The idea sounded tasty.
Bravo’s award-winning “Top Chef” series picked Colorado to film its 15th season and one of the early episodes promised the show’s first-ever beer garden.
The concept seemed like a no-brainer for a food show filming in a state that counts the second most craft breweries in the nation, hosts the annual Great American Beer Festival and ranks as a beer mecca.
But the episode that aired last week only left the taste of disappointment. The challenge, filmed under a big tent at Elitch Gardens, showcased traditional German cuisine and asked the chefs to create a radler to a pair with their dishes.
A radler is a German drink that is half light beer (traditionally helles) and half fruit soda (usually grapefruit or lemon flavored). The name translates to essentially “bicycle beer” and its main advantage is low alcohol. In America, most people know the drink as a shandy. Either way, it is definitely not beer.
As chef Joe Sasto, a contestant from Los Angeles, said during the show: “Where I come from, if you order one of those, you get kicked in the nuts.”
More to the point: The episode not only snubbed Colorado’s proud craft beer scene, but it continued to perpetuate a myth that beer does not belong at the table alongside wine.
“Beer still gets treated as an aside in much of our mass media because tradition trumps taste,” said Julia Herz, the craft beer program director at the Boulder-based Brewers Association, which represents small and independent craft breweries.
Herz is one of the leading voices pushing for a change, and along with the association’s Chef Adam Dulye, developed a guide for the culinary industry to learn about how to pair food with beer and present it at the table. It’s a course that many culinary schools already offer for wine.
Beer is even more popular than wine — a $100 billion in U.S. sales compared to $50 billion for wine, the association reports, and a recent survey showed that craft beer drinking is often linked to eating.
“Beer has gotten kudos from so many, it was surprising that it wasn’t more front and center,” Herz said of the Top Chef season in Colorado so far. It shows, she added, that “we have a lot more work to do. This is a great example of beer in the mass media’s mind compared to wine. It’s a great example of how hard and slow change is.”
Two seasons ago, Top Chef filmed in San Diego, California, and asked the cheftestants to pair food with beers made for the judges by Stone and Ballast Point — a worthy showcase of beer and food.
Here in Colorado, Chef Keegan Gerhard, a Food Network star and the owner of desert-master D Bar in Denver, served as the local host for the beer garden episode. He took the contestants downtown to Rhein Haus, a chain beer hall imported from Seattle, to introduce them to German food and radlers, serving them a Stiegel from Austria made with 40 percent lager and 60 percent grapefruit soda.
“I just shared with them about the lifestyle of Colorado in the summer time,” he said in an interview after the May filming of the episode. “It’s just about hanging out with friends and going to the mountains and having great food and great beer, which paired nicely with how I grew up in Germany.”
In the elimination challenge, the chefs made a variety of radlers, some of which used local beer, including Odell Drumroll APA and 90 Shilling; Oskar Blues IPA, Dale’s Pale Ale and Mama’s Little Yella Pils; and Great Divide Colette. But the beers won little mention and only a few tasted like a radler, as the chefs added chai spices, jalapenos, smoke, beets and other nontraditional ingredients to the drinks.
“I think a lot of them went to a lot of trouble to pair with a radler,” Gerhard said. “Now, some of them just tried to get super creative with the radler and I don’t think they necessarily tried to pair it with their food. They kind of turned it into a mini cocktail.”
A couple of the chefs couldn’t even properly describe the style and flavors of the beer they chose when I asked them about it at the challenge, which was again disheartening.
Ashleigh Carter, the brewer at Bierstadt Lagerhaus, a Denver brewery that makes some of the best German beer in the state, expressed dismay that the show didn’t feature a local brewery — even if they wanted to feature radlers.
Bierstadt even makes a radler the proper way by pouring the beer and then mixing the fruit soda at the bar to taste with Sanpellegrino Limonata. Carter loves the drink. “It’s just refreshing,” she said, but added: “It’s not beer-like really.”
If Top Chef wanted to feature Colorado’s brewing scene in a real way, the options for creativity are endless. The chefs could have visited CO Brew downtown to make their own beer to pair with a dish at the homebrewing shop and brewery. Or they could have talked to any number of brewers who are increasingly experimenting by putting food into their beer.
Or they could have foraged the landscape for ingredients to make food and beer, which is the focus of the Beers Made By Walking Festival in Denver. Or the chefs could have explored the concept of terroir by talking to breweries like Black Project that use wild microbes in the air to ferment their beer.
All sound pretty chefy.
Steve Kurkowski at the Colorado Brewers Guild highlighted the silver lining. He arranged for Colorado breweries to donate beer for the contestants, who are often seen with one in hand after the challenges. “If you know the brands, if you know the colors like we do, it comes off pretty well,” he said.
And the set where the show is filmed features two fermenters donated by Westminster’s Kokopelli Beer Co. The shiny tanks are often visible in the background behind the judges. But more visible — a wall-sized wine rack with empty green bottles.
“We were grateful for the opportunity we had to participate,” Kurkowski said. But he added: “Of course, craft beer is so much in Colorado’s DNA, I would like to see a bigger focus.”
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