This weekend I had a go at cooking Beer Butt Chicken, a rather comical but actually very real recipe in which you sit a chicken on top of a can of beer and cook it, resulting in beautifully moist meat. It's a bit weird but I'd heard that it works, so I decided to give it a shot. I won't go into the recipe specifics, because you can google the name and get a million variations, and I didn't really use any one of them.

I used Old Speckled Hen as my beer. Because of the size of my chicken, I cut the can in half, and drank half the beer. I think that I had a little too much beer in there, actually - most recipes suggest half a can but they also imply that the chicken will support the whole can, so I guess I should have used more like a quarter, or a third. Recipes vary on how much you should add to the beer, so I decided to go for two garlic cloves. I also chose not to season the bird much, because Glynn Christian tells me that you only flavour the skin with that. I avoided stuffing or rubbing it at all so that I could get at the raw beery flavour, to see how the method affected the roasting process.

Oh yes, and one more note: I cooked it for 20 minutes per 500g. Most recipes I've seen tell you to add another 20 minutes on top of that, but Glynn says not to, and How To Cook Without Recipes is my bible, so that's what I did. I didn't do any turning or any nonsense like that, although I did have to take the tray out briefly to add the roast potatoes.

So how did it go?

The flavour first, I guess. It was a good example of a roast, for sure, and the meat was moist, but it wasn't flavoured in any detectable way by the beer or garlic. Maybe if you added plenty of paprika you would get something out of that. Apparently the ingredients in beer really do something to moisten the bird that wouldn't happen if you just used water - I would quite like to test that theory. To be honest, though, I suspect you can achieve the same flavour with a regular roast, turned a few times throughout cooking.

The method itself is easy to set up - just sit the chicken on - and easy to get in the oven, and you don't have to turn or baste the chicken at all, but when it comes out of the oven the trouble starts. You have an extremely hot tray, a red hot bird that falls apart to the touch, and a searing metal can to remove from it. I laid the tray upon my stove, then moved the bird off using oven gloves, and then managed to knock it over, spilling beer everywhere, before lifting it with an oven glove in my left hand and using a teatowel to grab hold of the can. In terms of ease, I'd say this method is pretty poor. Perhaps if you used two people you could make your life easier.

In conclusion, it was a fun recipe to try out, and it did make for a good roast, but I'm not convinced that it's worth the hassle: I'll have to try a few more roast chicken styles before I make any final judgements.