Brining a Prok Butt With Beer Brine ???


 
M

Matt Heebner

TVWBB Fan
Brining a Pork Butt With Beer Brine ???

Hey all,
My brother is hosting a Central Waters beer tasting at his liquor store this weekend. He wants to have some food available as well so he asked if I would smoke/grill for the event.. We are doing the WI standard... brats grilled and simmered in the Central Waters sampled beer Jacuzzi, but he also wants pulled pork sammies as well. What he was thinking was doing a brine using the same beer, and maybe a glaze/BBQ sauce also using that particular beer.
My questions....does anyone have a good brine recipe that uses beer ? Does the brine even penetrated the shoulder ? I do have a good 48 hours to brine before the smoker so I have the time to really let it absorb. Should I plan on also injecting said brine into the shoulders ? I've done chickens and turkeys but never a butt.

I am also open to any sauce ideas. If you have a good beer reduction sauce recipe, I would like to hear about it. I have a couple in mind but I would like to hear a few tried and true recipes.

The beer being sampled is Central Waters Bourbon Barrel Stout, and should be a great candidate for both brining/injecting and a glaze/sauce.

Thanks a bunch
 
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Matt Heebner said:
Hey all,
My brother is hosting a Central Waters beer tasting at his liquor store this weekend. He wants to have some food available as well so he asked if I would smoke/grill for the event.. We are doing the WI standard... brats grilled and simmered in the Central Waters sampled beer Jacuzzi, but he also wants pulled pork sammies as well. What he was thinking was doing a brine using the same beer, and maybe a glaze/BBQ sauce also using that particular beer.
My questions....does anyone have a good brine recipe that uses beer ? Does the brine even penetrated the shoulder ? I do have a good 48 hours to brine before the smoker so I have the time to really let it absorb. Should I plan on also injecting said brine into the shoulders ? I've done chickens and turkeys but never a butt.

I am also open to any sauce ideas. If you have a good beer reduction sauce recipe, I would like to hear about it. I have a couple in mind but I would like to hear a few tried and true recipes.

The beer being sampled is Central Waters Bourbon Barrel Stout, and should be a great candidate for both brining/injecting and a glaze/sauce.

Thanks a bunch
Click to expand...

Matt, the idea you've got here sounds really good. What time we eatin'? :)

I've never brined a butt; I usually reserve brining for lean cuts like chops or prime rib of pork/rack of pork. That said, there's no reason you couldn't brine butts. You may want to keep the salt and/or brining time down since, if I recall correctly, some forum members have had pork end up tasting "hammy" after brining with lots of salt. If you're brining for 24 hours or more, I don't think there would be much point in injecting them.

I'm not much help with your sauce idea, but I like the sound of it. I'm sure you'll get some responses with good ideas for the sauce, and I'm looking forward to hearing what others have done.

Good luck, and good eatin'!
 
I recall Alton Brown brining a pork shoulder on Good Eats; at the time, I thought it was peculiar and unnecessary, since I also associate brining with leaner cuts. That said, your idea sounds pretty delicious, esp. given the theme of the event. I would second the advice to watch the salt, lest you end up with more of a cured ham-ish taste. The pork won't taste bad, necessarily - people who don't eat a lot of pulled pork probably won't notice/care - but it can be off-putting if you're used to a particular end product. I've also been less satisfied with bark formation when I've brined (only a few times, mind you).

I would be interested in tasting an injected butt (never tried that). That might even work better for getting this beer into the meat...?
 
As an update, they changed the beer on me to a Stout...no big deal but it does affect the BBQ sauces I am doing. Went with a Stout-Sriracha spicy sauce,(delicious!) and a sweet-stout BBQ sauce(for the masses). I kept the salt to a minimum, and added cinnamon sticks to try and counter balance the salt. I am smoking tonight and will pull them at the event tomorrow late morning.
I was thinking about adding another beer or two to some of the Sriracha sauce to thin it and use as a glaze. I think I will rub the butts with brown sugar, salt, pepper, a simple rub. After the initial 4 hour mark on the smoker I am going to start mopping the butts. I have done this before with other glazes/mops and it has always turned out pretty good. I have always gotten good bark production mopping.
I did mix up the brine and inject into the butts till almost bursting. They were so saturated that they would literally spring a leak every time I pierced the butts....like little holes in a hose...ha. That combined with a ton of little holes from the needle should get something into the center of them. I will try and post some pictures when I get them on the smoker.
 
