There's quite a bit of lore surrounding beer-can chicken, and for good reason. Just look at that burnished mahogany bird. The steam from the brew flavors the meat and keeps it moist. The can props the chicken up, so it roasts evenly--no scorching, no flipping, no stressing. And you get to drink some beer. We're believers.
Ingredients
4 Servings
1
1
2
Special Equipment
Preparation
Step 1
Pour out (or drink) half of beer.
Step 2
Prepare grill for high, indirect heat and fit with grill pan (for a charcoal grill, bank coals on 1 side of grill and put drip pan on empty side; for a gas grill, leave 1 burner turned off and place drip pan over unlit burner). Add water to pan to a depth of ½ inch.
Step 3
Season chicken with 4-3-2-1 Spice Rub. Place cavity of chicken, legs pointing down, onto open can so that it supports chicken upright. Place can, with chicken, on grill over indirect heat (and above drip pan). Grill chicken, covered, until cooked through and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part of thigh registers 165°, 45–60 minutes. (If using charcoal, you may need to add more to maintain heat.) Let chicken rest 10 minutes before carving. Serve with pan drippings.
Wing tip
Step 4
Use a can opener to remove the entire top of the beer can (pour out half). It'll maximize the boozy vapors that make it to the chicken.
Nutrition Per Serving
Leave a Review
Reviews (141)
Back to TopI found out the hard way that this recipe was missing the cooking temperature. It listed what the final temperature of the meat should be (165F) and how long to cook but it was missing this essential element. Time + Temperature = Final result. I looked up other sources and found it to be 350F but make sure you figure this out up front. I didn't read the recipe thoroughly and cooked it at 165F for 20-30min before discovering the error. This dried out the chicken more than normal.
Mark
Jacksonville, FL
7/7/2023
If you only know one grilling recipe, make it this one. Dead simple and amazing every single time. There's plenty of room to play around and little room to go wrong.
CaseySull
San Francisco
7/5/2020
I made this recipe on a gas grill, I missed the part about taking the entire can top off...oops! However, the recipe was great! I cooked the chicken over the heat as opposed to indirect heat. It came out perfect. I am not someone that follows a recipe to a tee, I more use it a a guideline so the chicken was on the grill for about an hour and rested for 10 min.
Anonymous
Connecticut
12/22/2019
OK, so having finished the recipe and eaten it all, here are my thoughts: This rub is very tasty and the chicken moist and delicious. However, the time allotted was not enough to throughly cook a bird in a small range of the suggested weight. That said, I take some responsibility. My chicken was on the verge of still being frozen when I applied the rub, abd for whatever reason I put the chicken to the right side of the grill, and ran the leftmost two burners, while leaving the right one off. That meant the heat wasn't even around the bird. Had I put it in the middle, with the left and right burners on, that would have probably gotten it done closer to under an hour. In the end, I wound up taking the mostly-cooked chicken apart, off the grill, determining it needed some more time and direct-grilling the pieces. This left them a little more carboniferous, but still very good. My main issue here is still the weird directions around the pan of water, which then becomes a dripping pan. The instructions around the "grill pan" which is later called a "drip pan" are confusing. For that reason I'm leaving this one at three stars. Tasty bird, but the recipe needs more attention to details, or maybe some pics. Thanks!
Benjamin Singer
Toronto
6/26/2018
This is preliminary as I'm still cooking, but my bird is reading nowhere near cooked temps after an hour on indirect, with two gas burners on high -- and my BBQ thermometer reading 500 (likely inaccurate though). Also I'd love to know if anyone has tried, as suggested, serving it with drippings from a pan that was filled with a 1/2-inch of water to start. Isn't that kind of gross?
Anonymous
Toronto
6/23/2018