“So Firestone Walker Wookey Jack.” Chef Paul Kasten, who has developed a specialty of hosting brewers dinners, was beginning a description of his method of pairing food and beer on the menu. It was a remedial lesson, for I am by no means a foodie. “Break down the flavors: You got some roasty, you got some earthy/peppery notes from the rye, the hops with piney/citrusy and some earthy character, some grassy-green character, and of course bitter.” Even though he’s a chef, Kasten starts with the beer, literally creating a map of its flavors and then assembling his dish by placing, one by one, flavors to match those he finds in the beer. In front of him was a legal pad full of diagrams, like sentences broken out on a classroom blackboard.
“Each component of the dish is hitting a number of the flavors in the beer.” He had paired Wookey Jack (a black rye IPA) with a dish of tandoor-roasted pork loin. “The roasted potatoes, they’ll match up with the roasty flavors of the beer; they’ll get a little char on them, bitterness. On to the morels—they’ll pick up the earthy notes from the rye and hops. Guajillo jus—the spiciness of it, the toasty and lightly smoky flavor to it—will hit the peppery rye, it will line up with the bitterness of the hops. I’ve got a little bit of gremolata—basically chopped parsley, garlic, and lemon zest—on top just to brighten it up. That will hit your green notes from the hops, the citrus, the raw garlic, the peppery quality to it.”
At some point in our discussion, I asked, “It’s not like white wine with fish, and red with beef, is it?” He looked at me sadly. ■
MATCHING FOODS can be trickier than it looks. The reason has to do with the alchemical nature of flavor, which doesn’t follow the rules of simple addition. Combining one thing with another doesn’t necessarily give you a blend of flavors—as Cody Morris, who crafts his Epic Ales specifically to be food-friendly, explains. “Beer pairings work best when you try the beer and it tastes like one thing; you try the food and it tastes like another; you try them together and they taste like a third thing altogether.”
Because of these quantum effects, food pairing can produce unexpected flavors. I was recently served a dish of three types of roasted vegetables that I paired with a crisp, balanced German pilsner. With the savory potatoes, the pilsner harmonized with fresh herbs, and the malt’s sweetness drew out the potato skins’ earthiness. But with the tart, pickled onion, it was the pilsner that popped, crisp and dry. The final vegetable, bitter greens, didn’t work well at all. The sweetness of the malt seemed to sharpen the vegetable’s bitterness, which in turn clashed with the beer’s spicy hopping.
French food chemist and author Hervé This gives one example of why this happens, on a molecular level. “A glass of vinegar is undrinkable,” he writes in Molecular Gastronomy, “but it becomes palatable if one adds a large amount of sugar to it. Yet the pH—the acidity of the vinegar measured in terms of hydrogen atoms—is unchanged. Why is the sensation of acidity weakened? Because the perception of tastes depends on the environment in which taste receptors operate.” When I paired the German pils with savory, tart, and bitter flavors, a similar kind of chemistry happened in the mouth.
And herein lies the silver lining: Once you understand these interactions, they are predictable. The example of sugar and acid is one case. When Paul Kasten begins to design a pairing, he starts with the beer’s constituent elements and works backward from there. His diagrams help him match the elements to those he’ll put in his dishes. When we’re sitting down to a meal, we can do the same thing. The result will be alchemical, but it doesn’t have to be random. ■
BEER HAS MANY elements. Carbonation levels vary widely, and texture ranges from watery to syrupy. Some beers are dry and crisp—an indication of the attenuation—while others are heavier and sweeter. Beers have very different intensities, from those that whisper to screaming punk songs of flavor. And of course, beers have a huge range of flavors—far more than wine.
When we sit down to dinner at a restaurant or open the fridge, there’s one obvious question: Which beer will go with this meal? People have been putting their brains to this puzzle for some years now. It has been more than a decade since Brooklyn Brewery’s brewmaster, Garrett Oliver, and food writer Lucy Saunders first published books on the subject. Thanks to their work, along with a few pioneering chefs across the country, people have begun to take seriously the idea that beer is as good a partner on the dinner table as wine. Beer has slowly been losing its second-class status as people discover how versatile it is. Experts have developed certification programs like those offered by Cicerone and Master Brewers Association of the Americas (MBAA) to train people to match beer with food. Chefs have been developing their own pairing methods through trial and error. There is a growing pool of knowledge that you can dip your toe into to quickly improve your odds of making a good match. The theories are largely complementary and overlapping—they just organize the concepts differently. Try them out and find the one that works for you.
