Flavor And The Menu Beer

DESCHUTES BREWERY/HOLLAND STUDIOS

Beer-and-food pairings have come a long way from burgers and wings. Diners now can enjoy beer dinners with a different brew for every course.

BEVERAGE TRENDS

BEER Hits the

Craft-made and European-inspired brews elevate beer to fine-dining status and show great food-pairing potential

BIG TIME BY JACK ROBERTIELLO

I

f you have any doubt about how far beer has traveled as a fine-dining beverage in the last few years, drop by New York’s venerable Gramercy Tavern and take a peek at the beverage list. In addition to the 30 or so regular beers, customers can choose from about two-dozen aged brews, such as two vintages of Brooklyn Brewery’s Black Chocolate Stout, a 10-year-old from Oregon’s Rogue Ales Brewery and an English ale aged in sherry casks. Not convinced? Perhaps the next time you visit one of Thomas Keller’s restaurants, like The French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., or Per Se in New York City, you’ll find a dish paired with Blue Apron, a bottle-fermented, Belgian, double-style ale custom made by Brooklyn Brewery. Beverage lists at Keller’s and other high-end restaurants reveal a serious effort to establish beer’s place of significance at the table. Or should that be “reestablish?” THE FIRST FOOD-FRIENDLY BEVERAGE Beer is probably the original food-friendly alcoholic beverage, and with advocates like Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver, author of “The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food,” preaching the gospel, more restaurants are introducing quality beers, offering food-and-beer pairings and hosting brewmaster dinners. Oliver is one of the most prominent of the many enthusiasts who have insisted for years that brewers’ wares www.flavor-online.com

have been exiled wrongly to the burger-and-pizza corner of American cuisine. “We often forget, as the craft-beer segment expands, that what we have is a slow return to normality,” says Oliver. “When you look at the U.S. historically, the period of the huge dominance of one kind of mass-market beer is relatively small.” Major brewers also have increased their attention to brewing a range of beer styles and even have focused on beer with food; the 304-page “Great Food, Great Beer: The Anheuser-Busch Cookbook” is only part of that megabrewer’s attention to more flavorful brews. MORE STYLES, LESS FIZZ George Reisch, an Anheuser-Busch brewmaster who works on the craft-oriented Michelob line, believes the golden age of brewing is upon us. “In the U.S. now,” he notes, “we have more beer styles for sale than anywhere in the world. We are living in beer nirvana now.” He credits the microbrew boom for resuscitating nowpopular beer styles like imperial pale ale (IPA). Beer fits well with food, since that’s what it was designed for, Reisch says. “It was never meant to be an egocentric beverage that gets in the way of food, and the flavor profiles of all the various styles of beer were developed to go with the local foods.” It was once normal for Americans to drink a range of locally made beers — porters, stouts, ales, lagers, pilsners and Winter 2009

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BEER at the Table Beer’s wide range of flavors allows for sophisticated food pairings, but first you need to know your brews

SEEK HARMONY: Beer can harmonize with flavors that wine can only contrast with, Oliver says, citing hearty red wines served with a charred steak. “What you’re not doing [with wine] in any way is harmonizing with the meat, which is about caramelization. Grabbing on to that caramelization is unique to beer.” BEYOND COLOR CODING: “Just serving a lighter brew with the first course, an amber with the main and then a dark with dessert is a little passé,” says Charlie Devereux, secretary of the Oregon Brewers Guild and co-owner of Double Mountain Brewery & Taproom, who sees the bar being raised by beer dinners. “When people come to a beer dinner, they’re looking for something they might not find at every corner,” he asserts. A recent dinner at the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, Ore., included such dishes as house-made carpaccio, antelope stew and rabbit with wild mushrooms. “These probably worked better with beer than they would have with wines,” Devereux observes. SMOOTH THE TRANSITION: When Greg Engert of Rustico in Alexandria, Va., confronts skeptical wine lovers, he opts for what he calls “transitional beers,” or beers that are more acidic, perhaps produced in ways similar to winemaking, via aging or exposure to more natural yeast. BE GENTLE: “Exploring the world of beer does not involve the kick of a steel-toed boot. It is a series of gentle nudges,” says Dave Alexander of Washington, D.C.’s, Brickskeller and RFD Beer. “You don't create a fan of specialty beers by getting a Bud drinker to try a Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Barleywine,” he notes. This dense, fruity and malty brew might be too intense a flavor leap for those used to the pale stuff. “You learn what the customer likes and introduce the next step in the flavor profile along his guidelines,” suggests Alexander, pointing to craft-brewed American lager or German Pilsner as better bets. ENJOY THE JOURNEY: “In any case, when the customer discovers a new taste, he is not going to stop liking that taste,” says Alexander. “As the world of beer moves into the kitchen, it brings those fans along with it.” 118

