Beer Can Chicken          Recipes / Grillin' Page / Back Home

So, you thought the Bird Sauce chicken on the grill was good?  Yeah it is, but lately we've become obsessed with the latest rage - Beer Can Chicken.  With the Bird Sauce, you cook thighs or legs.  With the Beer Can Chicken, you cook the whole bird.  We've never liked white meat before, because it always comes out so dry and tasteless, but not so with this procedure.

1.  Thaw and clean one whole young fryer, about a 4 pound chicken, removing the giblets package from the cavity. Rinse the chicken inside and out and blot it dry with paper towels.  Cut the remainder of the neck out to make an opening at the top of the cavity.

2.  Generously apply a rub-on seasoning to the inside and outside of the chicken, rubbing it into the skin.  (We like Chef Paul Prudhomme's Poultry Magic)

3.  Open a beer and somehow discard half of it.  (You gotta love a recipe that includes, "Drink half a beer.")  Make extra holes in the top of the can with a church key.

4.  Put a bunch of the dry rub into the can, along with some worchestershire and minced onion and/or garlic.  Keep it simple.  The beer and the rub by itself is wonderful enough.

5.  Position the bird on top of the can, with the can up its butt.  Use its legs to form a sort of tripod, so it's standing upright, with most of the weight on the can.  Put it all on a cookie sheet or one of those disposable aluminum pans.  (This is to catch all the drips, to keep from messing up your grill real bad.)

6.  IMPORTANT- seal the chicken's neck-hole with a carved onion or potato.  This allows the steam from the beer to cook the chicken from the inside while it's cooking all over.  If you don't do this, you'll have just another dried-up chicken when it comes off the grill.

7.  Cook it for probably more than hour on medium/low heat on the gas grill.  Start using a meat thermometer to check if the thigh reads 180 degrees after an hour.  Check it often toward the end to make sure you don't overcook it.  180 degrees is the target, and if you overcook it, you'll be sad.

CAUTION: That's all there is to it, but be careful when removing the chicken from the grill.  Don't spill the hot beer on yourself as you extract the beer can from the chicken's butt if you don't use a store-bought stand.

Note:  This procedure has become so popular that the WalMart sells a stand you can use.  You put the beer can in the stand, and then put the chicken on top of that.  It's much easier, but you can just as well use only the can to hold the chicken up if you're careful.  Below is a pic of two chickens cooking- one with a stand and one without (the WalMart we shopped at in Florida only had one stand in stock at the time.  It was a vacation thing...).  The one on the right is on a stand, the one on the left is sitting on the can.