The fun and challenges of beer and food matching

It’s been a bit of a feast of beer and food pairings lately, first at the annual dinner of the British Guild of Beer Writers and then at the rather excellent Hero of Maida gastropub in London’s Maida Vale, where UK beer distributor Euroboozer kindly hosted a “beery brunch” for writers. The former focused on British beers, naturally enough, while the latter included Austrian, Belgian and Danish brews – Euroboozer represents Schremser, Steigl, Boon and Mikkeller, among others.

It was fascinating to see how much better some pairings worked than others, but also to be reminded that although there was general agreement, different people of course preferred different pairings.
The rule of thumb with beer and food matching is you either go for complementary flavours or contrasts. For instance, a hoppy IPA can work well with curry, which to me implies complementary, but it can also match cheese, where the bitterness doesn’t so much contrast as cut through the oils.

Interestingly, both menus featured scallops – they’re clearly the shellfish of the moment. In one case, seared scallops were paired with Chalky’s Bite from Sharp’s, in the other the scallops were baked and served alongside Sonnenkönig II, a 9.5% Double Witbier aged in Tequila barrels (left), which comes from the pilot brewery of Austria’s best-known lager brand Steigl.

Both combinations worked very well. The dry tang of Sonnenkönig against the fishy sweetness of the baked scallops, and the spicy maltiness of Chalky’s Bite – a 6.8% herbed strong ale that makes me think of a Belgian Tripel – with the toastier seared scallops. A second fish dish, smoked haddock tartare, was paired with Riesling People, a hazy IPA brewed with grape juice – it’s one of Danish brewer Mikkeller’s takes on the modern beer-wine hybrid style. Again, a lovely beer, almost gin-like in its dryness, but for me it didn’t bring out the flavour of the fish.

Moving on, brunch brought us brioche buns filled with bacon, cheese and egg, paired with Boon Oude Geuze Black Label. This is a stunningly good beer, the driest Geuze that Boon produces, and it did a great job of contrasting with the lightly fatty and salty character of the bacon and cheese. I’ll try to remember Gueze as an option for cheese and charcuterie in the future!

The main course for dinner, roasted Welsh lamb, brought not one but two pairings. The intended one was Fourpure’s smoky-sweet and rich Oatmeal Stout. This is a very fine beer, but somehow the combination of that sweetness with the equally rich meatiness of the lamb didn’t work as well for me as the second beer on the table – Marble’s tropical and resinous Hopoplata. This gorgeous 7.2% West Coast IPA was intended to pair with the vegetarian option, but worked extremely well with the lamb – its hoppy and bitter fruitiness contrasted with the meat, each bringing out the richness of the other.

Back at brunch, the meat course was an amazingly delicious Gascon black pudding with white beans (right), served with Steel Toe Milk Stout from America’s Ska Brewing. This time, the creamy and slightly smoky sweetness worked excellently well, perhaps because of the softer – though equally rich and lovely – flavour and texture of the black pudding.

Time for dessert, and a sticky-toffee pudding paired with OTT, a classic 7% old ale from Hog’s Back. This match did a great job of bringing out the cocoa and fruit cake notes in the beer. We also had on the table a bottle of Greene King’s Heritage Vintage Fine Ale – a rather excellent strong ale brewed with Chevallier heritage barley – so for curiosity’s sake I also tried that with the pudding. Dry-sweet and lightly toasty, it too worked very well, confirming strong ales as a good pudding choice!

