Pair these Craft and German Beers with our Local Sausage

If you’ve got a barbecue planned for this Memorial Day weekend, then plan to stop by Alpine Market to pick up our handcrafted, local sausage. Whomever you’re celebrating the holiday with, they will be impressed by our artisanal meats which are a large cut above what you can find in your grocery store. The Alpine butchers stuff 10,000 pounds of authentic German sausages each week. Our sausages tend to be more finely ground, balanced and mild in flavor than sausages produced by the big factory processors. We have over 30 varieties of artisan, European and German sausages. And I’ve yet to find anything that pairs with a juicy sausage better than delicious, cold beer. While your picking up your meats, head over to the bottle shop to pick out the beers that will compliment your sausage perfectly. Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

Spicy and smokey, Andouille is a pork sausage that was first cased on La Cote des Allemands (The German Coast) in Louisiana. The Alpine Market butchers use liberal amounts of paprika, chile, red peper, garlic, pepper, onions, and thyme in the mix and give the sausages a slow, cool overnight smoking that seals in all the flavor.

The earthy flavors in this sausage pair perfectly with a farmhouse yeast saison like the Allagash Saison Belgian style ale from Portland Maine.

Curry Wurst is made with fresh pork, seasoned with curry, and stuffed into an edible, all natural casing. We infuse Indian curry spice into our recipe for a sausage with a bit more heat and character than you’ll typically find in a traditional German sausage. Try it topped with curry ketchup available at the Alpine Market.

Pair the eastern spices of this sausage with a wheat beer for the perfect balance. We suggest Adelbert’s Naked Nun wit from Austin Texas.

Smoked Bratwurst, the king of German sausages! We lightly flavor this pork sausage with cardamom, garlic and seasonings. Try poaching it in beer before grilling, or pan-frying with a light sprinkle of brown sugar to give it color.

Really this sausage goes great with any beer, but might I suggest the Köstritzer Schwarzbier from Bad Köstritz, Germany.

Wieners or German hot dogs are Vienna sausages of finely ground pork that are lightly spiced. Alpine Village makes them in the traditional recipe and also in all-beef and all-chicken versions. They are our best-selling German sausage. We sell an average of 1000 pounds of our wieners every week!

The perfect beer combination for this sausage is a helles lager like the Weihenstephaner Original from Freising, Germany. Its mild, thirst quenching flavors perfectly balance the the light spices and finely ground pork, beer or chicken of your hot dog.

Our Spicy Chicken Sausage is handcrafted in house and seasoned with habanero chiles then stuffed into an edible, all natural casing. This sausage is for the connoisseur of heat. If you’re motto is, “the hotter the better” than this sausage is for you!

It can be difficult to pair spicy foods with beer, because you never want either to outweigh the other. For that reason, spicy foods go great with an IPA with a high hop profile like the Barley Forge Orange Curtain from Costa Mesa, California.

Our Hungarian Gyulai Kolbasz is not easy to pronounce but very easy to enjoy. It is a dry pork sausage that doesn’t require refrigeration. Slice it thin and make a sandwich out of it or eat it with cheese. It has a great spicy flavor profile that includes generous amounts of paprika.

I suggest that you pair it with a classic Czech pilsner like the Lev Lion. Together, these two will transport your senses to Eastern Europe without having to leave Southern California!