Menu Matching: Meet your match with beer and food
CHRISTMAS PROVIDES a great opportunity for pubs to impress potential customers. Matching beers with food is surprisingly simple, and perhaps easier than matching food with wine. The reason lies in the wide range of flavours, textures, colours and alcohol strengths found in beer.
The overriding principle of beer and food matching is to pair the flavour intensity of the beer to the flavour intensity of the food. So delicate fish or a salad needs a delicate beer - either ale or lager, as they can both be elegant - while a clonking great beef stew needs a powerful beer, brimming with a hefty quantity of barley and hops.
The second principle is to decide if you want your beer to complement your food, or contrast with it. So a creamy dark stew can either have a creamy dark beer to complement it, such as a sweet malty mild or a creamy stout; or it can opt for a contrast, such as a hearty bitter, brimming with tangy orange hop flavours, reminiscent of zesty mustard or soused red cabbage.
For my final principle, I consider what condiment would best suit each food. If my lemon sole screams out for lemon or melted butter, I look for a beer with a light, lemony tinge - or one with a soft buttery suppleness. Equally, if my hot chocolate pudding would be good with a raspberry sauce, then a raspberry beer will also hit the spot.
Christmas breakfast: black pudding, white pudding and all the medley of sausages, bacon and eggs are happily partnered by a porter or a stout. Stouts were originally called 'stout porters' and have a more roasted finish than their slightly weaker, often chocolatey brethren, but both are a wonderful creamy match for all the rich flavours in the traditional British fry-up.
Christmas lunch: if smoked salmon is your chosen starter, or prawn cocktail or sweet vegetarian terrines, all these dishes benefit from beers which are either gentle or with a lemon edge. Gentle sweet lagers such as Sol, Amstel or the new Grolsch Blond should hit the spot, as will citric pale ales or citric-hopped bitters from a wide range of micro-breweries. If, however, meat patés or terrines are your chosen starters, then milds or lighter-bodied bitters will do well.
Turkey and goose are soft, easy flavours and great partners for those soft, sweet milds, gentle bitters or indeed, for creamflow beers. Any beer with too much hop power - best bitter, old ales or Indian Pale Ales (IPA), for example - would be too big and blow the turkey apart.
Cheese demands bigger-flavoured beers and British bitters win here big time. The key is to partner the intensity of flavour of the cheese to that of the beer. So a creamy yet chalky camembert will find its flavours pleasantly stretched by a gently sweet lager.
Cheddar benefits from a hoppy British bitter with a firm malt base such as Marston's Pedigree. Mature cheddar with its tangy flavours go well with a tangy, hop-rich IPA.
Blue cheeses and stilton match with either an IPA, or preferably an old ale of six to eight per cent ABV with rich damson and Christmas pudding flavours such as Robinson's Old Tom, Brakspear Triple or Hog's Back's A-over-T .
Christmas pudding is heaven sent with Guinness or other stouts, the same creamy dry flavours being pleasant in both. But barley wines or old ales are also worth an outing.
Christmas afternoon tea: this suggestion may be only for the more adventurous, but Danish pastries or chocolate cakes with fruit beers is one of my passions. Served in wine or martini glasses - never in a pedestrian pint or half-pint glass - they add theatre to the day.
My favourites are raspberry or cherry beer (mostly from Belgium, but Sam Smith's and some micros do them as well) with chocolate pudding. Apricot or passionfruit beer with 'a Danish' is also wonderful and a talking point in the pub. Ideally these bottled beers should be displayed on a bed of ice.
Rupert Ponsonby is co-founder of the Beer Academy.
