On the House

The Deconstruction of a Beer & Food Partnership

As beer and food pairings go more and more mainstream – and believe me, they are! – I’m asked with steadily increasing regularity about how to best partner the two. Most often, I reply with a reiteration of my four basic guidelines for beer and food pairing, first posited over a decade ago in my book, A Taste for Beer. In brief, they are:

1. Think of Ale as Red Wine and Lager as White Wine: In other words, when red meat or any other dish that you normally pair with red wine is on the menu, select an ale to serve with it. Conversely, if the main course is fish or poultry, try a lager.

2. Hoppiness in Beer = Acidity in Wine: Anywhere that you would seek high acidity in a wine – such as with spicy, salty or oily food – choose a beer with significant hoppiness. The more acidic you would like the wine, the hoppier you will want the beer.

3. Complement or Contrast: Try to match foods to beers with complementary characters, such as a robust stew with a full-bodied ale. Or for a change, try a directly contrasting flavour, such as a crisp, delicate lager with a heavy cream soup.

4. Keep the Beer Sweeter than the Dessert: Nothing kills the flavour of a beer like the overpowering sweetness of a dessert. Keep the sugar contents of both beer and dessert balanced, however, and the pairing will work tremendously.

As a starting point, I believe they still work well. However, after recently enjoying and fully appreciating a pairing I did not concoct myself, I thought it might be fun to deconstruct the relationship of beer and food and present the detailed results. So here we go.

The dish and drink was enjoyed at the Duke of Westminster in Toronto as the concluding course of a beer dinner designed to showcase the beers of the London brewer Fuller’s, as well as welcome their Organic Honeydew to the local draught family. The beer was Fuller’s London Porter and the dish was described thusly: “Bittersweet Chocolate Tart, served warm, dusted with cocoa powder.”

This is a pairing that definitely violated Number 4, as the dessert was definitely sweeter than the beer, but as I always explain as a coda to that Guideline, you can do that with chocolate. Like beer, cocoa has a bitter component to it, even when sweetened liberally with sugar or fruit, and so a beer can play off that element even when it doesn’t necessarily have the malty sweetness to play in the same league.

Additionally, porters and stouts are great beers for chocolate pairings since they often have a cocoa or chocolate flavor to them, as do some Belgian dubbels, barleywines, brown ales and assorted other brews. (See how versatile beer is with chocolate? Try doing that with wine!)

And indeed, the cocoa dusting was key to the way this pairing worked, as it brought out all the roasty cocoa character of the ale, prompting me to make a note that I was tasting elements of the beer I hadn’t previously encountered. Additionally, Chef was wise to make the crust relatively dense and chewy, rather than light and fluffy, since a shorter crust would have provided more fat than the beer could properly balance.

Next, the chocolate filling itself was particularly well-balanced, neither too sweet (which would have overwhelmed the beer and made it taste sour, chocolate exception notwithstanding) nor too bitter (which again would have been at odds with the Fuller’s Porter, itself not a terribly bitter beer). And finally, by serving the tart warm, and the beer not too cold, the flavours in each were allowed to emerge and mingle with one another, creating the proverbial party in my mouth.

Simply, a splendid partnership of comestible and potable. Congratulations to all concerned.

Reasons I’d Rather Be Somewhere Else This Week

For all of this month, Scala in San Francisco is offering a prix fixe “Three Martini Lunch,” featuring a selection of three martinis alongside a Caesar salad, grilled flatiron steak and mini-dessert, all for the meagre price of $50. No word on whether or not tax and tip are included.

Elsewhere on the beverage bargain front, this Friday, April 18, the Bourbon House in New Orleans is hosting a luncheon with Buffalo Trace Master Distiller Harlen Wheatley. Included are passed hors d’oeuvres complemented by Sazaracs and Blue Grass Sunset cocktails, sweet potato soup served with Buffalo Trace Bourbon, prosciutto-wrapped salmon accompanied by George T. Stagg Bourbon and a chocolate pecan tart offered with a drop of the increasingly rare Pappy Van Winkle 20-Year-Old. All for only $45, tax and tip included.

Back in California, this week will also see the craft brewing community descend on San Diego for the annual Craft Brewers Conference. For four days, some 1,600 brewers, importers, wholesalers and associated hangers-on – like bar owners and beer writers – will overwhelm the Town & Country Resort, as well as many if not all of San Diego`s breweries, brewpubs and beer specialty bars.

On second thought, maybe I`m just as happy to not be in San Diego this week...

