Beer and food: the best romance

You sit down to eat a delicious meal, one of your favorite dishes, and you've left your diet at the door. As you're about to dig in with reckless abandon, a bottle of wine appears with a set of glasses. The meal shifts a little; suddenly the food is no longer the most important thing on the table. The wine has taken over.

OK, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. But there is something to it. Wine quickly becomes the centerpiece of most meals, and wine and food pairings are usually structured to exemplify the flavors of the wine at the expense of the food. Wine's big flavors and acidity can outright overwhelm the flavor of some meals.

But with beer the situation is much different. Beer and food are best friends, not the angry couple that are constantly screaming at each other.

Beer covers such a broad range of flavor (including acidity, sweetness, bitterness, maltiness, roastiness, etc.) that matching a food with a certain beer is almost too easy. It does take a little bit of thought, however.

Take this pairing, for example: a spicy Thai or Indian dish with an IPA. This pairing works on several levels; the hoppiness of the IPA will actually accentuate the spiciness of the dish, while the caramel background will cleanse it at the same time. If you like your food really spicy, grab a really bitter IPA like Stone's Ruination. If you don't like heat, pick up a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, which is a lot sweeter and can soothe your tongue.

Beer has another innate advantage that most wine does not: carbonation. Carbon dioxide bubbles are like little tongue scrubbers; they come in and clean off your taste buds. This is extremely helpful for certain foods like cheese that stick to your tongue. It also can scrub away all those painful capsaicin molecules from spicy foods.

The best way to begin your beer pairing is to simply consider the strength of both the beer and the food. A pulled pork sandwich slathered in barbecue sauce is the perfect counterpoint to a hoppy American pale like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or a roasty stout like Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout, both strong enough to stand out. A light poached salmon with lemon and dill would work perfectly with a lighter beer like a Reissdorf kolsch or a Franziskaner hefe-weisse. This also brings up some of the wonderful harmonies beer and food can have together.

Both the kolsch and hefe-weisse are light enough not to overpower the fish, but have some fruit flavors that can work together with the fish and the lemon. One of my absolute favorite pairings is anything chocolate with a nice Russian imperial stout like Oskar Blue's Ten Fiddy. The roastiness, bitterness and body of the beer not only stand up to the chocolate, but combine together in an ecstasy of flavors. That's right, beer with dessert.

Due to beer's broad range of flavors, some extremely interesting combinations can be pulled off. Consider the BLT. It has been called the perfect sandwich, and is certainly a staple of any decent deli. In a BLT the bread is a huge portion of the sandwich equation. But it doesn't have to be. A bready English bitter like Gritty McDuff's Best Bitter or German pilsner like Victory's Prima Pils can instantly step in and fill its spot. Now take your bacon, lettuce and tomato, put a toothpick through it and you have deconstructed a classic sandwich to just its fillings and a delicious beer wrapper. Take a sip, take a bite, enjoy.

Until next time, sláinte!