Beer Tuesdays: Beer with chili cheeseburgers

There's really nothing better in the summer than a good grilled cheeseburger. For this post, I'm going to talk about a beer I've reviewed before in the past, Red Hare Gangway IPA. However for this review edition, I've paired it with grilled cheeseburgers which I've prepared with a healthy dose of leftover slow-cooked chili to turn it into an amazing and delicious chili cheeseburger.

Step one: I'm no BBQ snob, but I also realize you really don't need any fancy shmancy BBQ briquettes to create a good fire for cooking a burger. So I gathered up some branches and sticks from around my yard and built a fire inside my smoker/grill. I let the sticks burn until there was a nice little fire going.

Step two: When the fire was going for a minute, I put the grill grates on and closed the grill. Meanwhile, I went inside and grabbed myself a cold beer, my grill tools, fixins, and the burger patties out of the fridge. Now that the grill was nice and hot, I sprayed a bit of cooking oil onto the grill grates so my patties wouldn't stick, threw the patties on over the hottest parts of the fire, and closed the grill again. 

Step three: After letter the patties cook for a while, I flipped them and moved them away from the heat a little bit and put the cheese on to melt. I like my onions and red peppers grilled so I threw those on along with the buns so everything would get nice and toasty. Obviously, I didn't grill the romaine lettuce or sliced tomato.

Step Four: Assembling the chili burger. For this I put the cool stuff on the bottom, the hot stuff on the top. I used onion sandwich buns. On the bottom I placed the lettuce topped with the tomato (otherwise the bun gets soggy). I added the cheeseburg, a few pieces of onion, a hunk of red pepper, and a big huge dollop of chili. 

Paired absolutely perfectly with the IPA I was drinking.

Beer Tuesday: Red Hare Gangway IPA

This is a cool beer. I really love IPAs and I was glad to find it. Considering that Red Hare is a new(er) brewery and local (their brewery is right down the street from me), I was excited when local bars started offering their Long Day Lager on tap. Unfortunately, for a while, the only beer they were distributing in cans was their Long Day Lager, which is great, but at the same time I don't really care for lager that much. However, I am a huge IPA fan and when I walked into the store one day last month and saw this for sale I jumped at the opportunity to buy it.

I'm going to go ahead and steal the description of this beer from their website, I hope they don't mind too much,

This American style IPA is medium bodied and definitely has that citrus flavor and aroma we’ve all come to love. Coming in at 6.2% ABV we hope this IPA sets the tone for our brewery in the Atlanta market. Slightly sweet, hopped with Williamette, Chinook, Cascade and Falconers Flight hops, this golden brew is crisp but unfiltered and we know it will leave people thirsty for more.

Unfortunately, it seems like Gangway IPA can be a little hard to find. It popped up about a month ago, but since then it has disappeared (I think I personally bought out the entire stock from the Windy Hill Package Store). I'm probably going to start procuring this by the case when I find it, since this is one of the top beers I tried in 2012, and it has seemingly limited availability in the local shops.