I do home canning - typically water bath, with some pressure canning too. I’ve been having trouble with the seal on my pressure canner though, and am kind of picky about canning safety (it’s stupid to get botulism from something you do for fun at home, rather when in than a life-or-death food stocking situation), so I’m looking for a fairly legitimate canning recipe for a beer-containing barbecue sauce.
I checked online for beer’s pH, and it turns out it’s around 4.0 generally, which isn’t too far off from that of tomatoes. I guess I could get all of the excess liquid out of the tomatoes (the ‘gel’, excess juice, etc.) before throwing them into the mix and make up the remaining liquid with beer. I could even add some powdered citric acid if I want to make sure the pH is low enough, without messing with the flavor of it that much. But that makes me a tad nervous, regardless.
I’ve found a few water-bath canning barbecue sauce recipes, but rather than tinker - has any home canner out there found a beer barbecue sauce recipe that’s made for canning?
Oh, and the reason why I want to do this: New Holland Charkoota Rye Smoked Dopplebock. It’s got this rich, smoky flavor that made me immediately say, “I want to make barbecue sauce out of this.” But I have a big bottle and don’t go through sauce fast enough to want to make it without canning it.
I’d just go with a sweet and acidic sauce in the classic Memphis or Kansas city Tomato, Vinegar, Sugar, and Spice tradition, with the addition of the beer… cooked out and “reduced” for a normal time… Hot can normally. That’s why a lot of these barbecue sauces are so stable and safe, it’s the gram negative of the acid and sugar.
Taste some Budweiser BBQ sauce if you haven’t yet… Yes, I know it’s a massed produced sauce, but it is a good shelf stable sauce to learn and taste from. It almost tastes like they use a “beer concentrate” in their sauce. Always good to keep your senses open and learn from the tried and true.
I would just pressure can it. The recipes I have seen call for 40 minutes at 11 lbs. of pressure for quarts. Your local cooperative extension will usually test your canner’s pressure gauge for free, and could probably recommend places for a replacement seals.
I’ve already got another seal, so that’ll be fine. I just want to make sure nothing else is wrong with it instead - and I’m going to be water-bath canning other stuff this weekend so I’d prefer to not mess with it for now.
I’m just thinking about the pile of tomatoes stacked on my counter - but I guess if worse comes to worse, I can just process those now and water-can them as a plain tomato sauce, and then convert to BBQ sauce later.
Thanks everyone for the recommendations and suggestions! I’ll probably go with the tomato sauce first and think about what to do from there.
What recipe did you use for your beer BBQ sauce? I have some slightly stale Highland Brewery Blackberry Witte beer (St. Louis brewer) that I would love to use in sauce. I’m also making beer mustard to can.
I found this one that called for coffee, and since beer is as acidic or moreso than ketchup, I just replaced the coffee with beer in equal amounts, and added just a hair more cider vinegar just to make sure. The tomatoes got turned into a ketchup base first (as the linked recipe uses ketchup) to get the same smooth base consistency and acidity level.
The recipe doesn’t give a quantity, but it should come out to around 2 pints, as I think I ended up doubling the recipe and have 4 pints.