Not Your Ordinary Sausage, Made With Craft Beer & Heritage Pork

In my next life (actually, this one would be fine too) I’d like a career in food product development. Imagine, tasting and opining on morsels to ensure wholesome and delicious products destined for public consumption. Please, please feed me more. Goodness, I could do that …

Which is, more or less, what crossed my mind as I sat with brewers, product developers and marketing people the other day at Clocktower Brew Pub in Westboro, by any measure a pioneer in hyper-local craft brewing in this city, to taste a new sausage on the pub menu created by Denis Arsenault of Denis Gourmet Sausages fame using heritage Berkshire pork from Peasants’ Craft Farm near Cornwall, Ont., and Clocktower’s own Bytown Brown ale. Let me confide, it was darned delicious. And I completely love it when folks put beer on their ingredient list.

Recall that Denis and his wife, Becky Conrad, in 2004 embarked on a five-month backpacking trip through Thailand, Loas and Vietnam, where they took cooking lessons and fell in love with the flavours only to return home to Ottawa to make their own unique sausages — first, as a fundraising project at First Avenue Public School (where Denis was a teacher), then for retail sale. The links were an instant hit.

To read the rest of the story, please go to: Ottawa Citizen