A Quartet of Recent News Items

A recent change of computers and operating systems has slowed me down a bit of late, so I thought I’d jump back into the blog with a quick summary of a few items that caught my eye in between episodes of database collapse and fits of uncontrolled cursing:

- A company called Havana Beverages is promoting what they call the “Easy Mint Julep,” composed by simply mixing one part bourbon with three parts Havana Mojito, a cane sugar sweetened soda designed to taste like a Mojito without the rum. I haven’t tasted it yet, so I’ll reserve comment – save to say that no reputable Mint Julep recipe I’ve ever come across calls for lime – but the press release put me in mind of this hilarious video clip.

- Pabst Brewing has unveiled plans to resuscitate the one time king-of-the-hill brand, Schlitz. Accompanied by the tag line “Go for the Gusto,” the beer has been reformulated to its recipe from the 1960 and packaged in an old-style long neck bottle with retro-looking label. Again, not something I’ve yet tried, so I’ll reserve further comment.

- Miller Brewing has decided to take its previously test marketed Miller Lite Brewers Collection national, beginning this fall. This is something I have tasted – although not the Amber, samples of which froze solid and subsequently leaked half their contents during shipping – and so I can comment on what you can expect. The Wheat has a nose resembling something akin to the canned fruit salad my mother used to serve and a sweet, citrusy body that both dries and thins towards the finish, while the Blonde Ale offers a lightly toasty, faintly hoppy nose and just off-dry, mildly toffee-ish body that ands with a reassuring hit of mild bitterness. Both are thin-bodied, which presumably will help them appeal to light beer drinkers seeking to “trade up,” but I think calling them “craft-style,” as did the original press release, is stretching reality more than just a bit.

- And finally, the unfortunate news has just come in via Associated Press that the proposal to make the Sazerac the official cocktail of Louisiana has been rejected by the state Senate. According to the report, three senators declared that it would “send the wrong message” about the state if they were to honor an alcoholic beverage. My question: Don’t these boobs know where they live!?

How Will You Celebrate?

It seems as though I can’t open a drinks blog or web page these days without seeing some mention of the 75 anniversary of the first significant step towards the ending of Prohibition. Yes, in case you missed it, it will be three-quarters of a century ago, come Monday (April 7), that beer became once again a legal drink.

Now granted, it was still to be eight more months before Repeal was officially signed and all alcohol was again legal, but at least as of one second past midnight, 1933, low alcohol beer was flowing once again in most parts of the country.

So what will you do to mark the occasion?

As I write this, if nothing has already been planned at your bar or restaurant, it’s too late to launch a major promotion. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with the day! Here are just a few ideas:

• If you have a streetfront location, string a banner in your front window or outside your door announcing, as so many businesses did back in ’33, that “Beer is Legal Again!”
• Send out an email to your mailing list this afternoon, letting everyone know that for one hour on Monday, beer will be sold at 1933 prices (place limits on quantities, if you wish, but take solace in the strong probability that most people will linger on well after prices return to normal)
• Throw a party on Sunday night, culminating with a toast to the anniversary at midnight
• Put a spread of free finger food up on the bar, just like they did in the old days.

Or use your imagination to come up with an original idea, and begin planning for the big anniversary, Repeal Day, coming later this year on December 5.

Fritz Maytag to be Honored by the James Beard Foundation

San Francisco drinks legend Fritz Maytag, head of the Anchor Brewing Company, Anchor Distilling Company and York Creek Vineyards, will be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the James Beard Foundation, it was announced today. The presentation will be made during a gala ceremony in New York City on June 8.

Commonly regarded as the father of modern American craft brewing, Maytag purchased an interest in the flagging Anchor Brewing Company in 1965, purportedly to keep the operation from going under. With no experience in brewing or running a brewery, Maytag admits that the early years were a struggle, but he persevered and by the early 1970's owned the company outright. Among his more gutsy, if not outlandish moves were the introduction of a hoppy pale ale (Liberty Ale) and barleywine (Old Foghorn) in 1975 and the creation of what was likely America's first post-Prohibition Christmas beer (Our Special Ale, commonly known as simply "Anchor Christmas Beer").

In 1994, Maytag added a distillery to his business and began crafting an authentically old fashioned rye whiskey called Old Potrero. Other spirits, including a boldly juniper-flavored gin called Junipero, soon followed.

It is safe to say that hundreds, perhaps thousands of craft brewery owners and operators have found inspiration in Maytag's spirit and tenacity. And just as he motivated by example the development of small scale brewing in the United States (and beyond!), he is also today providing leadership to a new generation of micro-distillers.

For more information, visit the James Beard Awards homepage at http://jbfawards.com.

Why ‘The Session’ is Worth Following

Every month or so, I try to blog in this space about one specific beer or style of beer as part of a collective blogging effort known as The Session. If you visit On the House regularly, you’ve probably come across one or two such posts, and depending upon your level of interest in that particular beer type, either read it with interest or passed on to the next post.

