Sixpack Sez

Sept. 5 , 2008 | A chef and his brew

THERE'S A PRETTY cool dinner deal over at Manayunk's Terrace Street Bistro on Thursday nights. For just $31.50, you get a three-course meal, plus chef Josh Hunter's home brew - all you want to drink.

Hunter's place halfway up Shurs Lane is a BYO, so under law he has to give away the beer. (Even if he had a liquor license, I suspect the feds would have a problem with him selling unregistered alcohol.)

But the variety of the restaurant's brews is so outstanding, so inspired, that you'd be excused for presuming that the place is giving away the food and charging for the drinks.

One night recently, the menu included Russian imperial stout, oatmeal stout, pale ale, barleywine, hefeweizen, pilsner, Oktoberfest, raspberry lambic, porter, witbier and Belgian dubbel, tripel and quadruppel.

Every one that I tasted was as expertly prepared as Hunter's stuffed filet of sole. A 60 Minute IPA knockoff was painstakingly brewed, with hops added once a minute for an entire hour, just like they do it at the Dogfish Head brewhouse in Delaware. His ice bock was strengthened by freezing the beer, then skimming off the ice, just as Old World brewers once did.

How can he give it all away?

Easy: Home-brewed beer is cheap, as little as 40 cents a bottle. "It's about the same cost as linen," Hunter said.

I know there are other, more accomplished home brewers out there, and certainly more famous chefs. But the 30-year-old Hunter is the only professional cook I've met who has the confidence and ability to complement his restaurant menu with his own handmade beer.

And it makes me wonder: Why aren't there more chef/brewers?

After all, as Hunter said, home brewing is "just cooking, basically."

"It's a recipe, and it's about flavor," he told me on a recent Saturday morning while he brewed up a Belgian-style grand cru in the small backyard behind his restaurant kitchen. "Anything with a big pot and a long spoon has my interest."

A propane burner boiled a kettle of water. His thick mash of grains steeped in a large Coleman cooler, extracting the sugar that's necessary for fermentation. A row of zinnias bloomed in the sun alongside the wort cooler.

Trained at the Restaurant School in West Philadelphia, Hunter has cooked professionally since he was 19. His restaurant supplements his main business, catering weddings and other events with his firm, Company's Calling.

He's been brewing for only about 3 1/2 years, having started out with easy-to-brew extract kits that combine all the ingredients in a single can. Eventually he progressed to more complex, start-from-scratch, all-grain mashes, typically brewing clones of well-known ales and lagers from published recipes.

His current bible is "Beer Captured" by Tess & Mark Szamatulski (Maltose Press, 2001), a superb guide that I'd recommend to any home brewer.

As the wort seeped through the lauter tun, the two of us chatted over a strong golden ale spiced with peppery grains of paradise.

"I don't think there's enough beer in cuisine," Hunter said. "The whole world of fine dining has gotten stuck on wine, but beer is so much more versatile.

"I mean, wine is made from grapes, and it'll always taste like grapes. Beer has so many different flavors. Look at a stout and look at a pilsner. They're both beer, but they're completely different."

There's also something less pretentious about beer, an easily accessible spirit that Hunter discovered in his early days of home brewing. In contrast to the egos usually found in kitchens, Hunter said, he'd go to home brew club meetings "and everyone's willing to share their knowledge with you . . . Everyone's like, 'OK, let's make beer!' "

For Hunter, the hours spent boiling wort, pitching yeast and siphoning the suds into bottles are a chance to step back from the hectic pace of a bustling workplace.

"Brewing is not supposed to be a fast thing," he said. "Brewing beer makes you slow down. The yeast will do its job. If you do yours, you'll have a great beer that you made yourself."

For any chef, though, the true testament of success is whether the diners appreciate all your work. These days, Hunter finds himself answering more questions about his beer than his food.

"People are really curious about the flavors," he said. "They want to know about how the beer pairs with the food."

The food, the beer - at Terrace Street Bistro, it's inseparable, all of it prepared by the same chef, the same brewer.

Terrace Street Bistro, 3989 Terrace St., Manayunk (at Shurs Lane), is open Thursday to Sunday, with the fixed-price home brew dinner on Thursdays only. Three courses, $31.50, four courses, $35. Call 215-508-2775 for reservations.

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