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Brian's
Belly grills with beer
One
fine summer day not too long ago, three arguably overweight guys were
sitting around a picnic table enjoying lunch.
As
usual, they were enjoying their meal with a frosty brew. "Beer" they
though, "you enhance our food and our lives- is there anything you
can't do?" Apparently not, because these three now run Brian's
Belly, a website for the beer lover and home beercooks.
Brian's
Belly is a place for guys that know how to fire up a grill in their
backyard and know how to boil water but never strayed too far from
the cooking basics or the frozen food section at the grocery store.
The
site emerged as a cornucopia of the all meaty, cheesy, frosty goodness
that founders David Lauterbach, Brian Bailey and Mark Higgins felt
were representative of men who enjoy grilling and beer. Along with
countless friends, writers and affiates to their website, they have
formed a group known as the Belly Buddies.
"We envisioned a site where a guy could go when he wanted a good,
tasty, simple recipe. We also envisioned a site where we could make
enough money to support our drinking habit," says site producer David
Lauterbach.
"But back to the recipe thing. Not everyone instinctively knows how
to cook, but everyone has the ability to cook when it's broken down
into the basic steps and explained. It may seem obvious to some people
what to do when they read 'first, caramelize the onions' but certainly
not to most- so we try to break it down for them. And we try to keep
it real and keep it funny... most recipes won't yield a boring meal,
but you wouldn't know that from the way they're usually written- so
we make them fun to read."
Yeah"
adds Belly Buddy Mark Higgins.
"We
like to joke that every single one of the recipes on our site has
beer as an ingredient," adds website namesake Brian Bailey. "We will
list a six pack in the ingredients but five of them are to be consumed
by the chef while they're cooking, only one will make it into the
chili."
New
York City's outer boroughs may seem like a strange place to find three
guys that know anything about deep frying a turkey or southern BBQ,
but they don't let location stop them.
Brian explains: "As the site has expanded, we've been finding buddies
all over the country that have the same likes and dislikes when it
comes to beer, food and humor."
The
bodacious beer reviews and cutting-edge articles found on their tongue-in-cheek
website earn many kudos from laymen and professionals alike. But the
boys insist that they aren't letting all the popularity brought on
by their website go to their heads.
"Yeah"
adds Belly Buddy Mark Higgins.
"We
insist that we aren't letting all the popularity go to our heads,"
says Dave as he takes a swig of imported German beer from his solid
gold stein. "We are continually learning how to cook- right along
with the visitors that come to our site."
"When
a professional chef emails us and says he thinks we're doing a great
job, we feel great," says Brian. "When the same chef wants to write
something for us and help add to our knowledge base, we feel even
better... we know that when we add his article we're going to learn
something and teach something at the same time. We know that the site
will do someone else some good... and that's what it's all about.
Oh, and of course the more people that visit the site, the more money
we can make
to buy beer." Affiliates include fur-bikini clad ChillinVillins, the
Tabasco Store, and Hammocks.com. Such is the life of Brian's Belly.
"Yeah"
adds Belly Buddy Mark Higgins, "Yeah indeed."
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contributed by David Lauterbach, July 2002
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