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IRON HILL BREWERY

AT HOME WITH THE RANGE: “Beer has a much wider range of flavor than wine does,” says Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster Garrett Oliver. Brewers, unlike winemakers, can introduce other ingredients, such as more highly roasted malt, smoked grains or fruits, to create distinct flavor profiles.

Breweries like Iron Hill prove there’s a beer style for every taste, from hop-heavy IPA to cask-aged brews with bourbon notes.

the like — in different styles for different occasions and cuisines. And the flood of yellow, fizzy brews doesn’t adequately represent the incredible range of beer flavors. Beer’s reputation as an unsuitable food partner emerged as mass-market beers became single-note beverages, Oliver points out. Even after American brewing returned to its roots and expanded in the 1990s, the industry did a poor job of promoting how well beer pairs with food, says Mark Edelson, director of brewing for the seven-unit Iron Hill Brewery and Restaurant, based in Lancaster, Pa. “The wine industry has done such an incredible job over the last 25 to 30 years pushing the wine and food connection, and we as an industry have got to get better in making the case of food with beer.” BREWPUB REDUX The brew-pub craze of the late 1990s didn’t help, with its abundance of batter-fried fish and chips. And a shakeout among the craft brewers, who made good beer but bad business decisions, slowed things down. “In the early ’90s, it was no longer good enough to be the local brewery, even if you offered a consistent and desirable product, which many did not,” says Dave Alexander who, with his wife and partner, Diane, runs www.flavor-online.com

BEVERAGE TRENDS

The Brickskeller Dining House & Down Home Saloon and RFD (Regional Food and Drink) Washington in Washington, D.C. “The segment went through a heavy weeding out. The smartest business people survived, and the guys that had that ‘great India pale ale recipe’ were gone. The craft-beer industry became more savvy.” Craft beer is stronger than ever: In 2007, craft brewers increased the volume of beer they sold by 12 percent. There are now 1,420 craft brewers in the United States, including regional breweries, microbreweries and brew pubs, according to the Brewers Association in Boulder, Colo. As fine-dining restaurants take on more craft beers, the focus has grown on pairing food and beer. At Rustico Restaurant and Bar in Alexandria, Va., the list of 300-plus beers is built around the food menu, says Beer Director Greg Engert. Dishes with spicy and herbal elements require hop-assertive beers; hearty game or meat dishes call for roasty, dark stouts and porters. But that’s only the beginning. Engert looks for brews tweaked to match each dish’s specific flavor profile; carrying a few Belgian-farmhouse saison-style beers, for instance, allows him to be more specific in his recommendations, depending on a dish’s spiciness. ACQUIRING TASTES

