GreatBrewers.com has introduced a new tool called “Beer Sommelier” that has been making its way around the web via instant message, blog posts, and Twitter.  This elegant web 2.0 application is well designed, nicely illustrated, fast and straight forward.  You simply tell it a little bit about the dish you have in mind, and it suggests a beer.  Thinking about making beef enchiladas?  How about an American style IPA?  Chocolate brownies on the menu?  Beer Som thinks a Baltic style porter might be nice.  You then can click through to an in-depth description of the style, and commercial examples that might work well.

Here’s the rub – I don’t like this tool very much.  In fact, I downright dislike it.
I know, I know, it seems great, but here’s the thing: I think this tool does a disservice to the art of pairing beer and food. It paints with broad brush strokes, and a large, clumsy palate to suggest broad ranges of styles.  Worse, it discounts the direction that the food world seems to be heading.  This tool assumes all chocolate brownies are the same, as well as that many porters are the same.  It can provide a nice starting point, but what about the differences between local and not so local ingredients?  What about the notion of terroir being extended to beer and food pairings? While this tool can provide ok to good pairings, it’ll never provide the kind of great pairings that make Sommeliers necessary in restaurants with great wine programs, or gastropubs with stellar beers lists. This is the beer equivalent of “White wine with chicken and fish, red wine for beef and lamb.”

Let’s take this dish for example:

Cold smoked jumbo sea scallops, seared and served on a roasted fennel-celery root purée with a DBA demi-glaze

This dish was conceived , cooked and paired by the Homebrew Chef at his “Night of Ales” Firestone Walker Dinner.   The scallops were smoked using oak chips from the same barrels used to brew the Double Barrel Ale that this beer was served with Firestone Walker’s Double Barrel Ale.

The pairing worked great together, but what really took it to the next level were the small details of the composed dish.  Yes, seared scallops and an english pale is a natural starting point, as the beer sommelier tool points out.  But it’s the underlying details that make it work.  Smoking the scallops infuses them with some of the same wood flavors in the beer.  The sauce is created from the same beer, and the the celery root and fennel puree (which was nearly my undoing when helping prep the dish,) provided a continuation of the natural sweetness of the scallops.  Alongside the beer the celery brought out the aspects of the beer besides the wood and malt – the slight bitterness and the ale esters from the yeast.

Where broad flavor styles are a fine starting point, they miss the art altogether.  When pairing a dish and a beer, look not only at the big flavors, but pull out the specific notes that the beer can then contrast or enhance the food.  Looking back at the chocolate brownie example, try to use a high quality, local chocolate, and examine the characteristic of the cocoa product (or, let the chocolate maker help – try tasting and pairing with TCHO Chocolate). Does it have citrusy notes? Consider The Bruery’s Black Orchard. Perhaps roasted coffee flavors? Try AleSmith’s Speedway Stout.  Better yet, toy with the brownie recipe, and sweeten it with a touch of malt extract. Mix and match the individual elements to create a food and beer profile that is intertwined so much it’s nearly indistinguishable as two separate pieces, but rather an united culinary idea.

By investigating the unique deeper flavor notes in the individual components of a dish, you can begin to form a picture of a beer that doesn’t just quench your thirst, but becomes a part of the overall dish, and creates a flavor experience that would be lessened without the beer.  When you taste them together, you should not be able to imagine it any other way. In attempting to simplify the art of beer pairing down to its most basic elements, Beer Sommelier loses sight of what pairings can really bring to the culinary experience.

Tags: beer pairings, rants

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Pairings, Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.