Cheese and barleywine

Cheese and barleywine

This is part two of a linked two part article looking at pairing barleywine and cheese. The first part looked at it from the barleywine perspective, this part looks at the cheese perspective.

A work of beauty

Borough Market Quicke’s Cheddar
A full, rich traditional Cheddar aged for a minimum of 18 months bound in linen and covered in lard to provide a protective coating. An awesomely good cheese.
Seek out Flying Dog’s Horn Dog, Great Divide’s Old Ruffian, or Rogue Old Crustacean to pair with this cheese.

Cave Aged Gruyere
An assertive, earthy, complex cheese that will dominate a pairing unless you are careful. Try it with Flying Dog Horn Dog, or Avery Hog Heaven.

Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog (goat cheese)
Made by a mother/daughter team in California, it has buttery, creamy, faintly feta taste. Seek out Nogne O 100 or Rogue Old Crustacean to pair with this tasty cheese.

Maytag Blue
Made from pasteurised cow’s milk, Maytag Blue is a more subtle blue cheese which dominates the US market. Try this with Flying Dog Horn Dog, or Uinta XV Anniversary.

Neal’s Yard Dairy Colton Bassett Stilton
Rich, creamy, mellow and savoury with a buttery texture. Move Heaven and Earth to have this with Weyerbacher Blithering Idiot – a truly outstanding pairing, you may hear an angelic chorus. Whatever you do, do not pair this cheese with Norrebro Little Korkny Ale, or the Uinta XV Anniversary – it produces appalling bad, rancid, moldy, metallic, vomit-inducing sensations.

Neal’s Yard Montgomery Cheddar
Rich, sweet, fruity, nutty, beefy flavours reminiscent of the caramelised edge of a Sunday roast. This cheese will play well with most barleywines, especially so with the Flying Dog Horn Dog (which won the award of “most cheese agnostic” beer!), Weyerbacher Blithering Idiot, Norrebro Little Korkny, Avery Hog Heaven, Rogue Old Crustacean… well, pretty much any decent barleywine will do good things with this wonderful cheese.

It was a dirty job, but we took one for The Team

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Beerlicious articles by Stuart Carter, stuart@beerlicious.net is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: Blithering Idiot, Borough Market, Cave Aged Gruyere, Colton Bassett Stilton, Cypress Grove, Hog Heaven, Horn Dog, Humboldt Fog, Little Korkny, Maytag Blue, Montgomery Cheddar, Neal's Yard Dairy, Nogne O 100, Old Crustacean, Old Ruffian, Quicke's Cheddar, Uinta XV