While I don’t put any stock in astrology, in 1980 Guinness put out a calendar with each month representing one of the zodiac signs, and I thought it would be fun to share these throughout the year.
Taurus, the bull, is from May 21-June 21. To learn more, see:
I’ll be very much surprised if there’s a great turnout for Session #51.5. It is after all, asking a lot — and for a second time in two weeks — gather together a selection of beers and cheese. For this extra Session, the instructions were in the round-up for Session #51. The idea was to use the list of beers chosen by everybody for each of the three cheeses that were listed in the round-up to try a few more beers with the same cheese. Simply pick up some of the other beers that were suggested, and try them with the same three cheeses and do a follow up blog post on or around Friday, May 20 to explore more fully pairing cheese and beer.
You can write about how your choices compared, or what you learned from the other suggestions, or which out of all the ones you tried worked best. What recommended pairing most surprised you? Which didn’t seem to work at all, for you? It’s my way of taking the Session concept and making it more interactive and collaborative, essentially an “online cheese-off.” First, we made our best recommendations for pairing a beer with these three cheeses, and now we have an opportunity to try as many of the suggestions as we can, and discover which worked best. I’ll then do a second round-up and report the findings of the group as a whole to the beers and the three cheeses together. If you’ve already done Part One, don’t stop now, keep going. Read what your fellow bloggers liked, and pick a few to try yourself. To participate, just post a comment here or at the round-up with a link to your blog post for Session #51.5.
A final note. Since it’s not really an “official” Session, don’t worry too much about sticking to today’s date. Have another cheese tasting whenever you like, whenever it’s convenient or you feel like it. To be honest, after being in South America for the last eleven days, I’m too tired to do it today myself, and will most likely do it next week. Feel free to do likewise. I’ll keep adding posts as they come in. Also, don’t forget about Session #52, coming up Friday, June 3.
Our 52nd Session takes thing down a notch, and it is a bit easier than last month’s. At least you don’t have to go out and buy anything, although you may want to after reading about everybody else’s collections of breweriana. Our host, Brian Stechschulte, of All Over Beer , has chosen the topic Beer Collectibles & Breweriana, which he explains as:
As host of Session #52, I’ve decided not to focus on the substance of beer, but the material that plays a supporting role. Bottles, coasters, cans, labels, ads, tap handles, church keys, hats, t-shirts, tip trays, glassware and signs have been collected by fanatics ever since beer has been sold. These objects constitute the world of breweriana, a term that surfaced in 1972 to define any item displaying a brewery or brand name. The majority of highly prized objects are from the pre-prohibition era, but ephemera from every period in brewing history, including craft beer, finds a home with each beer drinking generation.
So what old or new beer related items do you collect and why? It’s that simple. This is your opportunity to share the treasured objects your wife or husband won’t let you display on the fireplace mantle. You don’t need to be a major collector like this guy to participate. In my mind, just a few items constitute a collection. Maybe you have mementos from a beer epiphany or road trips? You can focus on a whole collection or tell the story behind a single item.
So open your closets, your cabinets and cupboards; wherever you keep the tchotchkes, logowear and beer “collectibles” that have piled up in your home since falling in love with beer. You know you have them. Don’t pretend otherwise. It will be good therapy to get your obsessions out in the open, and Brian has offered us the perfect opportunity to lie on his virtual couch and unload your breweriana for the next Session on Friday, June 3.
P.S.: Don’t forget about Session #51.5, part two of the Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off, taking place on May 20.
Well that was great fun, I was certainly glad to see so many people step up and participate, despite my best efforts to make things as difficult as possible. And everybody seemed to have a very good time, too. Cheese and beers just brings out the best in all of us, I guess. Anyway, I’m doing the round-up a little bit differently this Session, because this is not just the end of the Session, but also the beginning of the second phase, or Session #51.5. Below you’ll find a list of all of the beers paired with each of the three cheeses, or their substitute parenthetically, along with a link to each Session post submission. In most cases, I listed just the best pairing from each blogger for each cheese, unless otherwise noted. Also, I’ll continue to update this list as late submissions continue to roll in, as they inevitably do. Following that, you’ll find instructions on how to participate in round two, Session #51.5 on Friday, May 20.
Here are the best pairings everybody chose for the Widmer 1-Year Aged Cheddar, or a suitable substitute. I’ve noted what substitute cheese was used, where applicable.
Here are the best pairings everybody chose for the Humboldt Fog, or a suitable substitute. I’ve noted what substitute cheese was used, where applicable.
