I’ve written before about the joy that is beer for breakfast. A solid dark beer infused with coffee makes for a great morning pick-me-up. That’s a breakfast beer, but a new brew from the folks at Dogfish Head Brewery is actually breakfast in a beer.
Dogfish Head’s new Beer for Breakfast Stout isn’t just a beer brewed with coffee, it’s a beer brewed with an age-old breakfast ingredient: scrapple. Wait, what? First, you’re probably asking, what the hell is scrapple? Don’t be ashamed, it’s not as ubiquitous as pancakes or waffles at your favorite breakfast joint, but it is just as tasty.
Popular in Dutch country, scrapple arose out of necessity as a way to utilize all the leftover tasty bits of a cooked pig. Everyone eats the ribs, the pork butt, and the bacon, but there is so much more to a pig.
These days, one of the hottest trends in food is the offal movement. These are restaurants where the chefs make a point to use the lesser-known and not-so-often-used cuts of meat. Think of scrapple as a butcher’s delight: pork stock, plus pig hearts, livers, tongues, and skin, with a dose of cornmeal, flour, salt, and spices that can include allspice, chili powder, clove, coriander, nutmeg, pepper, and sage.
All of that is put in a pot, cooked low and slow for many hours, poured in a loaf pan, then put into the refrigerator to cure. Once you’re ready to eat it, scrapple is sliced like bread and fried to produce a porktacular breakfast. Trust me, it’s good stuff!
So what is scrapple doing in the Dogfish Head Beer for Breakfast Stout? Well, it’s giving the beer a smoky goodness that permeates every sip. The scrapple they use comes from RAPA Scrapple, a family-owned business in Bridgeville, Delaware that has been making scrapple since the 1920s.
That awesome smoky flavor provided by the pig isn’t the only breakfast ingredient in this beer. The team at Dogfish Head also included maple syrup (which you should absolutely pour on top of fried scrapple), brown sugar, Applewood-smoked barley, molasses, milk sugars, oh, and coffee of course. Look at that ingredient list. It literally is breakfast in a beer! All that’s missing is some eggs.
The Beer for Breakfast Stout celebrates the twenty-first anniversary of the brewery’s Chicory Stout, and a worthy tribute it is. This beer hits the shelves on November 7, so start looking for it next week. The fine folks at Dogfish Head were nice enough to send me a pre-release bottle, (thanks, Heather!) but once it’s available at my usual beer-buying haunts, I’m bringing home a stash of this to keep around.
At a solid 7.4 percent ABV, this, like a scrapple-centric breakfast, is not something you’ll want to have more than a serving of before braving rush hour traffic into the office. Actually, this is the perfect Saturday morning beer. Stick the children in front of PBS Kids, grab the paper, crack open a Beer for Breakfast Stout, and enjoy a glass of what is undoubtedly the perfect start to a weekend. Cheers!
