Today being a colder day, I decided to go with a beef chuck pot roast, with potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and using some of the Amber Ale to provide the liquid component of the dinner.

This was a perfect meal for a colder day. The malt sweetness played off the beef and the sweet potato. The carbonation lifted the fat off the tongue, refreshing the mouth for each bite. The hop bitterness freshened the tastebuds and contrasted nicely with the sweet, fatty richness of the rest of the meal.

Sometimes simplicity is what you crave. This hit the spot exactly right.

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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.

The food came from a nondescript typical Chinese takeout place in Alabama.  General Tso’s is the standard by which I judge all Chinese joints, and this iteration was not high quality at all.  As sweet as candy and no spicy heat at all.  Fun to eat in a junk food sort of way, but not gourmet cuisine.

But the Gaelic classed the meal up quite a bit, offering a beautiful malty sweet compliment to the General Tso’s.  Only the Gaelic Ale is not cloying, so it actually reduced the sickly sweet flavor of the chicken.  And the chicken’s sweetness somehow brought out some interesting notes from the caramel malt that weren’t otherwise obvious, actually improving the experience of drinking the beer.

Call me crazy, but I’m going to rate this pairing as “perfection,” not because the food was particularly good, but because sometime in life you might find yourself eating crappy Chinese takeout and knowing which beer to put with it to improve the overall experience would be helpful.

Seafood Gumbo with Olde Towne Amber
If you haven’t had gumbo, you haven’t lived. Get some now! This pairing just confirmed my already solidly set perception that Amber Ale is probably the most flexible beer style – the mellow sweetness and subtle hops balanced off the seafood richness and chili spice of the gumbo, without squashing any of the subtle flavours or developing any harsh or “off” notes. Simply delicious.

Spicy boiled shrimp on a fried green tomato with remoulade, with Good People Pale Ale
The briny sweetness of the shrimp found a perfect foil with the malt sweetness of the beer, while the spices and hops danced an exquisite tango of polite one-upmanship. Utterly brilliant pairing.

Trout a la Meuniere with buttered pasta, with Terrapin Golden Ale
The Golden Ale is my go-to beer for creatures that live in water. It has a gentle sweetness that never overwhelms the delicate taste of white fish, while also playing nice with shellfish in a non-spicy setting. The Golden also helps to cut the butter richness, refreshing the mouth and leaving you eager for the next bite.

Southern-Style strawberry shortcake, with Good People Coffee Oatmeal Stout
Stout is my go-to beer with dessert, especially the Good People coffee stout which has echoes of a really fine cup of coffee with rich cream. What more can you ask for with dessert?

Some rights reserved:

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

OLDE TOWNE DINNER, 24 JANUARY 2009

This dinner was arranged by the J Clyde to celebrate the welcome return of Olde Towne beers to Birmingham after a brewery fire caused a too-long absence.

Reception: Olde Towne Pilsner A Selection of Gourmet Cheeses

I am generally quite indifferent towards beers in the Pilsner/lager styles – I am not a huge fan of the style. The OT Pilsner is a persuasive offering, and paired very well with the mustard seed and porter infused cheeses: it brings out the richness of the cheese, while cleaning the palate afterwards. Nice.

First Course: OT Porter with Local Winter Vegetable Soup

A surprise pairing here. The soup was truly outstanding – rich, tasty, with nice chunky vegetables. The porter lent its richness to the stock, leaving a lingering caramel/coffee sweetness that successfully played off the flavour of the vegetables.

Second Course: OT Hefeweizen (wheat beer) with Spanish Potato Omelet

Hefeweizens are a hard style to do well: many brewmasters come out with a good, but not outstanding, hefeweizen. OT’s brewmaster should be proud of this beer: it is, quite simply, world class: one of the best hefeweizens I have ever had the pleasure of drinking. Subtle, delicately sweet, with a very gentle spice flavour at the back of the mouth. The combination with the omelet was astonishing: taking a sip of the beer with the omelet in my mouth produced a phenomenal blast of clove spices! Superb!

Third Course: OT Pale Ale with Pecan Chicken Salad on leaf lettuce

This is a contrasting pairing. The Pale Ale is in the English style, very balanced and eminently drinkable, with a gentle hop dominance. The pecan chicken salad is sweet and rich. The combination? Both shine out full force: the Pale Ale clenses the palate, allowing you to fully appreciate the salad, and the salad leaves a rich sweet nuttiness which the Pale Ale washes down. Dynamite combination.

Fourth Course: OT Amber with Local Venison tossed in a rich red sauce over farfalle pasta

The Amber Ale is a style I only came across after moving to the U.S. It rapidly became one of my favourite styles, due to its flexibility: it pairs with pizza, burgers, milder chilis and curries, most cheeses, and so on. It’s also just a good sipping beer! This pairing proves I am not so nuts for liking the style: there is enough malt sweetness there to balance the spicy red sauce and to play with the richness of the venison, while keeping enough hop bitterness to leave a clean taste in your mouth, ready for the next bite. If you have never had this style before, the OT Amber is a great introduction to it.

