Beer and grilling?

he combination of drinking beer and grilling meat is one of those quintessential, all-American things. Everyone is familiar with the images of sucking back typical American shit beer while grilling some nicely marbled steaks, slabs of salmon, lamb, chicken or whatnot. Everyone is also familiar with the somewhat overrated health risks involved with grilling meat, too. Right? If not, let's refresh your memory.

Grilling with beer is funSeveral studies have been done in the past which concluded that grilling/charring muscle meats (cow, chicken, fish, etc.) create these nasty, little cancer-causing guys called heterocyclic amines (HCAs). There's also that damn benzopyrene, which is the nasty buildup of fat that drips onto hot coals, then evaporates back up to the meat and sticks to it. We've even read that when a pound of meat is grilled over charcoal, it can contain as much carcinogenic benzopyrene as 300 cigarettes! Of course, all this research was performed on warm, innocent little bunnies, kittens and cute mice.