Craft beer and food pairings are most successful when the intensity of the beer matches that of the dish. You don’t want the craft beer to outweigh the food and vice versa.
Choosing craft beer pairings that enhance one another requires attention to the dominant taste and flavor elements in each. When approaching pairing, success is often found by identifying the characteristics (taste elements, flavors, intensity and sensations) of the craft beer you plan to pair with. Look for flavor bridges, where the flavors of craft beer can bridge to the flavors in a food dish. This helps create harmonies, home runs and the complementing interactions we all enjoy.
Interactions: Beer Ingredients
Malt
The sweetness of malt reduces the heat of spicy food. In comparison, wine’s higher alcohol actually accentuates the warmth from many spices, which can be undesirable.
Malt-forward beer styles include: brown ale, bock, porter, red ale, scotch and scottish ale, stout and Vienna lager
The flavors of malt, which can range from caramel, chocolate, graham cracker, roast, toasted and toffee, harmonize with grilled, roasted and smoked foods because share many of these same flavors.
Hops
Hop bitterness cuts through the fat in food, lessening the dense heavy feeling in your mouth. This allows you to more fully taste the ingredients of your dish and enjoy the true flavors of both your craft beer and food.
Hop bitterness balances both malt and food’s sweetness.
Hops may intensify spices and heat. A good rule of thumb is to pair malt-forward beers with spicy foods and hop-forward beers with rich or fatty foods.
What hops bring to the tasting party depends on when they were added to the batch of beer and the type of hop used.
Carbonation
Beer’s carbonation (bubbles) works to scrub the tongue of fat and prepares your palate for the next bite.
Interactions: Food Elements
Salt
Salt flavors in food counter acidic flavors in beer—sour or wild ales become less acidic with salty foods. Sour beer styles include: Berliner weiss, gueze, lambic, flanders red and many “wild” or funkified beers.
Acidity
Acidity exists to a certain extent in all foods, especially tomato dishes and many salad dressings. When you match acidic food with acidic beer, they nullify each other and only mute the overall acidity. This is desirable and helps enhance the enjoyment of both the dish and the beer.
Beer and Brownies
Sweetness
Sweetness in either food or beer paired with an acidic counterpart increases the acidity. So avoid pairing sweet and acidic flavors together—imagine toothpaste and orange juice.
The same effect of acidic food with acidic beverage happens when you pair sweet with sweet. Try pairing a Belgian quadruple (often over 10% ABV) with a dense sweet dessert. You’ll see how the sweetness of the beer lessens the sweetness of the dessert and vice versa.
Fat
Acidic beverages cut fat, and that helps the palate sense more of the flavors from a fatty, rich or dense dish. See the above section on hops to learn why craft beers, which tend to be more bitter than mass produced lagers, work so well with dishes on the richer side.
Spice, Herbs and Heat
There are fundamental differences between spice, herbs and heat. For our discussion, we want to talk about heat—those additions to food that make your eyes water and your nose run—think capsaicin from chili peppers or pepper flakes.
Here’s a fun rhyme: sweet calms heat!
Heat intensifies alcohol, and as the alcohol penetrates your tongue and lips it acts like a solvent, which opens up your senses even more to the heat! The higher the ABV, the more you’ll notice this effect.
Be careful when pairing spicy foods with higher alcohol beverages as the pairing leaves you more vulnerable to the heat used to flavor your dish. Restrained heat and alcohol is nice, and creates a warming sensation in the mouth, but too much heat and alcohol is like throwing oil on fire.
Cheers and happy pairing!
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