Hip ways with hops
Richard Fox, author of The Food and Beer Cookbook, looks at ideas for making the most of food and beer on some of the milestone occasions in the year
Food and beer are becoming as synonymous as love and marriage. And while even soulmates may stray occasionally in search of some instantly gratifying but ultimately empty and meaningless liaison, the innate quality of their mutual suitability eventually triumphs - and harmony returns. Never has this proved as true as the pairing of beer and food.
There is now a greater range of beers available to the licensee than at any other time in pub-going history, ranging from brews resurrected from ancient recipes, such as Fraoch heather ale - incidentally, fabulous with grouse - to innovative crafted brews such as chocolate and coffee beers from the Meantime brewery.
Make a day of it
As for matching food with these tasty
newcomers, just let your imagination go into overdrive and take advantage of the fact there's a beer to suit every conceivable food occasion.
At first glance, this looks like seriously good news for anyone remotely associated with the licensed trade, and even better for the guzzling punter. However, all this choice means a plethora of decisions for the busy licensee.
You may choose to stick to the tried and tested beers to avoid alienating your traditional clientele and driving them to the nearest tap room.
Or you might go for the full monty and lose a damn sight more than your shirt as you end up saddled with so many cases of weird, wonderful and out-of-date brews that you could open a beer museum.
The answer is in the meal occasion: having a themed context helps to keep things tight and focused without losing overall integrity. It will also help you to determine customer preferences without bombarding them with products in that rather crass, dangling-by-the ankles-and-emptying-pockets kind of way.
Try picking different food occasions for the year and then building your beer selection around them.
But the bottom line is that whatever you do, whatever beer and food links you make or promotions you run, invest as much time as possible in staff training - staff are the greatest marketing agents you have.
Food of love
Post-Christmas, February is a notoriously quiet month - so Valentine's Day should be milked for everything it's worth.
Imagine a Champagne flute of naturally spritzy, lightly fruity, slightly tangy, burnished red beer.
This is one of the Lambic fruit beers of Belgium, made for romance, and omitting any of the bitterness normally associated with beer. I've taken cases of these beers to dinner parties and had the female contingent literally begging for more.
Having sampled a soft, fruity beer, customers will be ready for a bit of smooth, dark and silky action - how about a single oyster, coated in a light tempura batter and sitting on a shot glass of dark, creamy stout?
There's not a pint pot in sight - just a lip-smacking snifter to stimulate the appetite.
Moving swiftly but seductively on, it's a case of herbal heaven meets fresh fish, when a wine-sized glass of zesty wheat beer is introduced to all manner of seafood dishes. Just make sure that the portions aren't too hefty - we're trying to induce fun and frivolity here, not lethargy or sleep.
From a male customer's point of view: how thoughtful to be provided with the beverage so close to our hearts. From the female perspective: how daringly different and adventurous. Enough said...
A match-day event
Another great idea is to host a beer and food event. Pull out all the promotional stops on this one - use every available blackboard for beer with food recommendations, put tent cards on tables with tasting notes, and provide a couple of dishes incorporating beer in the cooking. This is a great opportunity to try to introduce more challenging speciality beers, as people will be more open to suggestions at a special event.
Also, many of the stronger, fuller-flavoured beers, such as Trappist and Abbey beers from Belgium, are actually enhanced when matched with the right foods - particularly as they should not be consumed by the pint!
Area bombardment
Come September it's British Food Fortnight. This year's event takes place from 22 September to 7 October. Despite being steeped in the grain rather than the grape, we should still be embracing the best of British in beverage as well as produce. How about a menu of regional classics with brews from the same area?
You could team Lancashire hotpot with Thwaites' Lancaster Bomber, or roast sirloin-stuffed Yorkshire puddings with Timothy Taylor's Landlord. Pitch these two culinary titans head to head and you've got a battle to rival the Wars of the Roses.
As Rick Stein goes to great pains to remind us, we have a coastline, so let's make the most of that too. Target the more adventurous by serving Colchester oysters with a great stout or porter such as Fuller's London Porter and you have as sublime a food and beer match as you'll ever get.
beautiful beer and food matches are turner's prize
Sue Nowak looks at celebrity chef Brian Turner's food and beer combos
As a regular combatant on TV's Ready Steady Cook, Brian Turner is used to thinking on his feet. That skill also came in handy when devising the perfect partnerships of food and ale for the year's biggest beer banquet.
Introducing the night's menu to 180 diners at the British Guild of Beer Writers' annual awards in December, chef Turner admitted it was his first serious go at matching beer with food.
Turner's menu at Kensington's Millennium Gloucester Hotel ranged from Cornish crab to Irish venison via five different styles of English real ale.
He says: "Obviously the choice of beer is crucial. For instance, with a lot of the carbonades of this world, if you don't choose the right light beer, you get the bitterness, but not the strength."
Turner found the experience so stimulating that he's been choosing a range of four beers to sell as Brian Turner's Classic Range in supermarkets.
Brian's beer
with food matches:
Shepherd Neame's Whitstable organic ale
Crab and bacon cakes with celeriac and oyster fritter
Meantime's IPA ( palate cleanser)
Cains 2008 Culture Beer from Liverpool
Roast loin of venison with pickled white cabbage
Young's double chocolate stout
Hot chocolate fondant
