The Quesale Dip
Beer Cheese Dip is quick, easy to make and seriously addicting. Perfect for a delicious party snack! I like to call it by its mashed up name: Quesale.
The Quesale Dip
Jump to RecipeYou guys really were speaking my language this week in the reader poll. You voted for something with beer in it which seems very appropriate given that it’s football season.
The nice thing about this Beer Cheese Dip recipe (besides that it’s some sort of crazy mash up between beer and queso) is that it only requires one beer so you’ll have five (or 11 or 29) left over to consume!
You could serve this Beer Cheese Dip (quesale) with a wide variety of things. Chips would be good, but I think hard pretzels are best.
Quesale Dip
Ingredients
- 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
- 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
- 1 ale beer not hoppy
- 8 ounces cheddar cheese grated
- 1 teaspoon hot sauce
- ½ teaspoon salt
- Scallions for garnish
- Pretzels for serving
Instructions
- Pour ale beer into a large cup and stir to remove as much carbonation as possible.
- In a medium pot over medium heat, add butter and melt. Once melted, add flour and whisk to combine. Cook for 2-3 minutes until roux turns a light tan color.
- Slowly whisk in beer. It should thicken almost immediately as you whisk it in. If it’s a little watery, continue to cook the sauce until it is the consistency of a light gravy. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
- Add cheese and whisk until melted. Season with salt and hot sauce.
- Pour into a large bowl and garnish with finely chopped scallions. Serve immediately with hard pretzels.
Nutrition
Did you make this?
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Beer Cheese Dip
The Basics
The base of this dip is a simple roux (cooked flour and butter), but then it veers pretty seriously from a traditional queso dip. While normally queso would whisk in dairy, like milk or cream, into the roux, I opted for beer.
There are a couple things to note if you are using beer for something like this. First, do NOT use a very hoppy beer. It will very much over-power the other flavors. Go for a nice mellow lager or brown ale. You don’t want anything really bitter. (I kind of screwed this up.)
Second, carbonation is not your friend. It’ll make the sauce harder to whisk because it’ll create a bubbly mess. So the first thing you should do is pour your beer into a large cup and stir it a few times to remove as much carbonation as possible.
When it comes to the cheese for this dip, I used a nice cheddar, but honestly you could get away with almost any cheese as long as it has some flavor and melts well.
Cheddar is a good bet though!
Now let’s get to the fun part…
Making the Beer Cheese Dip
Once you get the hang of making a roux, you can whip one together very quickly, but the first time you do it, it can be a little intimidating.
Start by putting a medium pot over medium heat. Melt the butter and then whisk in the flour until it’s smooth. It will bubble and start to turn a light tan color after a few minutes which means it’s ready to go.
Then you just start slowly whisking in the beer.
Here’s my best version of a whisking action shot.
Pour the beer slowly and whisk constantly so no lumps form in the pot.
When all the beer is whisked in, the mixture should be like a light gravy. If it’s very thin, return it to the heat for a few minutes and it should continue to thicken.
Once it’s the right consistency (light gravy) stir in the grated cheese!
When the cheese is completely melted, season the dip with salt and a good amount of hot sauce.
Then serve it up with some chopped scallions and lots of pretzels!
This dip was seriously addicting, but I found my version to be a bit too bitter because I used an IPA which I wouldn’t recommend.
Grab a nice brown ale or something and make this for your next game day.
One thing you might want to mention is that bags of preshredded cheese will make your queso (or mac’n’cheese) grainy, so buy the block and shred it. It took me a long time to figure this out. Unless you know of a preshredded cheese that doesn’t do that??
I’m not sure what you mean by a “hoppy” beer–I’m a consumer, not a connoisseur. ;-) Would Shiner, Killian’s Irish Red, Amberbock, or Sam Adams work? (Those are the beers we typically have around.)
Excellent point on the pre-shredded! They toss the cheese in a starch mixture to make sure the strands stay separated. It makes the queso grainy if you use it. So yes… shred your own. :)
On the beer, some beers use way more hops then others and it results in a bitter beer. If you’ve ever tried an IPA (Dogfish head 60 Minute is a good one), then you’ll immediately know what I mean.
Out of the beers you listed, I think Shiner or Killians would be best in the dip, but none of them are particularly high on the bitterness scale (I looked them up) so you should be okay with any of them. Good luck!
If you freeze a block of cheddar & then defrost it crumbles.
Thanks so much for the info on pre-shredded cheeses. I had no idea!
When we make beer cheese soup, sometimes popcorn is added as a garnish. I don’t see why popcorn couldn’t be used with the dip. Pour some dip over popcorn. Might be a little messy, but I bet it is good.
Sounds good to me!
Reminds me of my fondue recipes(from the 1970’s…)
Remindsme of my mothers cheese rarebit from the 1940’s…
We have several beer cheese soup recipes that we love but I don’t think we’ve ever made a dip. Great post, Nick.
Made this for a halftime snack during the game this week – delicious!! We used rice flour and needed 3tbs instead of 2 for the roux. I’m don’t think it affected the end result though – it was creamy and so yummy. Our only problem was that we ran out of chips while eating it! :)
Nice! Glad you guys liked it. GO DUX.
Sounds great, but IPAs are incredibly hoppy, so if the original recipe wants a not very hoppy beer, then a lucky u IPA would not be the one. Maybe a pilsner?
Hey Gmoney… right. I specified in the recipe not hoppy because I first made it with Lucky U and didn’t like the hoppy flavor in the dip (too bitter). I photographed it with that beer, but wrote not to use it. Hope that makes sense!
Cheers!
If you were to add a small amount of milk at the start then cheese then the beer at the very end off the heat then the bitterness wouldn’t become an issue.