A Food and Beer Pairing Primer

Even if you can’t have the tart itself, you can conjure the same delicious experience by pairing a bottle of fruit beer with a bit of fresh goat cheese. Voilà! The malt of the beer subs in for the crust, the goat cheese brings the rich dairy feel of pastry cream and that bright acidity reminiscent of perfect summer produce, and the fruit in the beer brings the, well, fruit on top.

Exciting pairings like this one happen when at least one of the items shifts in a profound way to offer a new experience that’s impossible when you have each item in isolation.

To get to that profound experience, you need to start with the basics, by matching the palate impact of the food and beverage. A low-impact food item, such as fresh spring salad, will be lost next to a high impact beverage, like a barrel-aged stout, and vice versa.

Once you have considered the overall impact of a food or beer you plan to pair, other important factors come into play. You either want to play off of something familiar, or shift the internal balance of the food or beer by using multiple pairing principles.

There are primary pairing types and secondary considerations that help make the pairings work. Often the best pairings bring multiple aspects into play. The primary pairing types are Contrast, Complement, Compound or Conjure, which work along with the secondary considerations of Cleanse, Cut and Cancel.

Beer makes a great partner to many things simply because it is carbonated. On the one hand, carbonation works to physically cleanse the palate, much like those cartoon scrub brushes in cleaning product commercials. Carbonation can fizz mouth-coating things like fat away, so your next bite of pizza or fish fry seems just as unctuous as the first, disrupting any diminishing returns. At the same time, carbonation also helps aromatize aspects of the paired item that would otherwise be muted or less available to your olfactory receptors. This is why most any beer, assuming there is not a clashing flavor in play, is a good companion for almost any food.

The experience of a cut is similar to the cleansing action of carbonation, as it helps keep your palate from being over-saturated by a particular aspect of the food. But rather than a physical reset, it is the stark difference of flavor that is in play. On the one hand, all beer has a degree of bitterness that can help cut fat or sweetness in food. On the other hand, all beer has a degree of sweetness that can cut bitterness or capsaicin heat in food.

Matching two similar aspects in beer and food can result in a canceling effect: the matched flavors cancel each other and end up dropping out of the experience. This often mutes bitterness more effectively than trying to lay a sweet element over top. The benefit of canceling is that it keeps the number of elements in play low, and allows you to over-exaggerate the elements of the beer and food that are not canceled. For instance, when you pair IPA with blue cheese or cheddar, matching the bitterness levels in the beer and cheese, you complement the fruitiness on both sides because you’re canceling the bitterness in both. The canceling is the mechanism that creates the experience, but it isn’t the interesting part: it’s how the fruit flavors compound as a result.

As you get a handle on matching impact, and considering how to cleanse, cut and cancel particular aspects of flavor, finding the profound shifts that make exciting pairings becomes more predictable. Proof of concept always requires smelling and tasting the actual pairing; luckily, each new day presents an opportunity to eat and drink amazing things together.

CONTRAST: Pairing dissimilar flavors to highlight differences.

• General example: Strong hoppy beer and dark chocolate cancels the bitterness and highlights new depths in each.
• Specific example: Giant Jones Double IPA and Wm. Chocolate Hati, Kafupbo 80% Dark.
• Experience: The malt comes more into balance with toasted marshmallow and popcorn notes and hops skew to almost ripe mango; the chocolate pushes towards black tea with bitter orange and watermelon complexity.

COMPOUND: Pairing similar flavors to over-accentuate.

• General example: American Barleywine and aged tea. Both are deeply malty and fruity.
• Specific example: Giant Jones American Barleywine and 2003 Green Heart Aged (Matcha Tea Company)
• Experience: A fresh beer quality compounds in each, highlighting their fermented character, then the fruitiness of each compounds with flavors of dried pineapple and toasted coconut.

COMPLEMENT: Pairing flavor aspects that have synergy.

• General example: stout or porter and nutty cheese. The synergy of toasted nut and chocolate flavors pulls those components to the foreground.
• Specific example: Vintage Scaredy Cat Oatmeal Stout and Cedar Grove Monterey Jack
• Experience: Everything becomes more indulgent, with beer and cheese seeming richer together than they ever do alone.

CONJURE: Pairing to evoke associations with a separate food.

• General example: Fruit beer and fresh goat cheese conjure a summer fruit tart, with maltiness as crust, goat cheese as custard, and the beer's fruit as garnish.
• Specific example: New Glarus Raspberry Tart and Dream Farm Goat Cheese
• Experience: You’re instantly transported to a breezy summer evening, enjoying the bounty of the season any time of year.