It’s finally edible! Until last night, I had never been able to concoct a good barbecue sauce that incorporates a shot and a beer, but I think I have finally found that saucepan full of gold at the end of the rainbow.

This recipe is a tribute to my Irish roots and a personal grilling ritual. When I lived in Vermont, where the weather is generally less than hospitable to a backyard barbecue, I made a tradition of breaking out the Weber on March 17th. Although there is rarely clement weather on St. Patty’s day in Burlington, I couldn’t hold out any longer, so I used the holiday as my excuse to fire up the coals and declare the official start of grilling season.

The Belfast Carbomb is a St. Patrick’s Day tradition, wherein a shot is dropped into a pint of stout and swallowed at high velocity, which got me thinking (hazily) that the flavors of Irish whiskey and stout would give a great spark to barbecue sauce, but my early attempts were lousy and so the idea was forgotten until I stumbled upon some old notes a few days ago.

This time I decided to go with a KC style sauce, which relies on a strong tomato flavor rather than the TN style, which is heavy on vinegar, I would simplify the ingredients and the process and I would switch to an Irish red ale from the overly dense, sweet and heavy stout. There were some complications, but it came out well nonetheless and I am looking forward to tweaking this recipe soon. I didn’t have a red ale on hand, so I used PBR to replace all of the water and I meant to go with a shot of Jameson’s and a shot of vinegar, but I forgot and used a full quarter cup of vinegar, but I think I like it.

For the next batch, I am going to use the red ale instead of PBR (although the lager did work remarkably well, so I may come back to it), cut the sugar from a third to a quarter of a cup, and use a quarter cup each of whiskey and vinegar instead of shots. I may leave out the 1/2 tsp salt as well, and cut the shallots and oil in half (by volume). I am trying to think of what other flavors I might add, and am considering cloves at the moment.

Once I get the flavors hammered out, I would like to create a recipe that offers substitutions of canned tomatoes for ketchup and shallots or onions and garlic for onion and garlic powder with the caveat of needing to puree and more cooking time if solids are used. Ginger powder will probably never be replaced by fresh ginger, but if I can figure out how to do it, I’ll try.

I’m, not the hard-drinking type; I drank little before I came of age; and even though I celebrated my 21st birthday with three trips to Oktoberfest in Munich in the span of a week, and can recall a number of other over-indulgent days in the seven years since, I’ve never had a hangover… until today.

I think perhaps it’s genetic, as my maternal grandfather, Bill Ledoux, claimed to have never had a hangover one single day in his life and he attributed this blessing to the purity of single malt scotch. He was known as something of a drinker however and a master storyteller, so nobody believed his claim.

Last night I went to a party at a new club in the SoMa district and the event was sponsored by a distillery. The gin was flowing free and freely, so I ordered G+T by the pair like I had someone to pass the second drink to and mingled with a glass in each hand. Here’s the problem: It was gin from a local distillery that I had never heard of, and despite the pretty label it drank like the batch had just been bottled in someone’s back yard. I knew right away that it was not a quality libation, but it was gratis gin so I kept drinking. I’m a connoisseur, but not a snob. I like good gin more than cheap gin, but I also like drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon and am not averse to ordering cocktails with well liquor instead of call.

I knew that this stuff was simply wicked beyond the flavor and the bite, but I just couldn’t place my concern, so I kept drinking. It wasn’t the clean drunkenness that I appreciate from a gin binge, and I felt less clear-headed than I would expect from comparable consumption, but it was not until 6:30 this morning that I knew for sure that something was not right. I woke up with a headache, upset stomach and a sensitivity to light that I have never experienced after a night of drinking. Sometimes I wake up with a very dry mouth and strong thirst and I call that ‘my hangover’ because that is as bad as it gets. So I got up well before my alarm went off, took a leak and drank two glasses of water before I went back to bed for another half hour. I woke up again at 7:30 feeling altogether better, but those thirty minutes of conscious hangover were not pleasant.

I’m far from an alcoholic, but I have always appreciated the way that a drink can lighten my mood, loosen my inhibitions and compliment a meal. Beer, wine and cocktails all have a special place in my culinary canon, both for the memories that I have of foods paired with drinks and for the influence they have on my cooking, whether that be making a dish with alcohol in the recipe, barbecuing a chicken with a PBR crammed in its cavity, or borrowing flavor combinations back and forth between food and cocktail recipes.