How Buffalo Bayou Brewing fuses barbecue and beer
What makes Houston barbecue different from other regions in Texas? It’s a complicated question, but suffice it to say there are many local traditions and ingredients that combine to create a style of barbecue unique to our little corner of the Lone Star State.
Take smoked boudain, for example. (Yes, it’s spelled with an “a” on this side of the Sabine.) This dish combines the long-grained rice of Southeast Texas — grown where upriver water flows into the swamps and marshes — with spices such as paprika and a pork filling, then smoked with local hardwood.
Texas smoked boudain is remarkably different from smoked boudin in Louisiana, where it’s more about pork than rice.
This idea that the character of a food or drink product is dependent on where it is produced — i.e., the unique climate, soil, flora and fauna of a geographic region — is known as terroir.
Terroir is most often associated with French wine. Indeed, Europeans place great importance on how food products are differentiated by the climate and soil that are unique to a geographic location. The best tomatoes are from the San Marzano area of Italy. The best olives are from Spain. And, arguably, the best wines are from France.
The idea of terroir can be applied to more than just wine, olives and even barbecue. In Houston, the mission of Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co. (Buff Brew to its many fans) is to infuse beers with the terroir — or flavor — of Houston. One way the brewery does that is by combining the flavors of beer with Houston barbecue, specifically smoke.
This is not easy to do, according to Buff Brew co-founder
Rassul Zarinfar. Beer is made from four basic ingredients: barley, hops, yeast and water. Except for the water, none of these ingredients is native to Houston. And although the water in Houston can charitably be called unique, it probably doesn’t add much to the overall flavor of the beer.
This is where Houston barbecue comes in. Before brewing, the barley is malted, meaning the grain is partially germinated to bring out the sugars that will be used in fermentation. Malt is the resulting ingredient.
The great thing about malt is you can infuse it with flavors that will be imparted to the beer.
One of Buff Brew’s premier beers is Smoke on the Bayou, which infuses malt with the complex flavors of local wood smoke.
“This is probably the nerdiest beer we’ve ever made,” Zarinfar says.
The malt — essentially dried grains of barley — is placed in pans and taken to local barbecue joints, including Blood Bros. BBQ, Goode Co. Barbeque and The Pit Room, where they are smoked at low temperatures for several hours. Depending on the type of wood and smoker used, the malt takes on the unique flavors of that barbecue joint.
The smoky malt is then used to create a style of beer known as a Scotch ale, whose sweetness complements the smoke flavor. Though I’ve never been a fan of heavy beers, Smoke on the Bayou has become one of my favorites. There’s a modulated sweetness that combines with flavors of caramel and toffee and just a wisp
of smoke that is imminently enjoyable to sit and sip or combine with food.
Fortunately, Buff Brew’s new brewing facility in Sawyer Yards includes a full-service restaurant helmed by executive chef Arash Kharat, who made his name collaborating with Blood Bros. BBQ and more recently as the chef at the barbecue-centric Beaver’s restaurant on Westheimer.
Smoke on the Bayou is made in once-a-year batches, and the bottles are stamped with the production year on the bottle. Because each year’s malt is smoked with a different group of barbecue joints, the resulting beer tastes slightly different from one year to the next. It’s a fascinating interpretation of how to infuse beer with the terroir of Houston.