along with ice creams made with stout and Belgian raspberry and fruity peach beers inspired the Alexanders, as did the Belgian cuisine de bière tradition. “Top chefs in Belgium had been cooking with beer for years,” observes Dave Anderson. “It was only natural that American chefs would sooner or later be drawn in.” The food connection saved many of the beer-centric restaurants in the late 1990s. “If you’re in the brewery-restaurant business, you have to operate as a restaurant first,” says Edelson. “It’s what drives people in and puts them in front of us so we can teach them about beer.” Craft brewers have stretched their recipes to include more highly roasted malts as well as fruits and spices. Some brewers add ingredients like cocoa nibs to boost the chocolaty quality of their stouts. In fact, the sky is the limit when it comes to flavor inspiration. Portland, Mainebased Peak Organic Brewing Co. produces ales with far-flung ingredients like coriander, organic pomegranate and acai and also uses local, seasonal additions like Maine-grown organic oats from GrandyOats in Brownfield, Maine, and organic maple syrup from Vermont. Brewers also have been emulating Belgian producers, long cherished for the breadth and depth of their styles, from frothy and aromatic wheat beers to intense and challenging lambics, and elegant, Champagne-like gueuze.

Executive Chef Piet Vanden Hogen of Pelican Pub & Brewery in Pacific City, Ore., prepares clams in Pelican’s Kiwanda Cream ale for a beer dinner.

As consumers mature in matters of taste, they welcome the chance to try more assertive flavors, says Charlie Devereux, secretary of the Oregon Brewers Guild and co-owner of Double Mountain Brewery & Taproom in Hood River, Ore. “It took a little time for people to develop their palates,” he says, “but we in Oregon, for instance, are used to drinking very hoppy beers; our typical recipes use twice as many hops.” “Americans love hops, and America is known worldwide for hoppy brews,” says Iron Hill Brewery’s Edelson. Bitter double IPAs have become the standard American version. INGREDIENTS ON TAP

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PELICAN PUB & BREWERY

As brewers toyed with more intense flavors, restaurants like RFD maintained that beer was being ignored as an ingredient in food. Whipping up dishes at home like chicken with artichoke hearts and figs in Anchor Steam Beer, Winter 2009

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DESCHUTES BREWERY

Deschutes Brewery and Brew Pubs of Bend, Ore., have been educating customers about craft brews and beer-enhanced cuisine for 20 years.

The other frontier for today’s adventurous brewers is yeast, as they tinker with wild varieties that can add phenolic notes like clove or fruit esters during fermentation. As breweries develop a market for barrel-aged and higher-alcohol-content beers, they become even more experimental. Roots Organic Brewing Co. in Portland, Ore., offers Epic Ale, which comes in at 14 percent alcohol and is made with malt smoked over cherrywood soaked in Scotch whisky, cognac and cherries. Obviously, with beers like this, the range of flavors widens, and potential food matches increase. With brewers innovating and chefs responding to new pairing opportunities, one trend seems to drive the other. It is now common to see chefs working to pair dishes with intensely bitter ales or making desserts that go with chocolaty stouts. “The [brewing] industry has made great strides in terms of quality, variety and sophistication of product,” says Devereux. In terms of flavor, “chefs” and specialization, the foodservice and brewing industries “have a lot in common.” &

AGING AND ADDING More craft brewers are starting to age their beers in new or used barrels, echoing the creativity of Scotch whisky makers who use casks from cognac and bourbon distillers and wineries to finish their spirits. “Aging of beer using bourbon barrels is very specialized, tough to do and a labor of love, but there’s lots of customer demand,” says Edelson. In February 2009, all Iron Hill locations served barrel-aged beers on tap, many with bourbon notes from the aging casks. (Iron Hill serves only beers it makes.)

TAK E -AWAY

T I P S

HOP ALONG: Americans love hops; offer refreshing, hop-heavy

beers to pair with spicy foods

TAKE A LOW RISK: Add a few unusual bottled beers as LTOs to bring new attention, seasonality and flavor descriptors to your bar scene

AGE WELL: Consider adding a cask-

aged beer to the mix for flavor and for a good story

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ANHEUSER-BUSCH

TAP POTENTIAL: Sip-sized samples of beer on tap are an affordable way to introduce new choices and open a dialogue between servers and guests

JACK ROBERTIELLO writes about spirits, cocktails, wine, beer and food from Brooklyn, N.Y.; he can be e-mailed at [email protected].

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