Summer of Meat: Beer Can Chicken

When I put out the call for BBQ requests for this blog, the most requested reciper was Beer Can Chicken. It wasn't a hard sell. Although I've never tasted it before, I've been wanting to make this for years. For no other reason than this: every recipe for it that I've seen, from the grittiest BBQ guide to the poshest of Food Network chef-babes, has had to use some variant of "shove a beer can up the chicken's ass" in the instructions. There is absolutely no way to describe cooking this dish without invoking poultry necro-sodomy. And you know what has two thumbs and loves chicken rape?



You start the hijinks with a whole chicken. Take out the giblets from inside and clean it off, inside and out, under the tap. Dry it off with a paper towel and put on the dry rub. I used Kinder's spicy meat rub. Powder it on real nice, and put some in the cavity too and spread it around. Then comes the beer.

I reserved about half of the Bud beforehand to soak my wood chips. You don't have to do that, but you don't want to put a full can in the chicken - boiling over is not our goal. I threw in a couple smashed cloves of garlic and a tablespoon of the dry rub. This will add flavor to the beer steam.

Then you simply stand up the chicken, and CRAM THAT FUCKER RIGHT UP ITS CHICKEN ASS...err...body cavity.





As you can see above, you want to make a tripod out of it with the beer can on one end and the chicken legs on the other. It helps to kinda wedge the knobs of the feet into the grill for extra traction. Don't worry about it too much - if you have sufficient clearance from your grill cover (measure before you start all this just to be sure), it will stay standing. It's less precarious than it looks.

Cover it and let it smoke over indirect heat (medium on the front and back burners) for 1 - 1 1/2 hours. Check on it after about 40 minutes to make sure it's not scorching on top. Mine didn't, because I rock, but if yours does you can lightly rest a little foil tent on top to keep the heat off. In the future, consider learning how to rock.



That's a done chicken right there.

Now, the next part's hard, and the reason there's no pictures of it is because it's a two man job and there's only 1...2 of us. Turn off all the burners. Then get someone to hold a pair of tongs tightly on the beer can while the other person lifts the chicken up off the can. I put a couple forks under the wings to hold it.

There you go. The beer steam keeps the white meat moist and tender, and the dark meat literally falls off the bone. We didn't serve it with anything, just mostly hovered over it and picked the carcass clean.

But wait, there's more!



My people believe in using every part of the beer can chicken.

NEXT TIME: I don't know yet. Keep sending suggestions.