While brunch now moved on to a liquid course – a tart and tangy Boon/Mikkeller collaboration where they aged Geuze in white Vermouth foeders – dinner wrapped up with an amazing range of British cheeses, quite simply the best cheeseboard I’ve had in a long time. They were served with another strong ale, this time from the far north – Orkney Brewery’s 10% Dark Island Reserve. With such a variety of cheeses, the aim (according to the tasting notes from fellow writer Jacopo Mazzeo) was to provide a beer complex enough to complement them all. It worked well, although now I can’t help wondering how the cheese would have gone with something like that white Vermouth Gueze or perhaps a strong Farmhouse Saison…

Drinking the world from London

3.5% is the strongest you can get in a
Swedish supermarket

Late July and early August are busy times for the London beer scene. The proximity of the London Craft Beer Festival (which I hear went very well this year) and the Great British Beer Festival gives bars and pubs around the city reason to hold all sorts of other events in parallel, such as mini festivals, tap-takeovers and meet-the-brewer sessions.

However, late July and August is also when the schools are closed for the summer, which means that many of us are out of town on family holidays. On the plus side, the holidays did enable a bit of beer shopping in foreign parts. Only in Systembolaget (the Swedish state alcohol monopoly shops) and in various German, Danish and Swedish supermarkets, but all of those carry pretty good beer ranges now – I even scored a bottle of the stonkingly good Limfjords Porter in Danish Lidl, of all places – so it was a nice change.

Anyway, it's why I only managed to get to two of those London beer events, or two-and-a-half if you count catching the last couple of hours of the Beer Writers Guild pre-GBBF summer get-together. I missed the speeches and brewery tours at the latter, as it took me that long to get there from Heathrow airport – it was hosted at Heineken's very shiny new Brixton Brewery site in the wilds of Herne Hill. But the company and the food were good, and some of the beer was excellent.

Among the stand-outs were Renegade India Session Ale, from the craft arm of West Berkshire Brewery, and two Americans, namely 2x4, which is Wyoming-based Melvin Brewing's massively hoppy yet smooth and rich Double IPA, and Hardywood's Singel from Virginia. The latter is in the style of a Belgian blond ale, and is lovely and spicy-estery. The name's a silly joke, though. The idea being it's below Dubbel and Tripel, hence 'Singel' – but Belgians don't call them that. It's not even a Dutch/Flemish word – the translation of single would be Enkel.

Next up: Cask goes Continental at GBBF

Craft beer hits Munich

It may have been a beer festival in Munich, but Braukunst Live! was about as far from the near-monoculture of Oktoberfest as it is possible to get. Instead of a choice of Festbier, Festbier and maybe an alkoholfrei for the drivers, there was everything from new twists on Bavarian classics, such as Hofbrau's double-hopped Hallodri Märzen, through local versions of stout and IPA, to some of the best and most interesting modern beers from countries such as the US, Denmark and Italy.

All of this was gathered together in a huge tramshed, now home to the Munich MVG public transport museum. All the small exhibits had been stored away at the far end of the shed, but some were presumably just too big to move easily, so here and there the brewery bars backed onto old tramcars, and at one point we found temporary seating on some kind of iron railway chassis thingy – though I don't know exactly what it was, not least because the explanatory signboards had also been stashed away.

As traditional as they come

The exhibitors were an interesting mixture: the new, often American-inspired, craft brewers from all over Germany were there in force, along with their friends from places such as Denmark and Italy, but so too were some of the big Munich breweries and quite a lot of very traditional brewers from around Bavaria, the rest of Germany, and Austria. There were also several beer distributors, and a stand from the US Brewers Association hosting 20 or so top US craft brewers. This being Germany, there were also oddities such as a smoking room run by a cigar importer.

As a country long accustomed to relative blandness rediscovers its interest in flavoursome beer, the craft beer concept is gathering traction in Germany. However, just as in Britain, where the older real ale breweries stress their craft credentials, the traditional German brewers are craftsmen too. So there's the same dichotomy between the new brewers for whom 'craft' is all about innovation and pushing boundaries in the American style, and the old-school brewers who see craft skills as the thing that differentiates them from the giant fizz factories.

"I also home-brew and sometimes I do those [new craft] styles," said Karl-Heinz Silichner, the brewmaster at 125-year-old AuerBräu Rosenheim, where he produces 13 different regular beers. He added: "Many people think the only art is craft beer, but it's not so. German-style beer, or Bavarian-style, is an art too. People don't just like craft beers, many people want normal beers too."

