The BeerCast

Back in the hazy mists of time I can just about remember Chemistry lessons at school. In between lighting the gas taps and throwing nuggets of caesium into water (both despite warnings of dire consequences), something that dimly comes to mind is the Fire Triangle. Handy for the budding arsonist, it gives you the three things that no inferno can be started without – heat, oxygen and fuel (although unless you’re trying to light a fire on the moon, you usually get one of those things for free).

All that is a typical roundabout BeerCast way into something I thought of (and expertly illustrated) the other day – the Beer Triangle. The concept of pairing beer with food, rather than wine, has spread from the US and is taking hold here – albeit slowly. There are plenty of great blogs about matching various foods to various beers – and we even talk about it on occasion. However, there are two things I’d never pair with beer – soup, and ice-cream.

Let’s start with the more contentious – I have read plenty of posts about pouring imperial stout over a bowl of vanilla ice-cream. But to me, that just sounds daft. I’m all for drinking beer at every opportunity, but with ice-cream? Really? No chocolate sprinkles or hundreds and thousands to hand? Must everything be alcoholic? Something about the freezing cold mixing with the hoppy and/or roasty just doesn’t sit well with me.

Likewise, having beer and soup. Maybe it’s a hot/cold thing – when in Japan I made like the locals and bolted down bowls of ramen with chilled Sapporo. All I got was an alternating kind of toothache. It might also be the liquid/liquid thing – soup needs a bready partner, and beer needs a similarly solid accompaniment, of any nature (other than ice-cream, obviously). Having that amount of different liquids sloshing about inside, I wonder if they settle out into layers, like oil on water?

The final no-go is the non-beery combo, that of ice-cream and soup. Unless you’re a true foodie and going for something Michelin-esque like scallop sorbet in a pea gazpacho, the idea of soup and ice-cream together is just wrong on every level. Unless, maybe having a beer at the same time as the other two would cancel everything out? You’d either end up with something calamitous, or the perfect blending of tastes and textures. I’m not going to find out though…

What are the things that just don’t mix with beer? Or is the answer to that question – ‘nothing, you triangular fool’?

For as long as anyone can remember, the drink of choice when eating out has been wine (with optional jug of tap water). Pairing food with wine is seen as the natural option – even the bargain boozer knows the ‘white with fish, red with meat’ rule. But slowly, things are changing. The idea of beer and food pairing is becoming increasingly commonplace, as both chefs and brewers alike become more experimental. In the States, the Craft Beer movement has really pushed this link, and pairing dinners have become more mainstream.

It’s easy to see why – wine has a classy (if not snooty) reputation that beer – the working-class cousin – can only dream of. Proving that the flavours in beer can match with something other than peanuts infers legitimacy on the brewers’ art, helping close that gap. Why not serve beer with food? Well, as much as I love both, I’ve always erred on the side of caution – in my experience the multiple complex flavours involved tend to cancel each other out in a way wine does not (although maybe that says more about my knowledge of wines).

Last night it was time to put all that to the test, as Edinburgh’s Caley Sample Room hosted a beer and food pairing event with the Black Isle Brewery. Hosted by Black Isle’s new sales manager Chris, the evening began with a welcome pint of their brand new Dolphin. A hoppy, citrusy session beer created for Black Isle’s recent brewery festival (or as Chris put it, ‘knocked up in twenty minutes’), it went down tremendously well – even more so when he explained that the name refers to donations made to a local dolphin charity when the beer was developed.

Then it was time for the food to come out – five organic courses, each matched with a Black Isle beer. Ingredients for the meal were sourced either locally or from the brewery farm in Ross-shire. First up, the appetiser – Hibernator smoked oyster, paired with Hibernator Oatmeal Stout (7.0%). Kicking things off with a bang, the enormous flavour of the wood-smoked oyster matched really well with the mighty oatmeal stout. The beer mellowed that smokiness somewhat, but managed to hold on at the same time.

