Want Some Cheese with That Barleywine?

In my last blog I cast my own doubts on the success of pairing beer with food.  I don’t mean drinking beer with food – beer & food go side by side great.  I’m talking about pairing in the transcendental foodie kind of way that, supposedly, would achieve some sort of celestial state & send one’s taste buds into thralls of ecstasy.  I just don’t think it’s happening, & my general rule is that beer is best left unto itself.

Now there exists one BIG exception to this soft “rule”, & that’s wine’s alleged “best buddy”: cheese.  Maybe it’s because I’m also a big fan of cheese, but for me, these two foodstuffs just click.  I think it’s Garrett Oliver who qualifies cheese & beer’s affinity thusly: at their most fundamental, they’re both just grass converted by enzymes & organisms.  In the case of beer, it’s enzymes & yeast.  In the case of cheese, it’s a cow & then enzymes.  He also goes into depth about the shortcomings of wine with cheese, as well as beer’s secret weapon: the “scrubbing bubbles” of carbonation.  I think the two work together so well because they are both simple yet so complex, in ways that complement fantastically.  Cheese is always salty & creamy to varying levels, flavors & textures that can catalyze & be catalyzed by the taste & mouthfeel of beer.  There aren’t layers upon layers of ingredients to overwhelm or negate one another, but the flavors can unfold & unlock one another in the right pairing. 

Next to beer, blue cheeses are probably my favorite basic foodstuffs, so there’s plenty of pairing potential with this rank, sharp, salty family.  I can remember trying Anchor’s Old Foghorn Barleywine with a sweaty, room temperature Stilton & having each of them transformed, going through movements as the sweet, caramelized barleywine opened up the funky Stilton.  I love blues with a good, dank IPA – some of my favorite double IPAs, like Green Flash’s or Dogfish Head’s Burton Baton, express blue cheese notes in & of themselves (to me, anyway), making for a natural match.  I was becoming disillusioned with farmhouse ales for a while, until one night when I tried one with brie & saw it in a whole new light – the rustic, earthy qualities of each really shone through & renewed my liking for saisions.  Flanders red (my favorite beer style) goes great with the buttery, slightly sweet notes of a triple crème like Saint Andre.  A nutty, aged cheddar works well with the nutty, chocolate, roasty notes of a porter or stout, or the citric & piney bite of an IPA.  Some of the Trappists make their own cheese, naturally pairing well with their world class Belgian dubbels, tripels, & quads.  And back to blues – great with traditional lambics.  If you’re feeling really adventurous, try a runny, washed rind cheese (French Muenster?) with a lambic or other wild ale & prepare to open a Pandora’s box of gustatory experience.

Just a few suggestions, but if you ask me, cheese is the only surefire food for beer pairing - but therein lies a slew of possibilities.  Find a good cheese seller (hey, you already know of a great beer store) & go to town.  This may be one area where I agree the beer literati: when it comes pairing with cheese, it’s all about the beer.  Wine just doesn’t cut it.