Beer Can Turkey

After college, I lived in a rental house with a large kitchen and many friends. As Thanksgiving approached, we planned a feast of every dish imaginable: mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, marshmallow yams, gravy, stuffing, two kinds of cranberry sauce, green bean mushroom soup casserole, jello salad, rolls, cornbread, beans, pickles, olives, ants-on-a-log, and other things I don’t remember—all centered around a 24-pound turkey intended to provide leftovers for days.

The bird was too big to put the top on the roasting pan, but that's ok, I made a tent of aluminum foil for it. This was the era of the Beer Can Chicken fad. You take a whole chicken, remove the giblets, and slide a beer can into the cavity to distribute the heat around the inside as it bakes....

...so it was only logical to make a Beer Can Turkey.

For a bird that size, a regular can of beer is be too small, so I got a Foster's Lager - 750 milliliters (3/4 Quart). I slid it carefully into the cavity, put the aluminum foil tent over the bird, and completed all other preparations. When the oven hit 450 degrees F, I slid that roasting pan in, set the timer for 30 minutes (after which I would turn the heat down to 325), and turned around to talk more and chop vegetables.

The happy fragrance of roasting turkey filled the kitchen as everyone chattered and chopped and went in and out of doors on a relatively sunny last Thursday in November. I was not surprised when the timer went off—DING!

But as I turned to the oven…

When making Beer Can Turkey, did you know that you should DRINK THE BEER FIRST?

Foster’s Lager, at 450 degrees, blew its pop top and jetted superheated beer into the turkey flesh. Newton’s Laws took over, thrusting the can in an equal but opposite direction, bringing most of the aluminum foil tent with it.

BAM! it slammed open the oven door.

WHOOSH! it rocketed past my shins just below my cargo shorts—singeing off a great many hairs—and disappeared through the open screen door.

The cats howled and ran for cover. The rest of us just stared for a moment. There was surprisingly little beer on the floor and, really, nothing to do but put fresh foil on the bird, slide it back into the oven, and get out the mop.

I learned three things from this:
1. When trying a new thing, do better research;
2. When you inject beer steam inside a turkey breast, you get a tender and flavorful result;
3. When I tell ANY of my friends this RIDICULOUS story, they find it completely plausible that I might do something so absurd.

I am not sure how I feel about that last one 😉 Happy holidays!