By Matt Mueller Culture Editor Published Mar 27, 2018 at 10:16 AM

"Bar Month" at OnMilwaukee is brought to you by Miller Brewing Company, calling Milwaukee home since 1855. For the entire month of March, we're serving up fun articles on bars, clubs and beverages – including guides, the latest trends, bar reviews, the results of our Best of Bars poll and more. Grab a designated driver and dive in!

Milwaukee may not be known for its hot weather, but that doesn't mean that the Brew City can't bring the heat – namely from the kitchen. That's why Senior Developer Nick "Power Palate" Barth and Pop Culture Editor Matt "Powder Puff Palate" Mueller are on a journey, burning their buds and torching their tongues across town to find the city's spiciest dishes. Grab your fork and a fire extinguisher – this is Burning Through Brew City.

Habanero-infused tequila

Nick Barth's kitchen
735 N. Water St., Suite 1120
(414) 272-0557

onmilwaukee.com

Welcome back to another Burning Through Brew City bonus, a little detour on our quest to find the spiciest foods in Milwaukee. We promise we'll be back on the regular road shortly – but first, we had to stretch our legs to make the long, arduous trek to one of the most mythical, legendary culinary hot spots in the entire city. 

Nick Barth's kitchen.

There, my esteemed colleague has been cooking up something special all month long: a pepper-infused booze – because it's Bar Month at OnMilwaukee and also because Nick just enjoys eating and drinking things that are slowly yet surely turning his digestive system into a charred wasteland. To each their own. 

Now, when I think of infused beverages or alcohols, I think of some trendy highfalutin bar with $20 drinks that I can't afford mixing up cocktails with elixirs that sound like they were bubbled up in some evil scientist's dark, stormy lab. But as it turns out, infusing your favorite liquors with some bonus flavor and giving your everyday cocktail an extra kick is easy enough to do right in your own kitchen – or Nick's kitchen, in this case.

To create his habanero-infused tequila, for instance, Nick simply chopped up a dozen peppers, put them in a decanter, poured over a bunch of tequila to soak up the spicy flavor and waited three weeks before sampling some of his homemade Fireball tequila. Easy!

But would drinking this capsaicin-crazed concoction be as easy? Let's find out:

 

Matt Mueller Culture Editor

As much as it is a gigantic cliché to say that one has always had a passion for film, Matt Mueller has always had a passion for film. Whether it was bringing in the latest movie reviews for his first grade show-and-tell or writing film reviews for the St. Norbert College Times as a high school student, Matt is way too obsessed with movies for his own good.

When he's not writing about the latest blockbuster or talking much too glowingly about "Piranha 3D," Matt can probably be found watching literally any sport (minus cricket) or working at - get this - a local movie theater. Or watching a movie. Yeah, he's probably watching a movie.