Kathy - the Guiness Stout Beef Stew looks great and I would like to make it for Sunday - one day before St. Patrick's.  Some of my guests cannot take alcohol so I'm wondering if it will 'cook away' leaving only the taste.

Many thanks,
John

Hi John, the general thinking is that the alcohol will cook away.  This article says a certain amount will in fact remain.  
If you choose to make this recipe with all beef broth and no stout, omit the prunes as well.  They will make the stew too sweet!
Or you could try my other Beef Stew video recipe and substitute the wine for beef broth.
Cheers!

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This is an interesting recipe, espcially the prunes. I've never heard of prunes being used in a stew, seems a little odd to me. Stews have never struck me as something that needs sweetness (but then i've never used beer in a stew), so I'm interested to see how this tastes.

For a non-alcoholic version you could substitute O'Douls for the Guinness. America's Test Kitchen says it is a good cooking beer.

I'm going to have to try this today.  My current recipe is pretty similar save for the prunes.  Really curious to see what they add to the stew.  I would have never thought to include them on my own.

Substituting O'Doul's for the Guinness will work in the sense that it will make a stew, but an alcohol-free lager will not taste anything like a rich, dark stout like Guinness. An hour and a half of simmering will certainly cook out almost all of the alcohol from the stew, so if your guest is concerned about alcohol remaining in active amounts then you'll be fine. However, if your guest cannot tolerate any quantity of alcohol -- for example, for religious reasons -- then you're not going to be able to accomodate that. You simply can't ever remove all traces of ethanol from the stew.

MikeW rightly notes that the alcohol in the beer will lower the simmering temperature until it is gone. This is in fact one of the reasons the alcohol is useful, so cooking it out in advance (or switching to a non-alcoholic broth) will change the cooking slightly, making the meat a little less tender by raising the initial cooking temperature.

While it's true that "some" alcohol remains, it's not enough to be concerned with. It's criminally easy to play games with percentages if you want to frighten someone. The mass media does it all the time to rile people up. But, if you look at the various charts available, then do a little math, the numbers get vanishingly small and insignificant. 

For instance, this recipe looks like it's making about 2 quarts. That's 64 ounces. 12 of those (or 18%) are beer, which contains roughly 5% alcohol. So, now the beer is diluted by a 5:1 ratio, meaning our entire stew is at about 1% alcohol. It gets simmered for an hour and a half, which according to the chart linked to earlier, reduces the amount of alcohol by 80%, leaving 20% in the recipe. 20% of 1% is .2%. 

Since someone might actually only eat a 16oz. plate of the stew, they're only going to get a little over 6% of that .2% of alcohol that's left, so now we're only talking about .012% alcohol content in a serving. That's a little over 1/100 of 1%. That's another way of saying "non-existent", although to be technical, there is "some" alcohol left. Not nearly as much as there is in "alcohol-free" beer (O'Doul's is at .4%), but "some", nonetheless.

So, don't worry. Make the stew as described, and enjoy!

What a fascinating take on stew. This is going straight onto my To Try list. I bet I'll love it. Thanks.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Now, to help you understand what that means to your body:

Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) can be roughly estimated using a mathematical approach. It can be useful for calculating a BAC level that is not currently testable, or a level that may be present in the future. While there are several ways to calculate a BAC, one of the most effective ways is to simply measure the total amount of alcohol consumed divided by the total amount of water in the body—effectively giving the percent alcohol per volume water in the blood. The total water weight of an individual can be calculated by multiplying his or her body weight by their percent water. Gender plays an important role in the total amount of water that a person has. In general, men have a higher percent of water per pound (58%) than women (49%).  For example, a 150 pound woman would have a total amount of water of 73.5 pounds (150 x .49). For easiest calculations, this weight should be in kilograms, which can be easily converted by multiplying the total pounds by 0.45359237, because 1 pound = 0.45359237 kilograms.

73.5 pounds body water = 33.3390392 kilograms body water

33.3390392 kilograms body water = 33,339.0392 mL of body water

So to calculate the BAC of a 150 pound woman after eating one serving of stew:

Eating 1 of 4 servings - (0.75767383 mL ethanol / 33,339.0392 mL body water) * 100 = 0.00227263247% BAC

1/20th of what you’d get if you drank all the beer directly
1/26th of what it would take to become legally impaired to drive
1/35th of what it would take to become legally drunk to drive

Eating 1 of 5 servings - (0.606139064 mL ethanol / 33,339.0392 mL body water) * 100 = 0.00181810598% BAC

1/25th of what you’d get if you drank all the beer directly
1/33rd of what it would take to become legally impaired to drive
1/44th of what it would take to become legally drunk to drive

Eating 1 of 6 servings - (0.505115887 ml ethanol / 33,339.0392 mL body water) * 100 = 0.00151508831% BAC

1/30th of what you’d get if you drank all the beer directly
1/40th of what it would take to become legally impaired to drive
1/53rd of what it would take to become legally drunk to drive

Cooked this saturday night.. It went fast.. The flavor of this stew is amazing esp considering there really isnt much to it!

was wondering how much of the amounts are needed of each ingredients. i put a the whole broth container in and 1 whole beer.

Well, I made this stew last night and it couldn't have been easier! Instructions were super easy to follow (thanks to Kathy's great photos). It's a breeze to prepare, and most of the time is just spent in waiting time to cook, which is really no big deal since I happen to work from home. The whole thing was cooking while I was on a long business meeting.

It was totally delicious and my hubby was thrilled with it and has already asked when we're making it again!

Thanks Kathy for another great and easy recipe.

Lisa Freeman