At the moment, the 'new craft' brewers in Germany face two big challenges. The first is that a few too many of the new, innovative brewers betray a lack of finesse. Braukunst Live! highlighted this by making their beers available alongside those of their more experienced Danish and American counterparts. Yes, there were some gems on the German side (Schoppe Bräu's Black Flag Imperial stout and Schlossbrauerei Au's Grätzer, for example), but there were also some that seemed muddied or confused – triumphs of enthusiasm over quality, or so it seemed.

BraufactuM's Weizen IPA

But they will learn – if they get the chance, that is. Because the second threat is that, just as in the US and the UK, big industrial brewers are trying to muscle in by creating or buying craft brands of their own – and at the same time, trying to equate craft beer with premium pricing. The boldest of these is undoubtedly the Oetker Group's BrauFactuM subsidiary, which does some pretty solid beers that sell for anything up to €15 for a 750ml bottle. By comparison, Gebr. Maisel's craft brand Maisel & Friends sells 750ml bottles for €4 or €5, and regular German bottled beer is maybe €1 a half-litre.

Still, the microbrewers are confident. "The industrial brewers try to copy us but they can't do it – I think they won't buy the same quality of ingredients, and they do the beer in two weeks, we take four," declared BrauKunstKeller's Oksana Himburg. "If you stay small, don't spend too much on marketing and keep costs low, it can work," agreed Thorsten Schoppe of Schoppe Bräu.

Well, here's to that! The two big take-aways from Braukunst Live! for me were just how much real curiosity there is now about interesting beer in the legendarily conservative state of Bavaria, and how many of the traditional brewers are dabbling in 'new craft' alongside their regular lines. Yes, some are obviously finding it hard not to be cautious, but others are applying their years of brewing experience rather well – a solid dry stout from Austria's Schlossbräu, the aforementioned Au Grätzer, and Schneider's Tap X Porter Weisse all spring to mind.

Golden Pints 2013

New Year is coming, the blog is looking thin, please put an article in the old man's tin... So I'm finally getting around to the Golden Pints 2013*, it won't be as long as last year's massive posting, not least because we were out of the country most of the year, but there you go...

1. Best UK Cask Beer - Great Heck's Dark Force Treason Stout, I found this at the Egham beer festival back in October, and its complex blend of treacley, fruity and citrus flavours blew me away.


2. Best UK Keg Beer - Given the unjustifiable price premium charged in the UK for keg over cask, I rarely drink UK keg. An exception was during some recent brewery visits where it was keg or bottle, and when I was rather impressed by Brew By Numbers' Saisons.


3. Best UK Bottled or Canned Beer - Siren Broken Dream. Having encountered Ryan's Danish beers, I was intrigued to see what he'd come up with after he moved to the UK, and those I tried at Copenhagen Beer Celebration this year did not disappoint. Nor did his Broken Dream stout.


4. Best Overseas Draught Beer - Klindworths Sauensieker Imperial Stout, amazing stuff, like a cross between an aged stout and a barley wine.


5. Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer - Lervig Brewers Reserve Konrads Stout, wonderful stuff, and a reminder that good as Nøgne Ø is, it's not the only fine brewery in Norway.


6. Best collaboration brew - Adnams / Pretty Things Jack D’Or. A version of a US beer, brewed in the UK as a special for Wetherspoons.


7. Best Overall Beer - Hmm, tough one. It's not a new beer to me, but right now it's the Acorn Gorlovka Imperial Stout that I was drinking last night!


8. Best Branding, Pumpclip or Label - I still love Magic Rock's artwork, but this year it's been just a tiny bit outshone by Siren.


9. Best UK Brewery - There's so many new names and smaller breweries I could choose - eg. Siren, Gloucester, Kernel - but I'm going to choose one that this year did it all. It produced great beers for the mass market and at the same time showed it can innovate as well as any of the smaller boys, and that brewery is Adnams.


