Stone Smoked Porter Pork Loin At Eggtoberfest 2009

Eggheads Unite

This past Saturday (October 17th) Pam and I attended “Eggtoberfest” here in Tucker, GA.  For those of you who are not familiar with it, Eggtoberfest is the annual get together for Big Green Egg owners and wanna be owners (Eggheads).  It is held each October at the headquarters for Big Green Egg.  Somewhere around 1500 people attend and eat all kinds of great food prepared exclusively on the Big Green Egg by the 200 or so cooks. This was the 3rd Eggtoberfest we have attended but this year we did things differently.  Instead of just wandering around eating food from all of the cooks, we decided to cook food for everyone else.

Craft Beer Meets BBQ

Being the beer geek that I am, I knew that whatever food I cooked had to involve beer in some way.   I also wanted to do something that was fairly simple.  I decided to do Pork Loin marinated in beer.  The question was, what beer to use?  I knew from previous Eggtoberfests that the vast majority of people would probably know next to nothing about craft beer.  So I wanted to use something a little unusual that would get people asking questions.  I wanted to spread a little craft beer love   I asked my Twitter “network” what kind of beer would be a good marinade and got back a few replies suggesting Porter.  That made sense since Porters tend to be more malty than hoppy.   I decided to use Stone Smoked Porter as the base for the marinade and spent a month or two experimenting with the right mix of ingredients.  I settled on the following marinade recipe (per 12oz of Stone Smoked Porter):

• 4 Tablespoons Soy Sauce
• 2 Tablespoons Brown Sugar
• 1 teaspoon crushed Garlic

Pretty basic, huh?  The marinade has a touch of sweetness and a hint of spice and smokiness, and really compliments the Pork when grilled on the Big Green Egg.  I bought an 8lb Pork Loin at Costco, cut it into 6 pieces and placed each piece in its own gallon Ziploc bag with some marinade and let it sit overnight in the refrigerator.  In the morning I just put the bags in a cooler with some ice and I was ready to go!

Showtime

Saturday morning dawned cold, windy and a little wet.  We loaded up the car and arrived a little before 8AM.  We got settled under one of the tents and laid claim to a Large BGE that was already setup and full of lump charcoal.  All I had to do was light the starter brick and start cooking.  People started arriving around 9AM and I was serving the first of the “Smoked Porter Pork Loin” by 9:30.  We spaced out the cooking a bit and ended up feeding approximately 250 people (small bite-sized pieces on toothpicks) by the time we finished cooking around Noon.  The reaction was very good.  People were coming up and saying “I hear you’re the people cooking pork loin in beer”  Almost nobody had heard of Stone (like I figured) but I took time to tell people that it was readily available at a number of liquor stores in the area.  I had a bottle to show people what it looked like so they could find it easily in the store.  Here’s a video showing the preparation of the pork and us cooking at Eggtoberfest:

Attend An Eggfest In your Area

We had a great time cooking at Eggtoberfest.  There is so much good food to try and some very talented cooks.  We learn something new every time we go.  If you’re in the Atlanta area you owe it to yourself to attend.  If you are in some other part of the country you can probably go to your own local “Eggfest”.  Go to Eggheadforum.com to learn more about all things “Egg” and to keep up with all of the “eggfests” that happen all over the world.