Schlenkerla Rauchbier

Of course, for my first food entry, I choose beer.

Schlenkerla Rauchbier is something they call a "smoked" beer. Brewed in Bamberg, Germany, in a 700 year-old cellar, this beer is truly like no other beer I've ever tasted. I won't go as far as to say it tastes like bacon - but it certainly does taste smoked. In the brewing process, the hops are mixed with burning beech-wood logs to achieve a serious smokey flavor.

This is certainly NOT a beer for a summer afternoon after you've mowed the lawn or played 90 minutes of football. But imagine early November, after you've raked leaves, and you come back in your den, peel off your thick coat, and you want something to warm you up. Yeah, sure, you could take a hot chocolate and sit with a teddy bear and cry about your ex-boyfriend, of you can open a Schlenkerla Rauchbier, sit back in your aged calfskin recliner and eat some cow.

This beer comes in 1 pt bottles, rather than 12-oz bottles. This is fantastic if you prefer to drink your beer from a glass, because it means you can pour twice. And anyone who doesn't love the action of pouring a beer, clearly doesn't love drinking a beer.

Tonight, I had this beer paired with a wild boar burger at my favorite burger place Hop Haus, right underneath my house in Chicago. It's got burgers ranging from classic and strong to surprising and wild, and the boar burger is somewhere in the middle. But for each burger, they've got a beer pairing, and it's got one of the best beer lists of any restaurant I've EVER been to. No Miller lights here - not even Newcastle Brown Ale. It's all interesting, hard to find stuff, and they all are scrum-diddly-umptious.

So next time you feel like warming yourself up on an adult, sophisticated brew, go for the Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier.