Cooking With Beer - Where to Begin

Cooking with Beer

Beer and Food – Where to begin

The ingredients in beer are full of varying characteristics and underlying flavours and aromas.  These flavours, aromas and characteristics come from the four basic ingredients in beer.-      

Hops with their herbal, citrus, resiny aromas      

Malts and grains provide the toasty, roasty flavours      

Yeast adds an element of fruitiness and spiciness      

Water, well this can help make a good beer great! 

To understand how these characteristics work it is important to understand how to pick out these aromas and flavours in beer.  This can be done by following some easy steps.  Much like wine tasting having a rounded glass is key as well as the iconic swilling of the liquid. 

Step 1 - Eyes – Look for the clarity of the beer, colour and carbonation.

Step 2 – Nose – To capture the aroma (swill glass, take short sniffs) identify the bold top notes versus the underlying ones.

Step 3 – Mouth - Sip to understand the body, strength and character.  Slurp to understand the taste and flavour.

Step 4 – Palate – How does it react on the palatte?  Sweet, savoury, umami, dry (bitter) 

Beer and Food transform each other.  The contrasting elements featured above help to balance and even sometimes blend the flavours together.  The key to great beer and food matching is down to finding combinations that work.  By identifying the flavours and ingredients in both the beer and food the experience can be astonishing. 

The certain elements in beer that should be acknowledged are:-     

- Bitterness (Hop)

- Malt Sweetness

- Carbonation

- Alcohol

These elements when paired with certain foods are the catalyst for transformation.

HOP BITTERNESS  -  ROASTED MALT  -  ALCOHOL - CARBONATION

BALANCES

SWEETNESS  - UMAMI - FAT

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MALT SWEETNESS  

BALANCES

SPICY HEAT -  ACIDITY

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HOP BITTERNESS

EMPHASISES

SPICY HEAT

There is no right of passage in terms of the order when pairing food with beer.  However there are guidelines that need to be followed.  Choose a topic, whether it is a certain style of beer or a specific cuisine, by having a concept this will make the matching process more cohesive. 

The following guidelines are: 

Match Strength with Strength

Identify the strength of the dish first.  A delicate light dish requires a beer that is mildly hopped and delicate on the palate, whilst a robust strong dish requires the same level of strength in a beer.  Strength does not refer just to alcohol content; this can be representative by hop bitterness or robust maltiness as well.  Strong dishes can vary as well, from that of heavily spiced dishes to that of roasted meats.  By understanding the strength of the dish can you find a perfect match. 

Find Harmonies

Understanding the flavours and aromas in both the food and the beer can help you in creating a perfect pairing.  Find commonalities, such as citrus hop aromas in the beer with citrus fruit, pepper vinegar, or, toasted malt flavours in the beer with grilled or roasted meats, aged strong cheeses.  Once commonalities have been found, the door to pairings can be swung wide open; there is no right or wrongs, just common sense. 

Contrast Elements

As explained in the diagram above, certain elements contrasting can provide the benchmark to great combinations.  Sweetness, bitterness, carbonation, heat (spice) and richness (fat) interact with each other in food and beer and provide an interesting and obvious result.  By picking out the characteristics of the food you can then look at contrasting elements within the beer to either balance or emphasize.  Such as carbonation balancing fat and richness.  So a dense pastry pork pie is balanced by the carbonation in Worthington’s White Shield IPA.  This is just one example of contrasting elements at work. Take the sweet malts of a Czech Pilsner balancing the spicy heat from a chorizo sausage.  The result is a transformation of both the beer and the food. 

Use beer as a condiment

The final guideline hightlights the underlying theme for this book.  Using beer as a condiment within cooking.  We’ve all had a steak and ale pie, but more often than not the use of beer in cooking is overlooked.  Why should this beer, when beer is practically food, and especially with the vast flavour profiles that are immersed in beer. 

ABRO BREW MASTER SPECIAL EDITIONS

Åbro Bryggmästarens Färsköl

Unpasteurised and Unfiltered - I was lucky enough to try this Special Edition at The Stockholm Beer and Whisky Festival.  From Brew master Lennarth Anemyr comes this light lager full bodied with a subtle hop aroma.

             Åbro Bryggmästarens Oktoberfest

Another one of Abro's Brew Master Special Editions, this Oktoberfest variety is packed full of Munich and Pilsner malts.  Alongside premium hops such as Tettnang and Tauras.  It is a fantastic balance of malt sweetness and hop bitterness.  Master brewer Lennarth uses the Decoction mashing method when brewing Oktoberfest, this is where a small portion of the mash is transferred into a separate vessel, boiled for a time and then returned to the rest of the mash.

Åbro Bryggmästarens Smoked Malt

If you are up on your smoked beers or Rauchbier if you hail from Germany then you will be familiar with Bamberg's offerings and in particular Schlenkerla.  Abro's Smokedmalt is a lot more delicate and subtle, providing the palate with a hint of smokiness and an underlying sweetness from the malt.  It's too heavy either, lighter in body than it;s German counterparts.  Overall a very fine take on a german classic recipe that is a fantastic introduction to smoked beers.

But auntie, what about beer?

I have always related to cookery and culinary-related programmes that the BBC provide, however, as a beer specialist myself for a large company, I feel it is my duty to comment on and try to understand the bias wine has in today’s programming.

Beer is the oldest-produced liquid-commodity in the world, dating back to 6000BC. Yet it is overlooked on programmes such as Saturday Kitchen by the fascination of wine. The complexity of beer lends itself to be better-suited to complementing food.  The use of malts, hops and yeast means that there are three flavour profiles to work with food, unlike wine where you just have the grape.

The diversity of styles in beer can help create a perfect marriage of flavours: from wheat beers to pilsners, and IPAs to stouts. The range of flavours and ingredients can easily shadow that of the usual white, red and rose.

It surprises me that the only programmes we have seen on beer, is a couple of middle-aged men travelling across the country in an effort to find a boozer where they can get drunk in and play some games… Now don’t get me wrong, this is entertaining television, but why cant there be programming that brings beer and brewing to life!  Why can’t Saturday Morning Kitchen pair a beer to their dishes rather than have some toff in Sainsbury’s prancing around the wine aisles? (Especially as James Martin confesses to enjoying a lovely glass of Duvel when cooking at home.)

I am keen to discover why the BBC has an infatuation with wine, and feels it is okay to disregard beer? There are around 167 wine producers in the UK, yet there are over 800 breweries, all of which use UK malt and barley to produce their beer. The UK brewing industry supports our local farmers through red tractor accreditation... surely this should be something to shout about?

The great British tradition of brewing is seeing a revival and it is key for the re-growth of the economy that we get behind our manufacturing. The revival in brewing can only be seen as a positive impact on today’s stuttering industry, where in Yorkshire alone, over three pubs every day are closing. I believe as Britain’s great institution, it is the BBC's duty to get behind the brewing industry and start portraying beer in a new light.

By introducing beer in cookery-related programming it can help in promoting sensible drinking and make consumers aware that beer is not the so called lynchpin of the “binge drinking” generation. This myth can be dispelled by the BBC doing away with the image of the local boozer and a landlord pulling a pint of beer every time a health and alcohol story hits the news.

We should be proud of our beer industry – in Yorkshire alone there are around 100 operational breweries, all of which use local farmers to source there ingredients. 

Beer is integral to our history and industry. Let’s celebrate that by the BBC leading the way... RESPONSIBLY!