Here are the best pairings everybody chose for the Maytag Blue, or a suitable substitute. I’ve noted what substitute cheese was used, where applicable.
I was also glad to see so many people not stress too much about the specific cheeses I recommended. I knew that not everybody would be able to find them going in, but it seemed like the more who could find the same cheeses, the better the experiment would work, because it could more easily be duplicated regardless of location. But I also realized that with beer bloggers so spread out around the world, that in the end it was an impossible task and felt it was better to participate with a substitute cheese then not at all, and as long as the cheeses were somewhat similar, I figured it would still be valid. A number of people also added additional cheeses or could not find substitutions that were similar, so the list below is all of the other and extra cheeses that peoples paired together.
Okay, I know not everyone will want to go for this, but if you’re with me so far and you’ve already participated in Session #51, here’s the idea for part two. Use the list of beers chosen by everybody for each of the three cheeses that are listed above to try a few more beers with the same cheese. Over the next two weeks, simply pick up some of the other beers that were suggested, and try them with the same three cheeses and do a follow up blog post on Friday, May 20 — which I’m calling Session #51.5 — to explore more fully pairing cheese and beer.
You can write about how your choices compared, or what you learned from the other suggestions, or which out of all the ones you tried worked best. What recommended pairing most surprised you? Which didn’t seem to work at all, for you? It’s my way of taking the Session concept and making it more interactive and collaborative, essentially an “online cheese-off.” First, we made our best recommendations for pairing a beer with these three cheeses, and now we have an opportunity to try as many of the suggestions as we can, and discover which worked best. I’ll then do a second round-up and report the findings of the group as a whole to the beers and the three cheeses together.
Spread the cheese .. er, the word. If you’ve already done Part One, don’t stop now, keep going. Read what your fellow bloggers liked, and pick a few to try yourself. To participate, just post a comment here with a link to your blog post for Session #51.5.
Our 67th Guinness ad, in honor of the Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off yesterday, is a poster Guinness did in 1965 showing a variety of English cheese with the tagline “Guinness goes well with food.”
They also made a metal sign of the cheese poster, as well, though with a different tagline. In the metal version, it’s “— And Guinness enhance the flavor.” The cheeses, too, are almost the same, but not exactly, plus their order is changed up.
It’s my great pleasure to host our 51st Session, my second time playing host over the four years we’ve been doing them. I chose a frightfully complicated topic which I’ve taken to calling by an overly grand name: The Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off. You can go back and read the long, original version of what’s going on, or here it is in a nutshell.
So in addition to the Session Announcement , I also wrote about cheese and beer pairing in my last newspaper column, similarly challenging readers to try some beer with the same three cheeses and send in their best pairings, too.
Wednesday evening, a few friends joined me to try several beers with each of the cheeses. Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef, and Pete and Amy Slosberg, who started Pete’s Wicked Ales in the 1980s, each brought a beer for each cheese, I picked a couple for each, and then I included some of the most promising sounding pairings that readers of my newspaper column sent in. Here’s what we discovered.
We started with the cheddar. The Widmer is a simple cheddar, but with solid, strong flavors. I love the nuttiness and the way it melts in your mouth. The beers we had for the cheddar were the Belgian sweet gale beer, Gagleer, Bear Republic’s Racer 5 , Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, Anderson Valley’s Brother David’s Double, Speakeasy’s Payback Porter, HUB’s Secession Cascadian Dark Ale and Firestone Walker’s Pale 31.
A few of our choices didn’t really work at all, which was immediately apparent. The Gagleer was too sweet, Pale 31 was too mild to stand up to the cheese and the roasted malt in HUB’s Cascadian Dark Ale was accentuated by the cheese, making the pairing too harsh to work well. The vegetal, oniony cattiness of Pliny — delightful on its own — brought out an equal amount of bitterness in the cheese and led to a hash astringency in the combination. While talking through the cheeses, Pete asked if I had another dopplebock we might try, so I opened an older Salvator I had in my beer cellar (a.k.a. “the garage”). Even slightly oxidized, it was our third best pairing with the cheddar. It had only a slight malt sweetness, which complimented the nutty flavors in the cheese nicely. Racer 5, Bear Republic’s IPA, was our second favorite. It seemed to have the right level of bitterness to work with the Widmer Cellars cheddar, the two were a little bit more than the some of their parts. I think it could have been fun to try the cheese with just a variety of IPAs, because it really seemed like the IBUs and the choice of hop varieties make a big difference in whether or not the beer and cheese pairing is a hit or a miss.
Our top choice, a unanimous decision, was Speakeasy’s Payback Porter. The cheese brought out an underlying smokey quality in the beer, accentuating it perfectly, and made the two something more than either could achieve alone. And that, we concluded, was what made a pairing great; when the two elements — the beer and the cheese — combined to become a third thing that was unique in and of itself.
We tasted the Humboldt Fog, a goat cheese from Cypress Grove Chevre, second. It’s a fantastic cheese; with unmistakably strong flavors. It’s creamy, with a zippy tang and sharp bite.
The beers we had for the Humboldt Fog were Aventinus Weizenbock, the Bruery’s Orchard White, Ommegang’s Hennepin, Hoegaarden, Russian River Temptation and Saison Dupont.
The Orchard White was an utter failure, the spices and floral notes really clashed with the cheese, making it too perfumy. We also tried the Pliny from the last flight and found its bitterness stomped on the cheese. Both the Payback Porter and HUB’s Black IPA did likewise, with the beer bringing out too much bitterness in the pairings that overwhelmed the cheese. In “The Brewmaster’s Table,” Garret Oliver singled out Hennepin as a beer to pair with goat cheese, but it didn’t actually work too well with the Humboldt Fog. It wasn’t terrible, but it brought out a bitterness in the beer when combined with the cheese that was less than ideal.
But most actually worked fairly well with this versatile cheese. The Velvet Merkin/Merlin (which we went back and tried; see below) worked better than I expected; the oats in the stout smoothed and rounded out the flavor combinations. And the orange peel and coriander in the Hoegaarden, a last minute impromptu addition, brought all sorts of complexity to the pairing that made it hard to choose the best choice with the goat cheese.
In addition to the new ones we added for each cheese, we also left all of the beers on the table from the previous cheese (and yes, the table filled up quickly) so we could try an even greater variety of combinations. As a result, we might never have discovered how well the Racer 5 went with the Humboldt Fog. It might not have occurred to be pair such a hoppy beer with the goat cheese, but the contrast was delicious, and we gave it an “honorable mention.”
For our third best, we picked Temptation. The two were just heavenly together, as was our second choice: Saison Dupont. Both beers are zesty, spicy and complex and served to bring out a lot of flavor components from the cheese in the process, hitting that sweet spot of being more than the sum of their parts. But the beer that did all that, but better and with far more intangibles, was the Aventinus Weizenbock from Schneider-Weisse. The beer itself has an awful lot going on, and brought out so much more in the cheese that we thought we’d died and gone to heaven. I’d swear we heard choirs of angels faintly ringing in the air.
Lastly, we tried the Maytag Blue, a classic blue cheese that crumbles easily and is very spicy and tangy. The runnier it gets, the more I like it.
In addition to the beers we’d opened before it, we also tried it with Firestone Walker’s Velvet Merkin (or Merlin for the feint of heart), Lagunitas Imperial Stout and North Coast’s Old Rasputin.
Most of the lighter styles from the previous flights weren’t up to the challenge of keeping their own against such as strong cheese as Maytag Blue, though the Racer 5 was an exception, and showed itself to be a very versatile beer to pair with a variety of cheese. Both the Velvet Merlin and the Lagunitas stout were strong enough and worked well enough for us to declare a two-way toe for third place. Personally, I thought the Lagunitas had a slight edge because it was stronger and stood up better than the softer oatmeal stout. But I was alone in that, and unable to break the deadlock.
Of the stouts, the already wonderful Old Rasputin became even better with the blue cheese, earning itself second place in our informal contest. Strength against strength, complexity upon complexity, the two were a beautiful match. There’s just something about a big, lip-smackingly good complex imperial stout, with all its roasty goodness, malty sweetness and alcoholic punch, that seeps into the veins of the tangy power of a blue cheese and can match it round after round in the boxing ring inside your mouth. But remember that was our second choice. The best was yet to come.
Hands down, and unanimously so, we liked the Russian River Temptation from the second flight as the best beer to pair with the Maytag Blue. It was simply “otherworldly.” It’s even hard to describe. We all took a sip, looked at each other furtively and knew. It was that good. Everything just worked. The combination of the two was so much more than the either individually, it was if they were made to go together.
And that, in essence, was the takeaway, what the exercise taught us. Like “white wine with fish,” any kind of guidelines about what beer styles goes with what cheese is only slightly better than guesswork. There is a very specific component to each beer and each cheese that alone determines if the pairing works or not, and that seems especially true for stronger beers (in both strength and flavors) and stronger cheeses, too. It may well be that milder cheese and beer do more easily fit a framework of guidelines. But in our little experiment, it became clear that guidelines are just a starting point. You have to really get under the hood and try various beers and cheeses together. And what you find is that while one IPA may work with one cheddar, it may not work at all with another. That makes it much harder to predict what will work together, but at least trying endless combinations is not exactly a grueling, miserable task. I’ll gladly try fifty beers with one one cheese to find that perfect pairing. Because when its good, holy moley, is it ever good.