Drinking beer with a meal is something like adding a condiment—you’re tinkering with the food. The results can either be harmonious, discordant, or a hash where the two don’t relate in a meaningful way. It’s no different for beer than chili sauce. One basic rule of thumb, then, is to match intensities. Chili sauce can easily overwhelm a dish, and so can intense beers like lambics or IPAs. The reverse is true, too; fiery or rich dishes require a beer that won’t taste like water by comparison.
Another handy rule of thumb is to think about the role the beer will play. Are you looking for the flavors to meld together and complement each other—roasted meat and a roasty beer—or act as a contrast, like a sweetly malty beer with a spicy enchilada? Some beers also help cut through richness or heat, or help cleanse the palate along the way. These three concepts are known as the “Three Cs.”
■ Complement. These are flavors that harmonize through similar elements. The sweetness of malts accentuates sweetness in meat; the herbal flavor of hops seasons herbal dishes.
■ Contrast. In good contrasting pairings, elements harmonize by putting each other into sharp relief. Roasted malts balance sweetness (think coffee and dessert); hop bitterness, by comparison, contrasts nicely with some sweeter meats. Sweetly malty beers contrast nicely with oil-and-vinegar dressings, and so on.
■ Cut (or Cleanse). One of the best uses for a beer is to cut through intense food flavors. When approaching rich food, hops, carbonation, and acidity are excellent tools. Acidity is also great at cutting saltiness.
Don’t forget to consider regional specialties and classic pairings. When beer and food come from the same place, they will often go hand in glove with one another. The smoky, rich meats of Bavaria are perfect with dunkel lagers; Flemish carbonnade is a triumph with tart Flanders ales; and the sweet and briny flavors in raw oysters are wonderful with roasty Irish stouts or charred porters.
Alcohol stimulates the appetite. As an aperitif, you want a beer that isn’t heavy and filling, and also one that won’t coat your tongue or wreck your palate. Dry, lightly bitter, effervescent, and acidic beers fit the bill, including fruit lambics or gueuzes, saisons, pilsners, and effervescent pale ales. You want the opposite when looking for a digestif—those beverages like brandy and Port that come after the meal. Here, too, certain styles are excellent, like barley wines, old ales, strong abbey ales, and doppelbocks. They are heavy, satiating, and alcoholic—a dessert unto themselves.
These few basics are a great foundation. To dig a little deeper and begin to get an intuitive sense of good pairings, it’s useful to consider the different elements of beer and cuisine. There are a few systems out there, and taken together, they can greatly improve your odds of making that perfect pairing.
Folks at the Master Brewers Association have reconfigured beer types away from style and regional tradition, focusing instead on flavor. When beer washes over our tongue and its aroma fills our nostrils, style is secondary to experience; our immediate impressions are sensory, not intellectual. The Master Brewers divided beer into four categories based on the dominant flavor: 1) malt, 2) hops, 3) fermentation flavors, and 4) added flavors like fruit or smoke.
MALT FLAVORS
In pairing foods, understanding the dominant flavor is critical—it will be the main driver of success or failure. Malt-driven flavors have a range that goes from the very sweet to the acrid—they will inflect food very differently. When considering a malty beer, think about how those flavors will express themselves.
MALT TYPE |
DOMINANT IN |
FLAVORS |
Pale malts |
Pale lagers, English bitters, pale Belgian ales |
Grain, bread, scone, biscuit |
Caramel malts |
American pale ales and amber ales |
Candy, toffee, caramel, honey, dark fruit |
Medium malts |
Amber lagers, mild and brown ales |
Nuts, toast, bread crust, caramel |
Black/roasted malts |
Porters, stouts, schwarzbier |
Dark chocolate, coffee, char, roast |
Hops are more complex and pose more of a challenge. When we say a beer is hoppy, we are actually referring to three separate qualities: bitterness, flavor, and aroma. One hoppy beer may be very bitter but have little in the way of hop flavors or aromas (some altbiers are like this). Other hoppy beers may not be especially bitter, but have tons of flavor or aromas—like many pale ales. The real trouble comes when trying to figure out the nature of the hops. Are they woody or citrusy? Paul Kasten creates his menus so that his dishes “borrow” the flavors of hops, using them like seasoning. Offering the example of a dish containing prosciutto, goat cheese, apricot, and balsamic vinaigrette, he says, “Say you’ve got a beer with a distinct apricot flavor—why not use that to replace the apricot in your dish?” In order to do this kind of matching, you need to consider which family of flavors your hoppy beer falls into.
