Go to the Article: Tips & Tricks: Beer Bath Brats
Yum! This is a great idea...for your beer bath, did you use whole grain mustard, mustard seed, or the pickled mustard seed?
Like anything, these will be much better finished on the grill. Before sous vide I boiled my brats (pierce the skins first a few times with a fork) the night before in a similar bath of beer, whole grain mustard, onions, pickle juice, whatever. Adapt this for your Joule. Let them soak overnight in the liquid, and the next day throw them on the grill until they develop a little color.
With this cooking method, I would imagine that the sausages would lose a lot of their salt (and therefore their flavor) to the beer/cooking liquid unless salt was added to it. Kenji confirmed this to be the case when he did his investigation of sous-vide cooked sausages and added beer to the bag. I think you'd get much better results with this method (especially considering you're not doing anything to add Maillard flavors) by adding 1.5 - 2% the weight of the beer in salt, to match the ratio of the salt in the sausages.
Grant is totally right here about cooking fresh sausages in the 160's °F. Sausages that are boiled get very dry. I totally agree with you about grilling them at least a little, tho. If you pour a line of charcoal across the width or length of your grill and pour a few briquets or lumps of lit charcoal on one end, you'll have enough heat to brown up a few sausages at a time for hours.
Salting the beer produces great results.
In a part of Germany called Franconia we have the dish "Saure Zipfel" what means translated something like "sour sausage ends". But instead of beer we use dry white wine with white wine vinegar and water (or more wine, some take beef or veal stock) as a stock. It's flavoured with some bay leaves peppercorns and mustard seeds. Some sliced onions and carrots complete the stock. Season it with a healthy pinch of salt and a small pinch sugar. Grants idea of a delightfully German bath of beer seems quite funny to me. In my opinion sausages with beer is very German but sausages in beer not at all. It's mandatory to use really good artisinal sausages for this recipe like Ulis brats. 160's °F is a good temperature. "Saure Zipfel" are best after about 30 min cooking time. They will not get better. They are served with a little bit of the cooking liquid and some of the vegetables from the stock a good sourdough rye bread ... and a glas of dry white wine.
Unless I am missing a step, exactly how long should the sausages braise in this bath?
I wouldn't suggest using this bath to cook the sausages. It's really a serving tip for pre-cooked brats that lets you mingle while your people still get fed. For a 1.5" sausage, sous vide for 45 minutes at a bare minimum, 1.5x that coming from frozen, and up to 3 - 4 hours between 140F for super-juicy and 160F for a typical (aka: boring) firmness and *then* let them bathe in this brilliant serving tip. Oh, and when you toss those bad boys in the bag to cook, go ahead and add some salt, garlic powder, and beer, but be careful about adding too much beer to the bag if you're using a vacuum sealer - it takes very little beer to foam up and convince the device it's too full of liquid to finish sealing the bag. Don't ask me how I know. :-D
As Michael Fisher notes it is a warming method, not a cooking method.
Use https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/juicy-snappy-links-with-uli-s-famous-sausage