10. Best Overseas Brewery - Klindworths, how this brewpub in a small North German village manages to produce - and sell! - such a huge range of exceptional beers still boggles my mind.


11. Best New Brewery Opening 2013 - Brew By Numbers.


12. Pub/Bar of the Year - Sad to say, I've not really spent enough time in any of them to call myself a proper judge, but in Berlin I enjoyed Hausbrauerei Eschenbräu, in Franconia it's Brauerei-Gasthof Kundmüller, home of the Weiherer beers, and in London my favourite place remains my local - the Magpie & Crown


13. Best beer and food pairing - stout and ice cream!


14. UK Beer Festival of the Year - I missed GBBF and several others, but somehow I don't think I'd have enjoyed them as much as I did an afternoon at the Egham Beer Festival. A stack of new and interesting cask ales, almost all in perfect nick, and in friendly surroundings. Perfect!


15. Overseas Beer Festival of the Year - this is a tough one! Hamburg's Craft Beer Days expanded to Berlin this summer, although sadly I couldn't be there then, and continues to be a fine showcase for characterful, non-industrial German beer. And then there's the loveliness of drinking Franconian festbier in the greenwoods at Annafest. For me though it was Copenhagen Beer Celebration, a festival of total beer geekery, loaded with rare and one-off beers from around the world.


16. Independent Retailer of the Year - It's a little pricey by local standards, but Hamburg's Craft Beer Store has a great local and international selection plus helpful staff, and even beer on tap.


17. Online Retailer of the Year - I didn't use any.


18. Best Beer Book or Magazine - I wish I had time to read more!


19. Best Beer Blog or Website - For the off-beat writing, it's Called To The Bar.


20. Best Beer App - UnTappd for being such a useful beer logbook, plus it has such tremendously responsive developers and moderators. Disclaimer: I am one of those moderators... (-;


21. Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitterer - @broadfordbrewer (-:


22. Best Brewery Website/Social media - Oh go on then, it's Sambrooks for its extensive Twitter, Facebook and the wibbly-wobbly web.

*This is a set of beery awards instituted by bloggers Andy Mogg and Mark Dredge; the idea is that anyone who wants to do so can offer their list, Andy and Mark then compile “best of” listings.

Happy New Year everyone, and may next year bring us all even more wondrous delights to drink!

Evil Twin - Ashtray Heart Smoked Imperial Stout

Every now and then a beer comes along and reminds me just how much I enjoy the Dark Side: this is one of those beers. Struggling for a comparison, I came up with vintage port and a barrel-aged barley-wine, getting married in a burnt-out toffee factory. Pretentious maybe, but it fits.

Produced by Denmark's Evil Twin Brewing – whose brewer Jeppe is the brother of Mikkeller's eponymous founder Mikkel – at De Molen in the Netherlands, at 8.9% this is almost a lightweight by modern Imperial Stout standards, yet it packs a big flavoursome punch.

Ashtray Heart pours a deep black-brown with a big foamy tan head. On the nose there's smoke and malt, plus hints of roasted coffee and smoky bacon. In the mouth it's well-named – there's notes of ash, leather, old wine, black treacle and a faint tartness. Then in the finish, a little malty sweetness, a hint of roasted cocoa, and that burnt bitterness that tends to signify roasted barley.

If you don't like smoked beers, you'll hate this. But if you like them, or if you're neutral to them but like strong stouts and porters, I suspect you might love this.

Willemoes: when is a Stout Porter not a Stout?

I'd not come across Vestfyen Brewery's Willemoes brand before our recent trip to Denmark, although it turns out I had tried a beer from Vestfyen before, but it was a naff and forgettable Eurolager, Vestfyen Classic.

