I have been making beer for a long time.  Over 20 years in fact.  I have even won a gold medal with one of my beers.  Not only that, but I have taught a few people who have one gold medals with their beers.  One of those people is my brother.

Now, one of the important rules of beer making is that your brewing pot should not be used for anything else except for making beer.  When I told this to my brother, he gave me a look that said, “What difference should it make what I use the pot for?”  I then explained to him, “If you use your brew pot for tomato sauce, how do you think your next beer will taste?”  (for those who don’t know, tomato sauce is notoriously hard to clean off of a pot.  Try cooking tomato sauce in a pot, clean it, and then boil water in it.  The water will taste like diluted tomato sauce). Now, my brother likes to cook, so he knew what I was talking about, and he walked away satisfied with my answer.

A couple of weeks later, I was talking to my brother when he suddenly told me that he now understood that laws of kashrut that say not to use the same pot or pan to cook both milk and meat.  Now, it was my turn to give that look of, “What are you talking about?”  He answered my look by saying that just as he should not cook tomato sauce in his brew pot because it would ruin the taste of the beer, he can now see how cooking a steak in a pan that was used for a dairy dish would import the taste of the dairy into the meat.  And since this he already knew that mixing milk and meat was not kosher, he could now see why you don’t use the same kitchen implements for both meat and dairy.

Pretty cool way to explain and understand the separation of meat and dairy dishes and utensils, don’t you think?

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.