Grilled Gulf Shrimp served on a Fried Green Tomato and Remoulade paired with Terrapin Rye Squared
The high gravity Terrapin beers have just entered Alabama. This was my first experience with the Rye Squared. As usual the hops in the Terrapin worked wonders with the spice in the remoulade to make an explosive spice mix. Wonderful.

Jolly Pumpkin La Roja served with a traditional Chef’s Salad and La Roja Vinaigrette Dressing
Jolly Pumpkin make very interesting and complex beers using wild fermentation, and are not the easiest to get hold of. All of them have some brettanomyces to provide a sour, wild flavour and unique taste profile.
The combination with the vinaigrette dressing and the chef’s salad is divine. The gentle sourness provides an almost vinegary tang that works perfectly with the salad. Seek out Jolly Pumpkin ales – don’t be put off by the description “sour” – this is an exceptionally good beer.

Three Cheese Tortellini covered in an Alabama Chevre Pasta Sauce accompanied by Rochefort 8 Trappiste Ale
The three-cheese pasta and goat cheese sauce is a great dish in itself.  The Rochefort is the 73rd best beer in the world (at the time of writing) and deserves this place – it is stunningly flavourful, rich and malty, explosively carbonated and delicious.
The combination is sheer perfection. The maltiness in the beer matches the rich unctuousness of the cheese, while the explosive carbonation scrubs the palate – and tongue – clean with every mouthful, cleaning and refreshing the palate to make every bite of the tortellini just as tasty as the first.
An example of a perfect beer and food pairing.

Cask Conditioned Ola Dubh Special 40 Reserve along with Sliced Smoked BBQ Mutton
Ola Dubh – Scottish Gaelic for Black Oil – is an old ale from Scotland. It’s matured in a cask that was previously used to mature single malt Scottish whisky from Highland Park, Scotland’s second most northerly distillery. It is rich, dense, tasty, with profound notes of single malt; a sublime beverage.
The Ola Dubh stands in stark contrast to the rich smokiness of the pulled mutton and the citrus-infused BBQ sauce, perking up your taste buds and providing a nice digestif to finish off the main course.

Good People Fatso Imperial Stout Ice Cream Float
Fatso is the new Imperial Stout from Birmingham’s own Good People brewery. Its taste has masses of coffee richness and an almost silky mouthfeel. In the ice cream float, it mutates into the richest, densest, most silky mocha coffee you can even imagine.  Absolutely wonderful.

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.

This was better than what you ate last night.

Magnificent.

Today I found myself in the mood for an old standby.  I don’t recall where I first saw the recipe, but now I make it from the hip.  The essentials:

Chicken
Artichoke hearts
Tomatoes
Red Onions
Feta Cheese
Pasta

Sauté the chicken (cut into small pieces) with the onion (chopped) in butter.  Meanwhile, start boiling your pasta.  I’ve used penne in the past; today I felt like bowtie.  Ideally, throw some fresh minced garlic into the pan before the chicken and onions are thoroughly cooked.  This time around I forgot, so I added some garlic powder later in the process — not quite as good but you need a little garlic flavor in there somehow.  Then toss in the artichoke hearts and tomatoes and sprinkle with some oregano and let that heat through while the pasta finishes up.

Drain the pasta, add to the chicken mixture, and cut the heat.  Then squeeze some lemon juice over it all, pour in a little olive oil, stir thoroughly, and serve with plenty of crumbled feta on top.  Yummmm.

Before I started cooking this evening I paused to consider what beer should go in the fridge to accompany this, and I settled on Ommegang’s Ommegeddon because it’s a funky, earthy brew fermented with Brettanomyces. I suspected it would go well with the funk and earthiness of the feta and artichokes.  I was right.

Without going into excruciating detail, most beers are brewed with various strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  All ales and lagers are fermented with one of many strains of Saccharomyces.  But Brett is different.  Beers fermented with Brett don’t fit into a convenient category.  They are earthy, funky, and sometimes sour.  It’s a whole different world from your typical pale ales, pilsners, or stouts.

This was a match made in heaven.  Neither the food nor the beer overpower the other; they just dance on your palate in remarkable complexity.  No off flavors, no clashes, just perfect harmony.  I wasn’t at all certain of what I was doing here, but it was an educated guess that turned out brilliant.

I suspect any Brett-fermented beer would work well with this dish, and there’s a surprising variety of them out there.