That sounds pretty neat. I know you're on your way to doing what you're doing but I often used to dilute BBQ sauces with beer for mopping. Probably don't need it now with injecting but a finishing sauce with the brand of beer you are using and BBQ sauce may have been kind of need to serve.

Good luck and looking forward to some pics.
 
Here are the butts pulled from the brine and rubbed with a little brown sugar, salt, and pepper. Also pictured is the Central Waters Stout that is in the injection, the brine, and both BBQ sauces. I had one initially before I started to get an idea of taste, but I have a few chillin in the freezer to enjoy after the butts go on, and the temp settles in.

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Got these big boys on....total weight was about 20 lbs. Injected and brined at least 25 lbs....:rolleyes:

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Will update whan I am ready to mop. I will say whan I pulled them from the brine it smelled so incredible. There was a malty flavor smell and that coupled with the other flavors smelled AWESOME !! I have high hopes for this.
If anyone is in the area tomorrow, the beer tasting and food will be at Hilldale Liquor, 1536 E Sumner St, Hartford, WI 53027 (262) 673-6763. Starts at 1 pm. There will be the Satin Solstice Stout to sample, an Amber(name escapes me), and brats and pulled pork sammies with the stout-sriracha BBQ sauce. Check it out if you can !!!
 
The butts turned out fantastic. I will say brining and injecting really did add a level of flavor. You could definitely taste the beer in the meat. I was too sleepy to actually mop the butts with a thinned-out sauce. I actually slept through my 'add charcoal alarm' but the smoker was hummin along at about 240 the whole session. The butts were done in exactly 13 hours almost to the minute. Covered, wrapped and cooler-ed till the tasting. I pulled them about 4 hours later and the durn things were still too hot to handle. Got the bear claws out and went to town.

Customers seemed to favor the stout-sriracha sauce over the sweet, but both got good reviews.

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BBQ Sauce (from The Beeroness with minor modifications)

Ingredients
1 tbs olive oil
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1/3 cup soy sauce
2/3 cup ketchup
2 tbs worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 tsp sriracha
2 tsp smoked paprika
12 oz favorite Stout
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp onion powder

Directions
•In a pot over medium heat, add the oil and allow to get hot but not smoking. Add the garlic and stir until you can smell it, about 30 seconds. Add the remaining ingredients and stir until combined. Allow to cook until thickened, stirring occasionally, about 15 minutes.
•Store in an air tight container in the fridge

For the sweet-stout, omit the garlic, sriracha, and soy sauce and increase brown sugar another 1/2 cup.
 
For the brine:

2 quarts water
72 oz stout beer
1 1/2 cups kosher salt
2 large onions quartered
handful peppercorns
1 bunch thyme
1 bunch sage
10 cinnamon sticks

This worked great and was enough to cover 20 lbs of butts. I let it sit in the brine for about 26 hours. the butts had just a little more salt flavor than usual but was NOT too much, literally just a hint. No one else tasted it but I was 'looking' for it.
 
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I'm a bit late to the party: I like to brine butts. I normally just use salt water and a cpl Tsp of rub but your brine sounds better. Once, I used a hard apple cider -- I got the idea from Bob -- and it was pretty good as well.

The finished product looks fantastic!
 
I had my doubts about how much flavor the brine would impart on the butts. I think injecting the brine into the butts helped but I guess I will have to experiment with a brine only, and injection only and see if the flavor is less, the same, etc. You could definitely taste the stout flavor in the meat. the bark also had a nice 'malty' flavor. I have never brined a butt before, and I will be doing more in the future. I really want to try a bourbon brine/injection but I will have to come to terms with using that much and not drinking it !;)
 
Guaranteed, your injecting did more good than a day's worth of brining :)

For our comps I've begun injecting mine with a few different concoctions, but my two I use the most are different variations of a beer brine and an apple cider brine, depending on the flavor profile I'm going for. I'll inject and let sit for a few hours to overnight in a cold environment, and then take it out, re-apply rub that I put on after I inject, and then put it on the smoker. I do mine in plastic cooking bags I buy by the hundred from a restaurant supply, and I use a round needle with holes in the sides so that I don't puncture the bag if I go all the way through. Seems to work really well.
 
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