FLAVOR FAMILY |
MAY TASTE LIKE |
Herbal |
Pepper, hay, mint, anise, sage, juniper, dill, marijuana |
Woody |
Cedar, pine, earthy, resin, incense |
Citrusy |
Grapefruit, bergamot, lemon, passion fruit, lemongrass |
Floral |
Lavender, jasmine, geranium, apple blossom |
Fruity |
Apricot, mango, melon, black currant, quince, peach |
FERMENTATION FLAVORS
The category of fermentation flavors is the most unfamiliar, but it is in many ways the most precise. Yeast produces flavor and aroma compounds that are more concrete—empirical, measurable—than the more impressionistic and poetic qualities malts and hops produce. Once you begin to feel comfortable with the concepts, the flavors become easier to distinguish than, say, whether a hop is more piney or grapefruity. Those beers that are driven by fermentation characteristics—rustic ales, weizens, tart and wild ales—are regularly cited by sommeliers and chefs as the easiest to pair with food, too, so getting to know these flavors will come in handy in your own pairings.
CHARACTERISTICS |
MAY TASTE LIKE |
Esters (fruity) |
Apple, anise, banana, pear, pineapple, honey, rose |
Phenols (spicy) |
Pepper, clove, smoke, vanilla |
Wild yeasts (tart) |
Balsamic vinaigrette, yogurt, leather, barnyard, compost |
ADDED FLAVORS
The final group includes those beers driven by flavors contributed by other ingredients like fruit and spices. It also includes smoked malts and barrel-aged beers, which pick up flavors from whiskey or wine. Pairing foods with these types of beers is more intuitive because the flavors are distinctive and recognizable. Beers keyed by the addition of cherries can be paired as you would the fruit; smoky beers can inflect the flavor of meats the way barbecue does.
Washington, D.C.–based beer sommelier Greg Engert developed a similar method to the Master Brewers’, but as a sommelier, he thinks of flavors through the lens of the layman’s incomplete sense of beer. “The first mission of the flavor profiles is to start with a beer you’re interested in,” he says. As he was developing his system of categories, he kept encountering people who had strong opinions about beers they didn’t like—but misunderstood what it was about the beer they objected to. This “backward” way of getting at flavor had the advantage of using all the customer’s experiences. He came up with his categories to help customers learn as they went. “Rather than just having a beer list that was inaccessible to the average guest, I wanted something that was coachable.”
Engert’s seven categories are arranged in increasing intensity, and each flavor is divided into different types.
Crisp |
Delicate fruit; malt-accented; and brisk hoppiness |
Hop |
Earthy and dry; malty backbone; and bold, herbal, and citric |
Malt |
Toasty; nutty; fruit; toffee |
Roast |
Soft and silky; dark and dry |
Smoke |
Subdued smolder; spicy and meaty |
Fruit and spice |
Bright; dark |
Tart and funky |
Delicate; fruity and vinous; earthy |
By organizing them from least intense to most, Engert gives diners a yardstick to begin with. His subcategories are pretty good guides for channeling the type of beer to the right food. Which hoppy beer to try with a hard cheese? Probably one that is earthy and dry will work better than a heavier malty one. An ale that is delicately fruity like a kölsch is probably not a great fit for spicy cuisine—try a malt-accented crisp beer like a Vienna lager, instead.
Paul Kasten has a simple system. For him, everything starts with richness, on both the food and beer sides: “Richness and richness is a general rule.” This is a slightly different dimension from intensity; a beer can be intensely bitter but not rich, and a dish might be, say, intensely spicy but not rich.
Once he’s established a beer’s richness, Kasten thinks about two other elements. Bitterness is one. His approach is to pair spice with hops. “Some pairing experts say that you should beat the beer into submission with the food,” a practice designed to showcase food at beer’s expense. He prefers using the beer to add layers of flavor to food. Finally, he looks at the malts and their roastiness or toastiness. Roast works well with heavier smoky or roasted meats, while toastiness can accentuate complementary nutty or toasty notes. After considering these three major flavor elements, Kasten turns to the specifics of individual flavor and begins matching.
IT DOESN’T MATTER particularly if you think of beer in terms of having three, four, or seven categories. Every expert I spoke to—brewer, chef, or sommelier—repeated the same message: “Beer is complex.” You have intensity, texture, density, and richness to consider along with flavors. The challenge is to keep all that in mind as you begin to experiment with pairing beer with foods. But don’t despair—the homework is as fun as any you’ll get. As the flavors blend and trans-mute, notice what’s happening, whether it works or not. Pretty soon, you’ll begin to understand the alchemy on an intuitive level. The pleasure is in the experimentation and discovery, but everyone can use a bit of a road map to help them get pointed in the right direction. What follows is a “rule-of-thumb” guide that will help you get started. But remember—rules are meant to be broken.
