When I first moved to Chicago from North Carolina, I was amazed at the variety of sausages. There were polish sausages, bratwurst, bockwurst, Italian; sweet and hot, among others. At that time, the sausage that I knew best was knackwurst which is smoked like a hot dog, only thicker and made from all beef. When I visited a German-style butcher shop in the city, I was intrigued by the uncooked, unsmoked sausages and couldn’t wait to taste the “beer brats” as they are called in Chicago and the Midwest.
I thought that my sausage ignorance was just because I was from the South but often, even today, when I mention my love of beer brats, people respond with a “what’s that?” Back then, I worked with a woman who was from an old German family in Wisconsin and she schooled me on the correct way to make beer brats. She explained that you grilled the uncooked bratwurst first over indirect heat until the sausage was burnished brown and cooked through. Then you remove them from the grill and place them in a simmering pot of beer. She made sure that I understood that most people make the mistake of simmering the sausages first in beer and then grilling them. If you do that, the flavor of the uncooked sausages melts into the simmering beer leaving the sausages tasteless, and it is almost impossible to get good grill marks on the boiled sausages.
Wanting to make sure what she said was correct, I tried it both ways and she was 100 percent right. Even though most people boil the sausages and then grill them, a taste test proves her theory right. You must grill first and simmer second for optimum flavor, texture and caramelization. Besides a better flavor, this method is more convenient.
You can grill the brats in advance and keep them warm in simmering beer for 1-2 hours. You can even reheat any leftovers the next day or make them a day in advance for a tailgate. Just be sure to simmer the hot sausages in the beer right after you take them off the grill and then cool them and store them in the refrigerator in the simmering liquid.