The BeerCast

The other day, whilst idly mopping up the remnants of another of Cadbury’s seasonal snacks, I began to wonder about potential beer pairings involving Creme Eggs. As pretty much any foodstuff can be complemented with a malt-forward beverage, why not the pinnacle of Easter treats? Searching around for the ideal companion to what Wikipedia calls ‘a chocolate and fondant product manufactured in the shape of an egg’ wasn’t easy – so I did what everyone else does these days, and asked Twitter. The result? @circlejack came up with the most intriguing suggestion – Boon Geuze.

After sourcing a bottle of Brouwerij Boon’s blended lambic, it was time to put the pairing to the test (clearly, I already had a ready stockpile of Creme Eggs). As I untwisted the cage of the bottle, the cork instantly blasted out – cage still attached – skimming my left ear. Thankfully the frothing eruption subsided, and I managed a control taste of the beer. Classic geuze (or gueuze) flavours – sour apples, dry tartness. Huge carbonation. Sore ear.

When alternated with dainty nibbles of Creme Egg, those bitter components are magnified tenfold. The sweet, mallowy goodness brings up all of the sharpness of the beer – highlighting the dryness as it slashes across your palate. The best way I can describe it is like non-acidic acid, if that makes sense. Even more puckering than usual. Like coating your tongue in sugar and squeezing a grapefruit over it.

However, interestingly, the opposite is true of the other flavours – as the extreme edges of the beer come out, the colossal sweetness of the egg is dulled. The caramel and marshamallowy fondant become milder and smoother – presumably as they gamely battle on against the overwhelming forces of the geuze. But eventually, they can only take a knee and submit. Like myself. Maybe beer doesn’t go with everything…?

As the Romans bludgeoned their way into the north of England, subjugating the lowly, mud-dwelling populace, they made a very useful discovery. The locals had invented a method of transporting small amounts of gristly meat around, without having it spoil – or drip through the fingers. Encased within a fatty, crumbling sleeve of pastry, they proved to be an ideal foodstuff for fast-moving armies. Back in Rome, Caesar Augustus Piecus attributed the success of his soldiers to this fact, and as a result, they were named after him.

Fast forward two thousand years, and although the Romans have gone – the pie remains. One reason for this has to be its versatility, as literally anything can be added to the filling. It needn’t even be edible, judging by some of the supermarket ‘value’ pies. Hailing from Preston, my most beloved is the style we gave to the world – the Butter Pie. The name is misleading (it’s usually less than 30% butter) – inside is fluffy mashed potato, a few ribbons of onion, and that’s it. Chips, can of Tizer – that was my lunch at school for five years.

Clearly, it never did me any harm. I sometimes varied by going for potato and meat pies (not meat and potato. Not in Preston), or adding peas if I was in need of nourishment – but the pie is an old friend to me. These days, however, it is under threat. The great British pie has been gastro’d. Good friend of the BeerCast Gavin Aitchison recently highlighted this trend, as part of his celebration of (the currently ongoing) British Pie Week. Gavin solemnly charts the rise of the imposter. The fakers.

For instance, example one – a lovely chicken and mushroom filling, crisp, fluffy pastry on top. Served in a ceramic dish. THIS IS NOT A PIE. It’s a chicken crumble. Do not accept this. Example two – a lovely steak and stout filling, topped with a free-standing puff-pastry lid. THIS IS NOT A PIE. It’s slop with a top. Or as Gavin says – a stew with ‘pastry floating like rafts on stormy sea’. Do not accept this either. Pick up the lid and throw it at the pub window, where it should a) stick, and b) serve as a warning to others, to the pie-curious, about what lies are told within.

If your collection of belongings was protected by a lean-to roof – you wouldn’t call it a house, would you? A pie needs four walls and a floor, as well as a lid. Shakespeare would be turning in his grave if he knew the threat to his beloved ‘pyes fill’d with rook and turnip’. If you can’t pick the whole thing up without fouling your shirtfront, leave well alone. We need to celebrate the classic British pie – it’s the perfect drinker’s food, after all. You can’t eat fish and chips standing up with a pint of mild in the other hand. Soak up that beer with a pie.

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.