Each recipe in Salad Daze is paired with a beverage and a song—food, music, and booze all being integral to the Hot Knives worldview. To further demonstrate their pairing skills, we asked Alex Brown and Evan George to put together a playlist combining their favorite beers with their favorite Northwest songs.
Glass Candy's "Beatific" Deschutes Brewery's Mirror Mirror
This post-mortem/post-modern disco tag team is a gateway party drug for punk rockers wary of raves. Deschutes' Mirror Pond was in many ways our gateway beer: We slammed 12-packs of it and cooked with it. To this day, a black and tan made with it and an Obsidian Stout gives us Mt. Hood house-party flashbacks. The only thing more beatific: the sickly sweet, double-strength Mirror Mirror.
White Rainbow's "Warm Clicked Fruit" Captured by Porches' Invasive Species IPA
We first tasted home-brewed Captured by Porches when a friend brought a bottle of Invasive Species IPA in their checked baggage. We first heard White Rainbow's Prism of Eternal Now the exact same way. Both are airy dreamscapes in their particular medium, and are thankfully underrated.
YACHT's "I Walked Alone" Stone Brewing's La Citrueille Celeste de Citracado
YACHT's new solitary-sounding single is actually about strength in numbers, and Stone Brewing's collaboration beer series is the pinnacle of triangular power. Their newest, La Citrueille Celeste de Citracado—a collaboration with Seattle's Elysian Brewing and Orange County's the Bruery—flies the freak flag of threesomes. It—and it alone—is the spiced pumpkin ale we want to drink this fall.
Nirvana's "Ain't It a Shame" Elysian Brewing's Loser
At its (aching) heart, Nirvana ruled most when they sounded like a gleeful teenager wielding a pitch axe in the backyard. We feel this irreverence in Elysian's 7 percent ABV pale ale Loser, which is kinda like a can of fizzy Olympia beer consumed while high on an eight ball.
Bikini Kill's "Jet Ski" Rogue Ales' Double Dead Guy Ale
No surprise here that Kathleen Hanna circa mid-1990s sounds as threatening to a dude's junk as Rogue's Double Dead Guy sounds to your liver. "No more candy for you" is right, you're getting a fistful of hops and malts whether you like it or not.
White Fang's "Feeling Shitty" Beer Valley Brewing's Black Flag Imperial Stout
We hear on good intel that the White Fang dudes do not drink water. Ever. When our favorite thrash-thugs get thirsty, they slam this thick-as-blood black-as-dark-matter stout until their amps explode and they puke on your shoes. If you ask them about any of this, they'll deny it and punch your dog.
Sleater-Kinney's "Turn It On" Hair of the Dog Brewing's Fred from the Wood
We had a "superfan" moment when we once saw a rock star walk by us at the Saturday Portland Farmers Market. Not Carrie, Corin, or Janet; it was the head brewer of Hair of the Dog, whose Fred from the Wood ale we've collected, well, doggedly. Lining up a bottle of every vintage from 2000 to 2010 feels like staring at these indie rock goddesses' discography.
Satan's Pilgrims' "Burnin' Rubber" Rogue Ales' Old Crustacean Barleywine 1997
We bought an eight-ounce bottle of Old Crustacean Barleywine, circa 1997, from a curmudgeonly beer collector's private stash and when we finally popped it this year, a crusty surf-wave reverbed riffs through our veins. Likewise, Satan's Pilgrims belongs in the disc changer of a red convertible burning down a dark highway.
Rob Walmart's "Cherry's House" Cascade Brewing's Cherry Gold Yeller
Local yokel weirdos pushing buttons 'til the dials hit 11 and fall off. That describes both this small brewery's approach to the wild fruit lambic with their Cherry Gold Yeller, and the thugs behind Rob Walmart's sweet-and-sour sonic squirts, whom we once had the pleasure to join on top of a party van procession down by the river.