This past Friday was the thirteenth edition of ‘The Session,’ and while it was one I missed reporting on here, it is also reportage that very much merits a look. Why? Because the subject concerns one of the hottest button topics in brewing today: Organic beer.

Whether or not you feel that organic beer – or wine or vodka or whatever – is a legitimate issue is hardly relevant to this discussion. (For the record, some bloggers felt that organic is very much a significant movement in beer, while others were far more skeptical.) The fact is that an increasing number of customers are interested in organics, and while the sales may be small to modest at present, this is one trend that could catch fire big time at pretty much any time. Remain unaware of what’s out there and you may wind up losing valuable trade to your competitors.

Which is why I suggest a visit to the Session round-up over at Chris O’Brien’s Beer Activist Blog is worthwhile. You may catch wind of a beer or beers you’ll be hearing quite a bit about in the not-too-distant future.

On Düsseldorf Altbier

Sitting in my hotel room in Cologne this morning, readying myself for the train to Düsseldorf (where there is not a hotel room to be had, hence my current accommodations), I’m set to musing about one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated beer styles of Europe: the Altbier.

Altbier is something you hear little about in North America, largely because it’s such a regional specialty even within Germany. But did you know that the Widmer Brothers – they of the impenetrably cloudy hefeweizen fame – first set up their business as an altbier brewery? And that numerous craft breweries across the land have, at one time or another, introduced an altbier to their portfolio, usually only to see it fail and wind up discontinued?

So what is an altbier anyway? Simply, it is a dark-hued, very dry ale that receives some cold conditioning to mute its natural esters and make it taste, well, more lager-like. This is a description which, of course, could be applied to any number of ales, but there is something about an altbier that makes it just that little bit different.

Discovering the exact nature of that ungraspable “something” is the task that I have set myself over these three days in Düsseldorf, and as fellow scribe Lew Bryson and I sat in our third brewery of the night yesterday, sipping yet another 250ml glass of altbier – 50ml more than what you get of kölsch in Cologne, by the way, and reportedly for the same price – I came up with my first thought. With its careful combination of pale and roasted malt, and nothing more on the barley front, altbiers in Düsseldorf seem to share a common flavor trait I can best describe as earthiness, along the lines of the taste you get in your mouth when you smell fresh-turned soil while gardening. It might not sound necessarily like a great thing, but trust me, it is.

More later.

The Bass “Brolly”

Okay, let’s get one thing straight, first: The Black & Tan as we know it, which is to say a layered blend of stout and ale (or worse, stout and lager), is entirely a North American invention. Don’t believe me? Go to Dublin, where they know a thing or two about stout, and ask for one. At best, you’ll be immediately sussed for what you are, a tourist, and at worst, you’ll get a good tongue-lashing from the barman.

That said, there are those on this side of the pond who simply love the layered look of ebony stout seated atop a base of amber ale. And for those people, the good folk at Bass, which is to say InBev, who own the venerable British brand, and their North American emissaries, Anheuser-Busch, have invented the Bass “Brolly.”

Shaped as a triangle with corner hooks to grip the top of a pint glass, the “Brolly” has several small holes along its sides, which I presume are meant to let the stout slowly drip into the ale below, settling there without breaking the color barrier, so to speak. According to the instructions that come with it, the idea is to pour Bass down the center of the glass until it’s two-thirds full, then set the “Brolly” on top and slowly drip the stout through it.

Being the ever-conscientious journalist, I had to try it out for myself. Here’s what I found:

1) Pouring Bass or almost any beer, directly down the center of the glass, as the instructions suggest, is an idiotic move. I wound up with about a quarter of a glass of beer and three-quarters of foam, forget having room for stout or even the “Brolly.”

2) After I poured the Bass in correctly – ie: down the side of an angled glass, allowing for one to two fingers of foam to form – I put the “Brolly” in place and immediately overflowed its sides, causing the predictable mixing of the beers. “Slowly” is obviously a key part of the instructions.

3) Having dumped, rinsed and repoured the Bass, I tried again, this time very, very slowly. It dripped at a frustratingly slow pace through the holes, and I may have overflowed a bit once more, but the promised separation still did not occur.

4) Another clean-up, another try. This time, however, I found my groove in a pouring speed that fell somewhere between the pace of my last two attempts, and discovered that the pour needs to be slow, yes, but not too slow, and vitally steady. since it is the force of the beer flowing onto the “Brolly” that pressures the beer through the holes. And yes, this time it did work.

Conclusion: Any bartender familiar with the “spoon” pour of a Black & Tan will have no time for this. For less skilled draftsmen and draftswomen, on the other hand, if the pressure of the stout pour can be regulated so it is just so, this could be a handy gadget, since the bartender can fit it on top of the glass and do something else while the pint is being finished.