Next – a crab and ginger tart with chilli jam, paired with Black Isle’s 4.0% Yellowhammer Pale Ale. Brewed with Cascade hops, Yellowhammer has a good bitterness to it – but at 4% I was wondering if the sessionable nature would be able to cope with the flavours from the dish. The crab tart – which was outstanding – was rich and almost creamy, with the sharp sweetness of the chilli jam working perfectly to cut through it. Against all that, the Yellowhammer took a bit of a battering, which was understandable.

The main course was roast shoulder of lamb, marinated in honey and herbs, and paired with Red Kite Amber ale (4.2%). Organically reared on the brewery farm, the shoulder – not a usual cut – was really tender and tasted fantastic. Lamb is one of the richest and fattiest of the red meats, and the bitterness of the Red Kite came through nicely. Slightly sweet from the marinade, the pairing was bang on. The dish featured sugar snap peas, boiled potatoes and sweet potato mash, which with my Gregg Wallace hat on I found slightly strange.

Time for dessert next, which for me is always the point I start to wonder about beer and food pairing. Can anything other than a sweet wine match to a pudding? Admittedly, I’ve never tipped a slug of Three Floyds Darklord over my ice cream, but time for an open mind. The dish was gooseberry tart with ginger and syrup ice cream, and the beer Heather Honey Ale (5.0%). At first, the beer was noticeably sweet, but the food took this away slightly and made it more bitter, which complemented the gooseberries. The tart was great, and the ginger and syrup ice cream unbelievable – without doubt the highlight of the entire meal.

The final course was the artisan cheese board, served with Black Isle Porter (4.6%), which is one of my favourite Scottish dark beers. The cheeses – Dunsyre Blue, East Lothian organic Brie, Applewood smoked cheddar and a chive-based one with a name I didn’t catch – were tremendous, and again worked well with the beer. The fatty nature took the roastiness out of the porter, and brought the bitterness up instead. Being the cheesehound that I am, it was a great way to end the meal.

Or so I thought, as at the same time a digestif arrived in the form of Export Scotch Ale (7.9%), another new beer recently released by Black Isle. Chris explained that the expansion of the business into a new brewhouse has freed up the original kit for more experimental beers, big hitters, limited release specials and so forth. Clearly that’s good news for everyone – the Export Scotch was my beer of the night. A great roasty component, mellowed with the boozy hit – there was a sweet, yeasty edge going on as well, with a lovely smooth finish. My girlfriend – whose favourite Black Isle beer is kegged Blonde – also said it was the best of the night.

With that, we wandered off with happily groaning stomachs – huge thanks to the guys at the Caley Sample Room for hosting the event, and to Chris at Black Isle for doing the pairings. We hear there may be others in the pipeline, so rest assured we’ll be there to pass on our thoughts. As for me, maybe my beer/food scepticism is fading somewhat – there could be something in this…

Black Isle Brewery
Caley Sample Room

Unusual ingredients are one of the more popular trends in British brewing at the moment – whether reviving the traditional or attempting the astonishing. Putting aside ancient herbs and sausage fillings, fruit has for a long time been one of the main adjuncts added to beer to give it a more unusual flavour. But what about vegetables? Depending on how strictly you want to classify things – pumpkin, ginger, chili peppers have all been used fairly regularly in brewing. But garlic? RateBeer.com lists only two garlic-based beers, one of which (Antonio’s Original Garlic Pils from Brew Brothers in Alberta) yields a score of 6 out of 100.

In our Beer of the Year shows we traditionally finish with a surprise unusual beer, and when in December I read about a newly-released Garlic beer on Tyson’s Beer & Cheese Blog something clicked. The small village of Newchurch on the Isle of Wight hosts both a brewery and a garlic farm – so combining the two was probably only a matter of time. David Yates used to brew for Ushers on the island, but went down his own path when they closed production. That was in 2000, and four years later Yates’s 5.5% Special Draught won a bronze at that year’s GBBF.

There’s no question Yates’s are a talented brewery – but this experiment should have stayed on the flipchart. I love garlic, don’t get me wrong, and flicking through the pages of the website of the Newchurch Garlic Farm was really interesting. But this beer is just completely awful. It pours a strange russet beige colour with a murky haze, even with the majority of sediment retained in the bottle – along with half a clove of garlic, floating around like a dead fish in an aquarium.

The aroma is all garlic, that instantly recognisable smell of Italian or Asian food. There’s some sourness in there as well – but that obviously doesn’t make it any more appealing. Strangely the first taste isn’t that strong – there’s a vague mustiness that reminded me of composting vegetable matter. Then, however, the garlic hits and dominates the flavour and the aftertaste. It certainly doesn’t disappoint, if that’s what you were after – if it was meant as a novelty then fair enough, but as a drinkable beer it falls short on every level.

A few months ago on the BeerCast, we started a new category of post – involving the wonders of beer used as an ingredient rather than a beverage. Predictably called ‘Eating with Beer’, it featured the rather odd onion and ale soup produced by the Yorkshire Provender. Just the other day another suitable mealstuff presented itself, in the form of Waitrose’s Steak & Murphy’s Topcrust Pie. It’s probably been ten years since my last pint of Murphy’s, but in a pie…too good to pass up.

Well, actually it’s not. Described on the box as “tender chunks of braised British steak and button mushrooms in a rich & flavoursome Irish stout gravy, topped with buttery puff pastry” it falls apart totally into a gloopy mess. Why? – it’s not a pie! ‘Topcrust’ it may be, but call me old-fashioned in thinking a pie should also have a bottom and four sides? The puff pastry crumbled into pencil shavings, as puff pastry always does, leaving the stouty gravy to do the talking.

Actually, this is the best part – the steak is nice, although there’s hardly any of it, and the dark gravy really does taste of stout. It contains 12% of the (other) black stuff, and in tremendous legalese the packet says “Murphy’s stout brewed under licence by Inbev on behalf of Heineken, Waitrose is an authorised user thereof”. I’d certainly draw the line at a steak and Heineken pie, that’s for sure.

Anyhow, at 539 calories it’ll put hairs on your chest, just take my advice and fling the lid out of the window and call the thing a stew. It is nice, but it’s not a pie (and I’m from Lancashire, so know what I’m talking about on that subject).

Beer is being increasingly used as a foodstuff rather than a drink to be knocked back down the local corner pub. From ale in pies to fancy beer-flavoured crisps (such as ‘Cheese and Adnams Broadside‘ flavour Kettle Chips that appeared a couple of years ago). We’re no strangers to combining beer and food here on the BeerCast, with new member Elliot posting a video of a rather fine version of moules frites cooked in Hoegaarden on his website. Watch out, Keith Floyd. So in honour of the multiplying ways in which you can find excuses for getting beer into yourself, it’s another BeerCast regular feature – Eating with Beer. First up, soup!

The Yorkshire Provender are a small company based in Ripon, North Yorkshire, where they produce a range of seven soups in plastic tubs for the ever-increasing market (it’s good to see someone taking on the might of the Covent Garden lot). Varieties such as Tomato and Red Pepper with Wensleydale Cheese sound interesting – but this being a boozy website I had to sample their Onion soup with Hambleton Ale and Mustard. Established in 1991 in the Swale Valley, Hambleton’s produce a fine range of bitters with the distinctive white horse logo.

But in a soup? According to the label (which features Nick Stafford, Hambleton’s founder), this is Yorkshire Provender’s take on the ‘classic French Onion theme’, using Best Bitter as a base for the other ingredients. Well, after polishing off most of a tub – it’s very sweet, almost too sweet to finish, with a strange almost meaty lasagne-type smell, which must be the combination of onion, beer and mustard. There was a background taste alongside the onion, but I couldn’t tell if it was the beer, or the mustard, or something else. It’s an interesting idea, but I think I’d rather have another of their soup varieties followed by a few of Hambleton’s beers – afterwards.

Yorkshire Provender
Hambleton Brewery