The other thing we noticed is that beers with pronounced flavors, such as very strong bittering or very sweet malt tended to accentuate those when combined with the cheese. As a gross generality, beers that were more balanced tended to work much better with whichever cheese we paired with them. That was interesting, and might require some more research.
Well, that was great fun. Now it’s time to open another bottle of Temptation and cut up some Maytag Blue. Yum. I can’t wait to hear what everybody else tried and what combinations worked best. So that’s my round one. Look for the details on round two, Session #51.5 — which will take place in two weeks on Friday, May 20 — in the round-up, which I’ll likely be posting tomorrow morning.
The biennial Toer de Geuze, or Tour de Gueuze, took place last week in Belgium. In a news report on Flemish National Television, both our own Steve Shapiro, from Beer by Bart, and Pete Slosberg, founder of Pete’s Wicked Ales, are interviewed in the piece. And Pete’s wife, Amy Slosberg, can be seen nursing her recently broken leg. Looks like they had a great time.
The May 2011 standings will soon be released for Wikio’s Beer Blogs. Stan at Appellation Blog got a sneak peak at the new rankings, so here’s what happened to the Top 20 over last month:
| 1 | Brookston Beer Bulletin (+1) | 2 | Beervana (-1) |
| 3 | The New School (+1) |
| 4 | Brewpublic (-1) |
| 5 | A Good Beer Blog (+1) |
| 6 | Appellation Beer: Beer From a Good Home (-1) |
| 7 | Drink With The Wench (+/-0) |
| 8 | Seen Through a Glass (+1) |
| 9 | The Daily Pull (+1) |
| 10 | Oakshire Brewing (Not in Top 20 for Apr.) |
| 11 | Washington Beer Blog (-3) |
| 12 | The Session Beer Project (-1) |
| 13 | KC Beer Blog (+3) |
| 14 | Seattle Beer News (-2) |
| 15 | It’s Pub Night (-2) |
| 16 | brewvana (Not in Top 20 for Apr.) |
| 17 | Beer 47 (+2) |
| 18 | Beer Therapy (+2) |
| 19 | Beer-Stained Letter (Not in Top 20 for Apr.) |
| 20 | The Not So Professional Beer Blog (-3) |
Ranking made by Wikio
As usual, I added the relative movements of each blog from last month. This month, three new blogs made an appearance in the Top 20, some for the first time. Another curious change is that #1 & #2, #3 & #4, and #5 & #6 each switched places. As always, I continue to stress that this is just a bit of fun and that we shouldn’t take it too seriously, though I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to be back at #1 again. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
A gentle reminder that the first Friday in May is less than a week away, and that means it will be time for the next Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday. I’ll be your host for the 51st Session, and I’m making it as difficult as possible, though not on purpose, I assure you. I thought it would be fun to take things a step farther and really do something different and challenging. So check out the original announcement for the full details, but in a nutshell here’s the dealio:
That’s the easy part. Now here’s where I make things a little trickier. As soon as I can, probably Saturday morning May 7, I’ll post the round-up with a list of all the beers that every participant thought worked best with each cheese. Two weeks later, I’ll be hosting Session #51.5. Here’s how to then take part in round two:
Even with making it a tad more complicated, I think it should be great fun to really dig in and experiment and learn about how best to pair cheese and beer together. What works and what doesn’t through trial and error will always trump abstract philosophies of how to pair the two.
So spread the cheese .. er, the word. Get some cheese and some beer, and start eating and drinking the two. I hope to hear how it went next Friday, May 6, for the Great Online Beer & Cheese-Off.
* NOTE: I’ve heard that many people have had some trouble finding some or all of the recommended cheeses. Sorry about that. I really thought they’d be easier to find. But don’t stress about it, using a substitute will be just fine. Please don’t let that keep you from participating. Hopefully, all of you can find a blue cheese, an aged cheddar cheese and a goat cheese to pair with some beer for this Session. I’m looking forward to hearing about how everybody’s tastings went.
Watch in horror as several pallets of beer miss their calling to be imbibed and enjoyed and instead end up creating a river of beer inside a warehouse at an undisclosed location. The only clue is that the language of alarm heard in the background does not sound like English. Apart from that, it’s anybody’s guess. Oh, the horror!