Just don’t pour the ale straight down the center of the glass, no matter what your Bass rep might tell you.

Time for a Barleywine: Session #12

The theme for this month’s edition of The Session is barleywine, which is a suitable pick (by Jon over at The
Brew Site) for any number of reasons, including:

1) It’s winter, and there is simply no better time of the year at which to indulge in some of the beer world’s strongest, most complex creations;

2) By coincidence, it’s a snowy, blowy, nasty day here in Toronto – ideal conditions for popping the caps on a barleywine or two, which is precisely what I’ll do a little later today for my Session post at That’s the Spirit;

3) It’s a great warm-up for the Toronado Barleywine Festival in San Francisco later this month, at which I’ll be judging.

So, what precisely is a barleywine? I’ll leave the historical musings to others and instead confine my comments to how I like to define the style. A barleywine, for me, comes in one of two versions: British-style (the original) and American-style (the revivalist). In the former instance, it should be richly malty with a bracing backbone of hop bitterness to carry the residual sugars of the malt. Complex flavour notes might, but might not, include stewed fruit, toasted nuts, chocolate, intense caramel, molasses, treacle and fruity brandy. What it should not be is overly sweet, which is where I personally draw the line between barleywine and old ale, since the sweetness of the latter when young should diminish over time and leave even more complicated flavour notes in its place.

On the American side of the ledger, hops are generally going to come first and malt will provide the skeleton on which to hang all that bitter body mass. Flavors should still be complex and multi-faceted, with bitterness, dried rather than stewed fruit, tanned leather, citrus peel (if American hops dominate, as they so often do in this style), and raw nuts potentially factoring into the mix. These beers are generally quite strong with a good kick of alcohol in the body – which is where they generally diverge from the double IPA style – and are usually good candidates for the cellar.

Where the two styles merge is in how they are best enjoyed, which is typically in front of a roaring fire on a frozen winter’s eve, either alone as a nightcap or with a piece or three of very dark, high cocoa content chocolate. In a restaurant, either will serve well as a digestif, in place of the conventional cognac or single malt, while bars are best to position them as one-time indulgences rather than by-the-pint beers.

For my Session post here, I’ve selected the Old Boardhead Barleywine from Oregon’s Full Sail Brewing, a beer I’ve enjoyed many times in the past and hope to again experience on multiple occasions in the future. American in style, Boardhead casts a nod, too, at British traditions by offering a rich, plum-laden aroma and very full body. The Yankee in it triumphs, though, with brandied raisins and orange zest joining the plum in the nose and sultanas, cinnamon, freshly shelled hazelnuts and nutmeg holding forth within the ascending bitterness of the body. The finish is off-dry, moderately bitter and lingering, with a warming hit of the beer’s 9% alcohol hanging on to sooth the spirit.

Overall, I’d classify the Old Boardhead as a highly enjoyable ale that would be welcome in front of my or anyone else’s fireplace. It’s perhaps not as complex as some, and less suited to cellaring than many, but its relatively gentle nature also makes it more amenable to food than, arguably, most American entries in the category.

Beer at the Cheers Beverage Conference

I was part of all three beer presentations at last week’s Cheers Beverage Conference (CBC) in Miami, either as a presenter or audience member. They were: A tasting of 8 beers I hosted for the Cheers Editorial Advisory Board; a breakout session about creating a style-inclusive beer menu, presented by Lew Bryson; and a second breakout on selling beer and food pairings in the New Beer Market, which I again led.

What did I learn? Well, to be honest, not much. I did, after all, serve as presenter for two of the three sessions, and my good friend Lew and I have been exchanging opinions and knowledge for so long now that I wonder if there’s anything about beer one of us could teach the other. Most audience members, however, seemed to glean a tremendous amount from the three seminars, judging by the enthusiastic responses received at the conclusion of each. Even beer industry veterans like Kip Snyder of The Yard House appeared to walk away with new and original views and information, and were you there, chances are you would have, too.

(For information on next year’s CBC, to be held again in Miami, stay tuned to www.cheersconference.com.)

What I did notice, on the other hand, was what I believe was unprecedented interest in the beer portions of the Conference, which I can only assume reflects the increased importance of premium beer in the minds of progressively thinking operators. If you’re selling premium beer now, you’ll have noticed this yourself, certainly among your customers if not necessarily among your competitors. If you’re not yet capitalizing on the growing profits associated with specialty domestic and imported beer, then it’s likely time you got out to the bar and asked your clientele what they think.

While it might be self-evident to some, or indeed, even most operators, it bears repeating that premium beer is hot. Premium beer styles are hotter – it’s no longer “just beer” – and beer and food pairings may be even hotter still. Trust me, this is one bandwagon you can’t afford to miss.