Beer and Snack pairing

Or, how I realised just how much of a pleb I am.

For the last few months, I’ve been running a Beer Club at work. For each session, we taste 5 beers from a specific theme. This week was the 4th and it was all about food and beer pairing.

I wasn’t blogging (again) for the first three, but for context the themes we went through were:

• Irish Spring (a few beers from Irish breweries for warmer weather, plus a brown ale cos we all know spring isn’t all hot)

• Eurovision (beers from some notable entries from this year, drank while their entries played!)

• Old Brewing Countries/styles (historically significant styles from Germany, Belgium and Czechia)

After each session, we vote on our fave beers of the day. I’m using this data to both satisfy and challenge my colleagues’ tastes. I will get them to like dark lagers if it’s the last thing I do! ;)

This time, I wanted to pair snacks and beer. This was a much bigger research task, and I’m not just talking about trying combinations and picking the best. In order to do this any kind of justice, I had to dig into the principles of flavour interactions, and really understand why things taste the way they do together.

First, I solicited free advice from Twitter and got dozens of interesting responses like these:

Then, after speaking to a few more people as well as consulting the excellent Pints and Panels archive, I came up with a bunch of potential pairings.

What really struck me, is that I clearly don’t know the first thing about flavour. We all know that the basics are salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Fat is emerging now as its own flavour too - kinda makes sense - but did you know that spicy is not a flavour but a sensation? I’m not sure what I thought it was, but when trying to pin it to the 5/6 flavours it didn’t fit.

Then again, neither does “pungent” or “tangy” (even though that one seems to be a mix between sour and sweet). Plus, beer doesn’t just have flavour but it has other notes that affect how it tastes with food, like carbonation or alcohol content. Let alone the sheer number of hop varieties, malt varieties, fermentation flavours and combinations of all the above. Lastly, when was the last time you tasted food that was only one flavour?

Pairing beer and food is hella complex.

The way that flavour interacts is characterised in a few ways (although I’m sure there are loads more):

• Cut - how components like carbonation or acidity can “cut” through fat, salt or other flavours

• Contrast - flavours that work because they’re opposite

• Complement - flavours that resonate through similarity

Then, there are ways that pairings can work together:

• Harmony - when flavours work together because of their similarity or commonality

• Alchemy - when paired, flavours that create something “new”**

Food and Beer pairing principles, summarised.

For each of the pairings, I tried to think about whether it was harmonious, or alchemical along with which flavours in the beer/food cut, complemented, or contrasted with its counterpart - as well as making sure to match food and beer intensity.

So this was the menu. I tried to keep it simple, preferably one-ingredient snacks since I am no Sommelier (yet…?):

• Spicy salami & Pilsner (Seemed classic, but good)

• Popcorn & Saison (I was so interested to try this!)

• Sharp cheddar and NEIPA (a strange-sounding combo to me)

• Carrot Cake and DIPA (suggestion from a friend, as well as Cicerone it seems!)

• White Chocolate and Fruited Sour (which I have tried before and was blown away by)
  

Fair warning: nerd stuff ahead.

I knew that telling the beer club that these pairings “should” work wouldn’t be enough. I needed to explain and visualise it in a way that both they and I could appreciate. So I gave beer and food their own value/characteristic rubric, so that we could see how the flavours interacted with each other.

Here’s a question for the food-pairing geeks out there - how do you account for things like smokey-ness in food? Can food really be broken down into only one (or combo) of the flavours? Why then do we have such a long list for beer?

Next, I used an example to show how the notes (flavours?) combine with the flavours in food. While I realise that the interaction would actually be double-sided, I chose to focus on what the beer would do to do to the flavour of the food - only for representation purposes. I’m sure there are theses written about this in more detail, but alas, I’m but an enthusiast trying to evangelise beer at a software company.

Showing how one flavour doesn’t just pair with one other; some cut a flavour, some contrast it, while others complement it.

Now for each pairing on the menu, I did the same - put the rubric together with some key stats about the beer and food so that we, as a group, could discuss why this “should” be a good pairing.

I tried to capture whether the food/beer was low-high intensity, whether it was a harmonious/alchemical pairing as well as how each of the flavours interacts - whether they cut, contrast, or complement each other. Capturing the relationship of “many to many” wasn’t easy, and I think there are better ways but I didn’t want to point arrows all over.

You may have noticed, but I actually snuck in another pairing. For Popcorn & Saison, when I tried it, I couldn’t decide whether I liked the pairing of salty popcorn or salty-sweet popcorn better, so we tried both.

The final selection of beers, food and the fun folks of our Beer Club.

Now for the jury.

Right. The TLDR is that people’s favourite combinations were the Spicy Salami & Pilsner, and Saison & Salted Popcorn. These results surprised the hell out of me, as I thought the Salami/Pilsner would be too “basic” to rank well, but I also thought the Saison would be a bit “out there” for most - as a beer style, more than a pairing. Interestingly, the Saison and salty-sweet popcorn was the least favourite of the lot!

What this really revealed to me, is that it’s not quite enough to pair a style of beer with food, it’s actually down to the beer itself. When I was testing the combos, I had chosen different beers from the ones I ended up with, except the sour which I had selected specifically. If I were to do this again, I’d start by picking 5 individual beers, and then finding food that goes with them rather than just thinking about pairing on styles alone.

Cheers to everyone that helped me figure this stuff out, it’s been a wild ride and one that is certainly not over.

** My term. I’m sure others have coined it more eloquently