Thankfully, the Willemoes stuff – there's now five regular Willemoes ales, plus seasonals – is a very different (brew)kettle of fish. As well as these two, a 6.5% Stout and a 9.8% Porter, I also picked up a bottle of their very nice 200 år ('200 years'), a rich 6.5% Dunkelbock.

All were good, the Porter especially so: it poured a deep red-brown, with a rich treacley nose with touches of chocolate, coffee and tobacco leaf. The body was full and drying and slightly sour, yet balanced with sweet notes. Flavours I picked up included black treacle, burnt prunes, liquorice, and something pleasantly reminiscent of old leather and aged port.

The deep black-red Stout was notably lighter bodied, some might even call it a bit thin. It still had a good flavour though, with faint aromas of toasted bread and malt followed by dry fruit and wine notes in the body.

It's tempting to look at these two beers though and think that someone on West Funen (Vestfyn) has missed the point. After all, historically "stout" meant "strong" and in beer terms was a contraction of Stout Porter, so shouldn't a brewery's Stout be stronger than its regular Porter?

Some would say not. This pair do match the BJCP Style Guidelines for Baltic Porter and Dry Stout pretty well, and according to that guide, and to many modern brewers, historical differentiation by strength is gone now, leaving distinctively different beer styles with their own characteristics. That's even before we add Imperial and Double (and Double Imperial!) versions into the mix...

I'm not so sure though. These are historically-inspired beers, after all, complete with old wood-cut style labels and a historical name. Vestfyen's "speciality series", it's named after local hero Peter Willemoes, who distinguished himself as commander of a floating gun-battery in the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen, in which Nelson's ships destroyed a Danish-Norwegian fleet - that's the battle where Nelson was supposedly ordered to withdraw, but put the telescope to his blind eye, saying "I see no signal!" (It wasn't quite like that, but that's another story.)

Indeed, the 200 år bock was first brewed in 2008 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Peter Willemoes' death in another naval battle, at the age of just 24. (Yes, as a 2nd Lieutenant a month short of his 18th birthday, he had been put in command of 129 men and 20 cannon. Different times...)

So it would be nice in a way if the beers followed 19th century norms, rather than 21st century. But whatever, Willemoes is a name I will be looking out for in the future.

Copenhagen Beer Celebration 2013

By all accounts, it looks like going to Copenhagen for CBC rather than London for London's Brewing might have been the right choice – although on arriving at the venue, just up the street from the Copenhagen FC stadium, it wasn't entirely clear that this would be the case...

Aptly named: Mine Is Bigger Than Yours

Let's just say the venue appeared pretty basic. From the outside it looked like a building site with extra portaloos, while on the inside it resembled a disused tube station with no rails (or platforms) but with less charm. Most of the bars were just tables with tall keg tap-boxes mounted on them. Those around the walls at least had a space to put up a poster or something, while those on the centre 'island' just backed onto an open area with chairs, tables and luggage strewn around. It was also rather noisy, with little to deaden the sound apart from some industrial carpet and a few hundred bodies.

BrewDog's Berliner Weisse

And yet it was great! There were tables and benches for the early arrivals – or those with all-session tickets – a friendly atmosphere, and plenty of beer. Mostly keg but there was some in cask, from Siren Craft Brewing which has feet in both Britain and Denmark – it was set up in Berkshire, England, by the former head brewer of Denmark's Fanø Brewery, who just to confuse things is American. Anyway, I digress – which I try to do less of in writing than I do in person...

The crowd, as I'd guessed from seeing both photos of the Friday sessions and what the Copenhagen craft beer scene's like anyway, was pretty hipsterish. I spotted several sideburns, a Mohican and even a couple of those Amish/Salafist-like moustacheless beards. 

Chinese Imperial Stout

Although the Danish language predominated, there was a lot of English spoken - not least perhaps because half of the breweries present were US. The rest were a world-wide selection, with (I think) one each from Australia, Brazil, Japan, mainland China, the Netherlands, Norway and New Zealand. Just four Danish breweries were present, the same number as from the UK.