Fifth Course: OT Chocolate Stout with Classic Homemade Cheesecake

I am, as you may recall, Mr “Dark Beer And Cheesecake”. There is nothing I can usefully add to my previous article: porters/stouts and cheesecake are simply Da Bom. The OT Chocolate Stout is an interesting take on the style. While there is the expected hop bitterness, there is also a dark chocolate bitterness. This double whammy could have been overwhelming, but the cheesecake came to the rescue by providing dairy richness and sugar sweetness to offset the hop/chocolate combination. An odd combination, but still very tasty!

As you can see from above, a beer dinner is quite a serious time – and waistline! – investment, but well worth it. It allows you to explore beer and food, and try pairings that would not necessarily have occurred to you.

North Coast Old Stock + dark chocolate. More of that 72% stuff from Whole Foods.  I wasn’t at all sure of this one before trying it, since my most successful pairings with chocolate have involved stouts.   But this was excellent.  Old Stock is a very rich and malty beer with some prominent alcohol notes.  The dark chocolate really pulls out some intense caramel flavors from the beer.  Which, as you might imagine, goes quite well with the bitter chocolate of the 72% grade.

Heineken + Chang’s Spicy Chicken and Crispy Honey Shrimp. The wife wanted P.F. Chang’s the other day on date night.  Inspired by Doug’s Heineken experience with Korean food, I went that direction (as the beer list is a bit depressing).  Not exciting.  P.F. Chang’s around here carried Sweetwater 42o way back in the day, and that would have been a lot more interesting.  But the SOBs dropped it a couple years ago or so.  I don’t hate Heineken, but the flavors are just soooo subtle.  It was washed out by the rather potent Chinese food.  At least it wasn’t skunked.

Cascade Lakes Santa’s Little Helper + Andouille with Red Beans and Rice. Leftovers.  But unlike the pasta from a week ago, red beans and rice doesn’t suffer from sitting in the fridge for a couple days.  Still great.  Though it presents itself as a winter warmer, Santa’s Little Helper is essentially a hoppy American amber.  Quite a nice beer, and another good compliment to the andouille sausage with red beans and rice.  Maybe not quite as good as the hoppier red rye homebrew, as the andouille is pretty intense.  The beer has to fight for some attention on the palate.  But it pulls through and works well.

And finally, Avery Old Jubilation + Hot Wings, tonight.  More leftovers, but these were superior to the first round.  When I cooked these last week, I fried the wings up, poured the sauce over them, and dug in.  Then I put the leftovers in a ziplock bag and poured the remaining sauce in with them.  So they’ve been marinating for a few days, and they were a notch better tonight.  Spicier and more painful.

In spite of my recent comment that I was devoted to pursuing future wing consumption paired with IPAs, I must hang my head in shame and admit I have no IPAs currently in stock.  I probably have at least 20 different styles of beer around right now, but no IPAs.  Shameful.  Part of me wanted to try the homebrew red rye here, as it has IPA levels of hoppiness.  But I instead opted for experimentation.  I went very malty: Avery Old Jubilation.

And the results were surprisingly good.  The caramel sweetness of this old ale-style winter warmer actually provided a good balance to the vinegar spiciness of the wings.  Good contrast, and no off flavors as I’ve experienced with some failed malty pairings.

Ultimately, though, I’m still going to have to vote for the IPA as the preferred pairing for wings.  The citrusy hops of a good American IPA are perfectly refreshing up against the heat of buffalo wings.  Although interesting and complimentary, the winter warmer left me wanting something that felt a little more quenching.  I’m sure a macro lager would acheive that (and certainly has for millions of wings fans), but of course you wouldn’t be tasting anything in that sort of beer when pitted against the intensity of high heat wings; it would be functionally equivalent to water on your palate.  Which defeats the purpose of intentional pairings…

I of course started things off with a delicious Good People IPA:

Drink local!

Foodwise I was in the mood for something relatively light, so I sprung for the BLT.  Southern-style, featuring fried green tomatoes and remoulade.  With sweet potato fries on the side, of course.  It all paired nicely with the GPBC IPA.

But my glass was empty by the time I finished the first half of the sandwich.  How odd.  Finding myself presented with the opportunity to enjoy a second beer with the meal, I went for something from the newly reborn Hunstville brewery, Olde Towne.  I’d had their Pilsner recently, so I opted for the Amber.

American ambers can span the spectrum from intensely malty to intensely hoppy.  Olde Towne’s is the maltiest I’ve ever had.  Not to be confused with something like Cable Car Amber, which has virtually no flavor.  Color ≠ flavor.  But Don Alan at Olde Towne does it right and gives us a surprising barley malt bomb in a keg, especially considering the sub 5% alcohol content.

Which brings us to the Malt Barrier.  I’ve been getting my butt whooped by malty beers, but this marked a turning point.  The Olde Towne Amber was the superior pairing of the two beers.  It went beautifully with both the BLT and the sweet potato fries.