Beercan Chicken With Guinness As the Beer

First post in a while, sorry. We have a lot of ideas tabled and frankly rose the bar a little too high with what we did in 2009. Butterfinger Brisket, come on. Chicken Fried Brisket, right. So, this is going to be relatively short and sweet. Really sweet.....because the chicken turned out really sweet. Zing.

But really, this has been on the to do list for a while. We still plan on producing several other variations on this classic but its been hard to find time lately. Smokehopper turned 30. Pretty Wild is on E!. New albums from Band of Horses, LCD Soundsystem, The Delta Spirit, Sharon Jones, The National and Gorillaz. Etc. Etc.

Onto the chicken.

Started with a whole fryer washed off and patted dry.

Threw on some paprika, salt and pepper. Also, you should crack open a Guinness at this point. The cans are sold in 4 packs, so you can have a couple yourself. In fact, when you're dealing with a smoker that is not cooperating and maintaining a pretty constant level of heat it is suggested.

Chopin is a good addition to the Guinness when dealing with a smoker induced headache. Particularly this :

That is The Clientele - Strange Geometry and Dave Matthews Band - Crash on the table. Both really solid albums if you can get over the fact that its not cool to like Dave anymore.

Dave sucks.

Not really, just kidding. Zing x2.

This is the smoker we used at SmokeNor's house. The original plan was to cook the chicken for about 4 or 5 hours at about 225. Things we didn't have that would have been great:

1) Meat thermometer (we ended up getting one later, so disregard this).

2) An oven thermometer that told gave us an accurate reading on the temp inside the chamber.

We didn't end up needing a thermometer but instead a better understanding of how the smoker worked. We didn't use nearly enough wood starting out and the heat only got up to 175 for the first 3 or 4 hours. Ended up cooking the chicken for a solid 6 hours after we figured out that we had to get a good sized fire going in the firebox. Took about 3 logs at a time. Sorry for the rant. It's under control.

We did some ribs too, but only LSmoke's turned out good. Next time I needed to make mine a little more tender. I also tried out a Guinness inspired bourbon, coffee, heath bar rub that will not be posted. Good idea on paper but executed poorly.

Anyway, here are the results. Check out how the Guinness came out through the top and drizzled down the skin. Don't think that had any effect on the final product but the chicken was easily the sweetest chicken I had ever tasted. So, I have to think that the Guinness penetrated the skin and got into the meat. It was fantastic. Like two guys playing horse.

Not much meat, but like I said above it was really tasty. Consumed pretty quickly.

So we played ship captain crew. It was a fun night.

Also, there is this:

The end.