Be A Beer Brat

Hey, it's me, summer. I'm not over yet. Remember my good buddy July? Just because it's gone doesn't mean sausages in buns are finished for the season. For all we know you could be going on six weeks without one, simply because nobody's talking about them anymore.

One of humanity's great sausage-bun combinations (all tricked-out hot dog creations aside) is the beer brat. These hefty pork sausages can be cooked in a pan of beer over a grill, grilled and topped with a beer-based spicy brown mustard, both grilled and eaten while drinking beer...really any combination of sausage and beer will result in something you can call a beer brat.

We like to take the best of all worlds and start the brats in a beer pan, then finish them on the grill, along with buns too durable for mere hot dogs. The smoke infuses the meat (which goes nicely with the beer) and the bun (which goes nicely with the meat) and the residual sugar from the beer chars in an attractive and tasty manner. The last summer symphony we got dragged to didn't taste nearly as sweet.