*This is a guest post by my dad. He’s a beer enthusiast and used it to make this amazing apple pie. Enjoy!

I am a beer snob.  That’s a boast, not a confession.   While others inspire themselves with phrases like “Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life,” “When Life hands you lemons, make lemonade,” “My heart will go on” or “Reality is negotiable,” I opt for something more cautionary: “Light beer is proof that evil is loose in the world.”  (Actually, that should be “lite” beer.  Clearly, drinking it not only is evil, but degrades certain cognitive skills.)

Finding a way to integrate good beer into cooking (or in this case, baking) is, then, something I’m almost hard-wired to do.  Now, cooking with beer is hardly a new discovery.  But with the extraordinary growth of craft beers in this country since the 1970s, we now enjoy an enormous number of different beers with different, more complex flavors.  The possibilities of cooking with beer have now gone far beyond boiling hot dogs in it or mixing it in batter.  How we use beer in food is limited only by our own creativity.

I have been making apple pies for many years.  It is pretty much the only dessert I make.  (I’m not much of a dessert person.)  However, I have rarely made the same pie twice.  Inevitably I tweak nearly everything I make, in a small way or large way, to try to discover new tastes.  Sometimes the tweaks work, sometimes they don’t, and occasionally they even create a threat to humanity.  But what’s the point in cooking if there’s no adventure?  And if humanity (or my wife and family) suffers as a result, well, my heart will go on.

Soaking the apples I use for the apple pie in stout is a tweak, one that turned out well.  Again, I can’t claim to have originated the idea of using stout in a dessert.  My first experience with stout in a dessert was with an ice cream made with stout.  (Quite good.)  Why stout?  Stouts, depending upon how they are made, have long had a reputation as a “dessert beer” because they can tend to emphasize maltiness (sweetness) over hoppy-ness (bitterness), and can have a heavier mouth-feel, like a liqueur.  Stouts can also have undertones (of differing strengths, depending upon the stout) of chocolate, coffee and dark fruits.

For this particular pie I used Brooklyn Brewery’s Black Chocolate Stout, which is as decadent as the name hints at.  (Generally Brooklyn Brewery makes some very fine beers.)  Black Chocolate Stout falls into a category known as Russian Imperial Stout—the name historically designated stouts worthy of being consumed by Russian czars.  They are muscular beers: strong flavors, high alcohol content.  (If you make this apple pie, I highly recommend having two bottles of this stout on hand, one in which to soak the apples, the other to drink.  That way, if the pie turns out well you can raise a glass in celebration, or if the pie turns out to look and taste like something Godzilla stepped in, you’ll still be … quite happy.)

General Comments

• While you can use whatever stout you wish, do keep in mind that some stouts are more aggressive in how the hops are used, which can result in a more (intentionally) bitter taste.  Ultimately, though, there’s really only one thing you need to keep in mind: use a good stout.  The same principle applies if you should decide to use beer in other dishes you make: use good beers.  Using the fizzy yellow water made by the big commercial breweries is an insult to good food.  There’s a reason why the name of the largest commercial brewer in America rhymes with “crud.”
• I use less sugar than what most recipes for apple pie call for.  One reason is that the stout can add sweetness.  Another reason is that I prefer to try to foreground the flavor of the apples, rather than overwhelm the apples with sugar.  I know a number of people who don’t like apple pie as a rule, and the number one reason why they don’t is that they find most apple pies to be too sweet and they can’t taste the apples, or any flavor other than the sugar.
• I typically use a brown sugar/Splenda blend.  Feel free, however, to go either all-Splenda (remember, the stout will have sugar) or all-sugar.  I use a blend simply so people can tell themselves they’re eating a relatively healthy dessert.  (The things we tell ourselves to get through the day….)
• I usually use Granny Smith apples, precisely because they are tart.  Again, I’m trying to de-emphasize the sugary taste.
• Tweak away.  Cooking is art, not dogma.

The Recipe

Frankly, this is difficult, because I never write down recipes of anything I make.  Like I said, cooking is art, not dogma.  (This drives my wife crazy, since she knows that no matter how good something is that I make, she’ll never see the likes of it again.)  However, my daughter, who is maddeningly reasonable, has asked for the recipe, and I always do what people tell me to do—particularly when it’s her telling me to do it.  Below is the recipe I used for this particular pie.  So here goes:

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