Now that the holidays are here, it’s time to start planning your upcoming family feasts — including what beer you’re going to serve. Over the years, I’ve offered advice on tasty ways to pair beer with a variety of things, such as salads, candy, grilled meats, ice cream, cheese and even Girl Scout cookies. While I’ve been experimenting with pairing food and beer for three decades, there’s really no magic to it. Here are some basic concepts to help you successfully find the right beer for whatever you’re eating. The simplest way to approach pairing beer and food? Consider the three C’s: complement, contrast and cut.
Complement
Beer can complement food by harmonizing similar flavors, like chocolate notes in chocolate brownies with the chocolate in a dark stout. Try matching a spicy dish with a hoppy IPA, or a Rauchbier (smoked beer) or porter with barbecue. When two similar flavors combine, they’re often better than the sum of the parts, leading to a more pleasurable dining experience.
You can look at this from either direction. You can start with a beer and then decide on what food to make. Is your beer malty with caramel or toffee notes? Maybe order a thick steak. Or, if you already have your food, what are its signature flavors? If it’s spicy, maybe drink a spicy beer.
Contrast
The second “C” is contrast. Start by looking for opposites. For instance, a classic contrasting pairing is oysters and stout. A dry Irish stout, with roasted chocolate notes and strong coffee bitterness, meets its match in the sweet, briny flavors of oysters. If you’re having something sour, like sauerkraut or kimchi, try a sweeter beer, especially one with fruit flavors to emphasize that contrast between sweet and sour. Or pair a sour beer like a Lambic or a Gose with something like beef stew.
Basically, hop bitterness, roast malt, carbonation and alcohol can all balance sweetness and fatty richness in food, and the malty sweetness in certain beers can balance the acidity and hot spiciness of foods with those characteristics.
Cut
Lastly, the third “C” is cutting. Many beers, especially ones that are highly carbonated, are well-matched for food that is fatty, rich or sometimes even spicy, and can cut through and cleanse the palate between bites. A rich creamy cheese will be no match for a fruit Lambic, for example, and an amber ale will slice through a spicy chicken wing like a hot knife through butter.
This concept works especially well with fried foods, because frying intensifies the food’s caramel flavors, while the beer’s carbonation and acidity (from the yeast) will cut right through the fat.
Other considerations
There are a few other factors to consider when creating pairing combinations. The most important is the strength of the beer. You wouldn’t want to drink a barley wine over 10% ABV with your salad; a more delicate, lower alcohol beer would be a better match. If you’re having a multi-course meal, it’s usually best to start with lighter beers and move up as you go. That will make pairing your dessert with a big sipping beer all the more appropriate and tasty.
More generally, you want to keep in mind the relative strength of both the food and your beer. Neither should overpower the other. Whether contrasting or complementing, they should remain in balance. Other considerations might be: What is the weather like? What’s the occasion? What mood am I in?
There are, of course, tried-and-true lists of good pairings. Pizza and lager is a classic for a reason: Simply, it works. I also like to pair brown ale with shepherd’s pie, sour beer with cheesecake, and pilsner with fish and chips. While you can’t go wrong with any of those, it’s more fun to try and come up with your own perfect pairings. One of my absolute best happened by accident. I was at an event that served chili con carne alongside wheels of blue cheese. Adding the blue cheese to the chili (itself quite amazing) while enjoying a lightly spicy IPA cut through the spicy heat of the dish and complemented the tangy cheese indescribably well. It’s a combo I’ve returned to many times. But I never would have discovered how good it was unless I thought about it and tried it. Let me know what perfect pairings you discover.
Contact Jay R. Brooks at BrooksOnBeer@gmail.com.