … We conquered — winning two trophies as outsiders to this close-knit friendly contest.
In 2007, we came back and brought along a video camera, hoping to snag the dessert category, or at least some drama.
2008, the festival grew and moved to Griffith Park. We won two more trophies, making us the most decorated competitors in GCI history. And so we retired our spatulas, announcing on KROQ (of all places) that for 2009, we would be giving a lecture on the perfect grilled cheese rather than competing. As luck would have it, we’d also be dethroned by a six-time winner.
Which brings us to the First 8th Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational of 2010 taking place this weekend. Look for us in a food truck slinging sliver after golden sliver of molten aged cheese with fruits, strange oils and fermented chili pastes. The truck will be parked on Boylston Street, between the Border Grill Truck and Eric Greenspan, acorss from Campanile. Did we just say that? Wow.
Like the video above? Thank Helena Wei, Amanda Ellis and Michelle Johnson who produce it.

Beer brats: We were dunking vegan brats in a boiling vat of smoked beer (1 part leftover marinade, 2 parts fresh porter from the keg, plus apple cider vinegar) and grilling them to order, hung on a small wheat bun, swiveled with habañero-mustard and topped with a choice of kraut. Let’s talk (tofu) turkey, because Alex toiled hard for a perfect technique: each brat got dunked in the beer reduction to start, thrown on the grill for char marks, then dunked again before sitting until order, whereupon, it got dunked a third time! The result was the most inebriated, smokey and juicy vegan brat you’ll have in your life.
Kraut came in red and green: “Borscht Blast” of fermented garlic, beets, purple cabbage and cabernet with caraway seeds; and green a sweet garden mix of grated carrot, green cabbage, red bell pepper and dill seeds.
Potato salat: What else but red farmers market potatoes par-boiled in salt water and tossed with diced celery, parsley, cornichons, crispy shallot-tofu-apple stuffing and finished on the plate with a sprinkle of handmade purple potato chips (crunch) and a squirt of vegan Russian dressing.
Beer pops: that classic German monk brew, Franziskaner, got sweetened up with a touch of lemon-clove syrup. Frozen orgasm style.
Although we were out of our 80 or so beer brats in just a few hours, we kept serving until the kraut was almost gone. That was 12 cabbages people! And truth be told, it was that kraut that stole the show. We can’t do that justice here, look for the recipes later this week.
Hefeweizen Popsicles
(Makes 8)

1 Half-liter bottle of Franziskaner
2 lemons (1/4 cup juice)
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp ground clove
1. Empty the beer into a pot, with enough room for the bubbles to fizz, and place it on medium heat. Bring to a slight boil (about 10 minutes). Turn it off and set aside.
2. Prepare a simple syrup: First zest and squeeze lemons, combining the juice and zest. You should have about a 1/4 cup, adjust as needed. Combine this zesty juice and water in a small sauce pot on high heat. Let it hit a boil and then slowly whisk in your sugar. Whisk for 1 minute, then turn off the heat and set aside. Add clove and stir again.
3. Wait for both mixtures to return to roughly room temp (about 20 min) before pouring into popsicle molds. The best way is to fill each popsicle mold three-fourths to the top then top it off with lemon syrup. Stir with a spoon handle.
4. Place carefully in the freezer and let sit for 24 hours.