THIS Labor Day, let's have a kegger. An elegant kegger.
Forget all your images of frat-house suds sessions -- it's not about Bud, Miller and burgers anymore. These days, you can get a keg of the freshest, most recherché microbrews -- Anderson Valley Hop Ottin' India Pale Ale or Karl Strauss Red Trolley or Lost Coast Great White.
As a result of the craft beer explosion, two big things have happened: A lot of people are more comfortable pairing foods with beer, and a lot of food-friendly beers -- pale ales, Belgians, hefeweizens -- have become available in keg. One local beer merchant, Mr. Kegs in Huntington Beach, lists about 170 microbrews available in kegs on its website. And if you elevate the menu to match the quality of the beer -- think pizza with Serrano ham and wild arugula, say, or your cheese monger's best Epoisses or Pont l'Evêque -- it's a whole new way to entertain on the patio.
For a party, ordering a specialty beer keg has some wonderful advantages. The whole idea is inherently festive, to begin with. Keg beer is fresher than bottled -- unpasteurized and more likely to have been kept scrupulously refrigerated since it was made. On top of that, kegging it can save you money.
Beer is easygoing about what you eat with it, so you could serve a wide variety of things. A simple-to-arrange buffet of exquisite charcuterie. Smoked salmon with all the trimmings. Couscous aux sept legumes, with long-simmered vegetables on a properly fluffy couscous. Even that Pixar-anointed Provençal dish of the season, ratatouille.
And Labor Day's just the beginning of the sophisticated kegger season. As the weather gets cooler, we'll be in the mood for fuller-bodied beers and the heartier foods so delicious with them, such as sausages and roasts. Say, a grandiose Mexican sopa seca de fideos, the toasted noodles simmered with chorizo, chiles and cheese, or a choucroûte garni of smoked pork chops and a variety of German wursts stewed with sauerkraut. Or a pork roast, or even roast turkey.
The mechanics of serving beer by the keg are pretty simple. For a party of 20 people, you'd want the smallest size keg, 5 gallons, which provides a little more than 50 (12-ounce) pours. For larger events, some beers are sold by the quarter barrel (7 1/2 gallons) and most by the half barrel (15 1/2 gallons). A few, particularly imports, come in 50-liter kegs (13.2 gallons).