■ Bitterness is a natural ally of salty foods. The two flavors are intense, but they help calm one another. Salt inhibits bitterness, and the bitterness quenches after a salty wash.
■ Bitterness helps cut through rich foods. It reduces the satiating effect of fat on the palate, working equally well with heavy meats and cheeses.
■ Consider using the flavor of the hops to complement herbs in food, especially those that are citrusy, fruity, spicy, or green-tasting.
■ Sweetness is an excellent contrasting element, adding depth to salty dishes and tempering sour ones.
■ Sweetness is a useful tool in soothing the fiery assault of spicy foods. The viscosity of sweet beer will help temper the fires, as well.
■ Matching sweetness in beer and food can bring out the rich tones in both, but keep intensities in mind—extremely sweet beers may cloy when paired with sweet dishes.
■ Acidity is one of the best ways to cut through rich cream or cheese, oils, or fats. Tart beers are especially nice with funky cheeses.
■ Salt helps neutralize acid, so tart beers will be dulled by salty food.
■ When pairing with tart ales, consider secondary characteristics like fruit flavors or esters, which may complement sweet notes in food.
■ Meats are an obvious choice for roasty beers like porters and stouts, but pay attention to the intensity and richness of both beer and meat and match accordingly.
■ Some roasty beers have a smoky component that works nicely with barbecue, game, or dishes with mushrooms or truffles.
■ Like coffee, roast can be used to nice effect to contrast rich, creamy, or sweet dishes.
■ Malty beers are generally low intensity, so pair them with milder foods like pizza and roasted root vegetables.
■ German beers, including kölsch and altbier, are excellent partners for meat dishes, including those with tangy or smoky qualities.
■ Consider darker, sweeter malty beers with well-spiced dishes like stews and mole sauces.
■ Strong beers are nearly always intense, and must be served with robust foods.
■ Treat sweeter strong beers like Belgian ales as you would dessert wines, serving them with either hard, salty cheeses or desserts.
■ High levels of alcohol intensify the sense of spicy heat, so don’t serve lighter-bodied strong Belgian ales with fiery dishes.
■ Choose a sweet beer to balance the bitterness in vegetables, but a light one that won’t overwhelm the veggies’ delicacy.
■ Dressed salads offer interesting pairing opportunities. With sweeter dressings, crisp or tart beers will complete the triangle, but for vinegar dressings, a sweeter beer or a crisp one are better choices.
■ The intensity of dark chocolate is a good match for a heavy, sweet beer like old ale or a sweeter barley wine.
■ Light, crisp beers work well with lightly sweet dishes, since the carbonation cuts and the crispness cleanses.
■ To contrast the sweetness of fresh fruit, try a tart or crisp beer. Tartness will contrast fruit’s sugars while the esters harmonize. Crisp beers will enliven fruit.
■ Beer works surprisingly well with desserts. Dark, roasty beers accentuate chocolate, caramel, dark fruit, and spice, while acidic, crisp beers cleanse the richness and density of creamy or buttery desserts.
■ Citrus is a wonderful match for bright, crisp beers, especially those with citrusy hop notes.
■ Consider fruit ales as a contrasting element to sour foods.
■ Malty beers like helles are a natural pair for pickled dishes (including sauerkraut). The sweet malts temper tartness.
■ The Maillard reactions in malt and meat harmonize nicely, and dark beers and roasted meats are a classic combo.
■ Dark, light-bodied beers like porter and schwarzbier can make subtly sweet notes—such as those in pork or shellfish—pop.
■ Lighter-colored malty beers like American wheats and Scottish ales are nice with lighter meats like poultry and dishes with spice, like Mexican and Thai.
■ Salty foods exaggerate booziness, so choose lower-alcohol beers, especially with salty snacks that encourage sipping.
■ Tart beers offset saltiness, and sweet beers add a toothsome contrast—but remember to match intensities.
■ Avoid roasty beers, which clash with the flavor of salt.
■ Bitter beers may accentuate the heat in spicy foods, but the flavors of hops may also be used to harmonize where spices have a citrus or floral component.
■ The same nerves that detect spice also recognize carbonation, so for very fiery dishes, skip highly effervescent beers. Instead, use sweeter, thicker beers to douse the pain.
■ Consider taking a drink before you chomp down on that chile; the beer will coat your tongue and help balance the lick of flame that comes roaring through.