Westbrook Mexican Cake

The idea was roughly this: 30-odd (actually 29) breweries bring nine beers each, and present three at each of the three sessions. In theory each session had a completely different beer list, but in practice several breweries ran one or more beers over multiple sessions. So there may have been more than 90 on when we arrived.  

But 90 beers for a five-hour session?! Even if you didn't take any time out to eat or go to the loo – the latter meaning a trip outside to the portaloos – that's still one every three minutes. Service was generally fast, and servings varied from 50-100ml, so around a tenth of a UK pint, but still...

Argh! My deMolen Rotting Carcass!

I think I managed to taste about two dozen – my notetaking got a bit wobbly as things progressed – so I did at least cover most of the breweries. They varied from the deliciously refreshing Kernel's London Sour (a Berliner Weisse) at 2.3% to a rich and warming 11% Cigar City Hunahpu's 2012. Sadly, I missed out on Three Floyd's Vanilla Bean Dark Lord (14%) and Mikkeller's X Big Tony 2006 (15%). My notes will gradually make their way onto Ratebeer as time allows.

Almost the complete range of beer styles was represented. Lots of IPAs and Pale Ales of course, and also lots of Porter and Stout – there is definitely a huge interest in Denmark in dark beer at the moment, even supermarkets have shelves full of locally-brewed examples. There were also sour Lambic types with and without fruit, spice and veg beers, coffee and tea beers (Siren's Chai Love You a Latté was good though well-odd) and of course lots of high strength Double or Imperial versions of the above. The only thing I can think of that was absent was Mild. (That's Denmark's loss, mind you.)

A T-Rex among cheeses

And it wasn't just beer – a local coffee roastery was offering sample brews, as was a Danish maker of very tasty cherry wine. There was food too, with my favourite being the cheese merchant. You know how there's Stout, then Imperial Stout, then Double Imperial Stout? Well, this deliquescent scoopable gem is Double Imperial Danish Blue cheese...

Would I recommend it? Absolutely! (That's the beer festival as well as the cheese...) Admittedly it's a bit of a sensory overload, and the signposting of who's where could have been better, but the range and quality were excellent.  There was even free WiFi, though fortunately I'd a local SIM card in my phone by then, and the 3G signal was fine. 

Many many thanks to Martin for sourcing me a ticket, and to him, Marty and Conny for being good drinking company...

Sunny Danish mornings

We had quite a light night of it yesterday - just four beers shared two or three ways. Mind you, all were fairly rare, and a couple were pretty seriously aged by beer standards, most notably the 1996 Campbells Christmas Ale from Belgium - Ratebeer lists this as an English strong ale, but I'm pretty sure it's actually a Scotch ale, a type that's still popular with Belgian brewers. It had oxidised quite a bit, but not too badly, and there was still enough treacley hoppy goodness underneath to make it well worth drinking.

The plan for today is to hit one or two of the specialist beer shops in town, then get some dinner ahead of tonight's blue session at Copenhagen Beer Celebration. The beer list for tonight is really quite something - I know the brewery names, but almost all the beers are complete unknowns. Should be fun!

Going a-Viking, in reverse

We're in Denmark this week, it's sort of a holiday so we spent three days soaking up the early medieval atmosphere while living in a repro 9th century house at Ribe Viking Centre where the annual Spring market is underway. Now we're visiting friends just outside Copenhagen and assaulting their beer cellar - Martin has a large collection, large enough that I don't think we even made a dent in it last night with this little lot:

That's not all Danish (and there's two rows of bottles there!) but the variety and quality of modern Danish craft beer is astonishing. And there is still more to discover - today we've sampled Jacob's Chili-Lakrids øl, brewed on the island of Fyn at Refsvendinge, one of the few surviving Danish "farmhouse breweries", though these days its brewing kit is a bit more substantial than a farm one! And now it's a cloudy spicy Dubbel from Verdes Bryghus, called Sankt Jacobi - I sense a theme here...