Where to buy: Specialty markets with a Latin American- or Caribbean-leaning stock

Malta is a carbonated malt beverage, and not in a Zima or Olde English way. What the hell it tastes like: Malta lands somewhere at the intersection of brown ale, molasses, and unsweetened cola. Even though the beverage itself is sweet, your mouth might register it as not sweet. It has thickness, like milk, and its carbonation compares to a Coke that’s been open for a few hours. This Malta Goya, out of Puerto Rico, pours like a dark, strong ale, molasses brown and almost as dark as a porter. It smells, depending on your nose, anywhere from heavily malted chocolate to an earthy, beer-soaked molasses cookie. Definitely a degree of difficulty to drink, malta’s lack of aggressive carbonation really throws your brain for a loop. Basically, malta is unfermented wort, or beer before beer becomes beer.

And all this is why it is the world’s perfect beverage for carnitas tacos, Cuban sandwiches, and barbeque, even though you’re 10 times likelier to find it in a pupuseria. Malta Goya garners the most shelf space, but Colombia’s Pony Malta also gets around; look for the red label with the white pony. Malta is the secret ingredient for my pull-apart pork, because stock comes off too savory, and coke is too sweet for filling the crock pot. When you cook a pork butt down with beer, you risk too bitter a result, but malta and onions produces a caramelized character smack in the middle of all these things.

Malta makes great liquid to use when sautéing mushrooms or onions and cooks down to something similar to Marsala, but far earthier. Reduce it as you would wine and you end up with something to slather on your steak, and it single handedly changed the way I felt about liver and onions. Add it when making caramel, chocolate cake, or any other nutty and malty dessert, but you will freak out when you try it with vanilla ice cream, as a float or a milkshake. It’s an instant malted, without that powdery residue getting in the way of all the creamy goodness. Malta is low in sodium and rich in B vitamins, so as you chase your pork tacos with a thick, beery frosty you can think about all that flavor with only a wee guilty conscience.

Maggie Savarino Dutton is an industry veteran who has played bartender, sommelier and line cook and who now consults. She writes "Search & Distill," which appears every Wednesday in the Seattle Weekly, and maintains The Wine Offensive, her blog about wine, food, and anything else that might be discussed over the bar.

"Point of Purchase" photograph by Roadsidepictures via Flickr (Creative Commons), "Pantry" photograph by Áslaug Snorradóttir.