Beer & Cheese

The pairing of beer and cheese is a custom that dates back centuries.  Both beer and cheese are traditionally farmhouse products. Farmers often made cheese when they had an abundance of milk.  This kept the surplus from spoiling.  During the winter months, when farmers couldn’t farm, they brewed! So, as you can imagine, a common farmer’s diet consisted of beer, cheese, and sometimes, cold meat, commonly referred to in England as a, “ploughman’s lunch.”

Both beer and cheese have a similar origin, grass. Barley is a cereal grass used in making beer, and milk is a by-product of a cow eating grass. In the words of Garrett Oliver, Brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery and pairing guru, “Cheese is grass processed through a cow and modified by microbes.  Beer is also grass processed through a microbe—yeast.”  As a result, beer and cheese complement each other by sharing some common characteristics in both aroma and flavor.

Carbonation

Carbonation scrubs the palate, providing for a lively flavor interaction.  The carbonation cuts through the fats in cheese and in turn, lifts the palate and wipes the it clean bring out many nuances in the cheese that would otherwise be undetected. 

Malt

When beer is malted, it is soaked in water for several days, and then allowed to sprout for about a week. The grains are then kilned at high temperatures to dry them out. During this kilning, browning reactions create flavors, which are commonly described as toffee, caramel, toasted, chocolate, coffee, roasted, and more.  You can find all these descriptions on the tags at a cheese shop.  Use them to help create harmonies in your pairings.

Hops

The bitterness of hops helps cut through fat and balances sweetness!

3-Step Guide to Pairing

The ultimate goal of pairing is for the beer and cheese to taste better when enjoyed together, than apart.  The beer and cheese should go on the, “best date ever,” on your tongue.  These two should finish each other’s sentences and dance til early morning.  Here’s how you make this happen:

Match Strength

Delicate cheese—delicate beer; Strong flavored cheese—assertive beer

Take into consideration flavor intensity of your beer.  Qualities that determine the intensity of a beer include: alcoholic strength, malt character, hop bitterness, sweetness, richness and roastiness.

Find Harmonies

Combinations often work best when they share some common flavor or aroma elements.  Find a dominant flavor in a cheese and match it to the same dominant flavor in a beer.  For example, the nutty flavors in aged Gouda paired with the nutty flavors of brown ale.

Contrast

Contrasting elements balance and sometimes blend into one another.  This of the saying, “opposites attract.” Certain flavor elements interact with each other in specific and predictable ways.  Your goal is to take advantage of these interactions to ensure the food and cheese will balance each other and not throw the match out of whack. 
 

Great tips are:

• Salt flavors in cheese counters acidic flavors in beer—sour or wild ales become less acidic with salty cheese.

• When you match acidic cheese with acidic beer, they nullify each other and only mute the overall acidity.

Here is a chart from the Brewers Association to best illustrate this point: