More Perpectives: Jamie Bogner’s Tips on Pairing Beer & Cheese

Beer and cheese are natural partners, with equally wide ranges of possible flavors. Here, Craft Beer & Brewing cofounder and cheese enthusiast Jamie Bogner offers a few suggestions on how to think about pairing various styles of cheese with different beer styles.

Like craft beer, artisanal cheese is an affordable luxury with price points that make it accessible to just about anyone. While there are no hard and fast “rules” for pairing cheese and beer, and many pairing suggestions from experts are driven by personal taste, these suggestions are always a great place to start when thinking about your own pairings. Here, we asked cheesemongers Cody Cook and Travis Hines of Fort Collins, Colorado, cheese shop The Welsh Rabbit for their recommendations on successful beer and cheese pairings.

Match Intensity
The first thing to consider when pairing cheese and beer is the same principle that holds when pairing any food with beer—match the intensity of the beer with the intensity of the flavor of the cheese. The flavor curve of cheese tends to be the inverse of beer—while beer oxidizes and typically mellows in intensity as it ages, the flavors in cheese tend to become sharper, funkier, and more focused as cheese matures.

Lighter beers, such as pale lagers or wheats, pair very well with lighter fresh cheeses such as fresh mozzarellas/burratas or chèvres. Strong beers such as Belgian quads, imperial stouts, and barleywines can stand up to older, more pungent cheeses.

Pair To Complement or Contrast
Just as in other foods, look for notes in the beer that complement the flavor and texture notes in the cheese. To complement, try pairing a young, nutty Gruyère with a malty German bock or dunkel or a manchego with an American brown ale. For a contrast, Cook suggests pairing the funky barnyard notes of an Irish Durrus with the sweeter notes of a honey saison, allowing the sweeter notes of honey in the beer to balance the intensely pungent cheese.

“When looking at complements or contrasts, don’t just think about taste, think about texture as well,” says Hines.

Try Stouts With Blue Cheeses
Blues from different cheesemakers have different characters, but one of Cook and Hines’ favorites is the toffee and caramel notes Point Reyes Bay Blue.

“Stouts and blue cheeses are just the perfect marriage. The salty and creamy experience of the cheese melds so well with the sweetness of the stout,” says Cook. “I’ve enjoyed this with a hazelnut stout, and it was a beautiful pairing.” Sweeter stouts such as oatmeal or chocolate stouts will typically pair better with these creamy, salty blues than intensely bitter or roasty stouts.

For drier, less salty blues, Cook enjoys dry stouts. Roastier stouts pair well with heftier blues such as Stiltons.

“A stout and blue is the perfect dessert course for me,” Cook says.

Try Belgian Dubbels and Tripels With Alpine Swiss and German Cheeses
“Many aged harder cheeses such as Emmentalers have slight citrus and fruit notes that can complement similar flavors in Belgian beers,” says Hines. “Pairing them brings those flavors to the front.”

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IPAs Pair Well With Cheddars, But Don’t Stop There
“I recently brought back a growler of Comrade Brewing (Denver) Superdamp IPA and paired it with a range of cheeses. The fresh hopped beer paired incredibly well with the English Westcombe cheddar,” says Cook. “Match the hop strength to the sharpness of the cheddar. The same beer paired with a 4-year aged Grafton cheddar was an unpleasant experience. It brought too much tanginess to the beer. But the mineral character of the Westcombe was a great match.”

Beyond cheddar, IPAs pair well with high fat content cheeses (the bitterness of the hops helps cut through the fat), and some suggest pairing IPA with spicy pepper cheeses or blue cheeses.

“We paired an IPA with Norwegian Gjetost cheese at the Fort Collins Brewers Festival,” says Cook. “Everyone kept coming back. It surprised us, too.”

“It was a great example of a contrasting pairing,” Hines says. “It wasn’t so much that people loved it, but they found it surprising and different and wanted to come back and try it again.”

Lighter Beers Match Lighter Cheeses
“Chèvres pair great with a nice wit. The coriander and orange zest in the beer complement the cheeses that have similar light, clean flavors,” says Cook. “An aged goat cheese such as Coupole could stand up to the additional hoppiness and malt character of a pilsner.”

Other fresh, light cheeses such as fresh mozzarellas pair well with the same beers—wheats, wits, and pilsners (as well as similar styles such as kölsch).

Tasting is Believing
Try a cheese you like with several different beer styles to get a better sense of how the range of flavors in the beers each work with that cheese. Or take a beer you enjoy and try a few different styles of cheese with it. We use this strategy with our own pairing here at Craft Beer & Brewing and will frequently open several beers with several cheeses and mix and match to find the pairings that work best. The pairings we think will be successful often end up being the group favorites, but just as frequently we find individuals who prefer an alternate pairing.

Don’t Be Pressured to Pair
Certain aged beers, like fine aged wines, should not be paired with cheese or food. With complex bourbon barrel–aged imperial stouts and barleywines, aged fruit lambics and guezes, and older Belgian quads, the experience of discovering the depths and layers of the beer can be overshadowed by pairing. These are best enjoyed with a clear palate, as they do not benefit from pairing in the same way that younger beers do.

More Suggestions, via Specific Cheeses:

Gouda
One of the oldest recorded styles of cheese, this Dutch classic is perfect for pairing with beers of the region. As these cheeses age, different characters emerge, ranging from nutty to caramel sweetness depending on the cheesemaker. With orange citrus back notes underpinning the traditional dry and nutty flavors of Gouda, Rembrandt Extra Aged Gouda, aged one year, is great with a bière de garde, where both the beer and the cheese offer a touch of sharpness and warm supporting depth. Beemster Classic, aged 18 months, exhibits a bit more of that sweet nuttiness that’s perfect with German-style dunkels and dopplebocks or even the new generation of American hoppy ambers and browns.

Hard Chevre
Exhibiting some similar flavors to Gouda, but expressed with goat’s milk instead of cow’s milk, Cypress Grove Midnight Moon offers a touch of brown butter richness with a perfect supporting tang that holds its own even with stouts and porters. A consistent favorite in our own tastings and pairings, we’ve even enjoyed it with out-of-the-box matchups such as smoked beers.

Aged Parmesan
Best known for its use in cooking, aged Parmesan is great on its own paired with beers on the lighter side of bitterness and body—think Pilsners, Helles, and golden ales—where the dryness of the beer accentuates the dry and sharply intense notes of the cheese itself.

Harder Alpine-style cheese
Comté is one of our favorite cheeses for blending into grilled cheese or fondue, and it pairs very well with maltier beers such as altbiers, Vienna lagers, or American ambers that let the natural sweetness shine through.

Emmentaler, Gruyere and other hard alpine cheeses pair very well with Belgian-style dubbels and tripels, where the background fruity notes of the cheeses are complemented by the yeast ester notes of the Belgian brewers’ yeasts.

Flavored Cheeses
The exterior of Beehive Cheese’s Barely Buzzed is rubbed in an espresso and lavender mix for an intense roasty and herbal flavor and slight butterscotch sweetness that pairs well with foreign export stouts and porters, but those flavors also work well with dark saisons and farmhouse ales such as Prairie Ape Snake orUpright Brewing Six. Fresh goat cheeses with peppers, such as Montchevre Jalapeño Goat Cheese and Cypress Grove Sgt. Pepper are great when paired for maximum heat with IPAs, as the hoppy bitterness amplifies the spice in the cheese while the carbonation of the beer helps to cut through the creamy fat of the cheese.

Soft Goat Cheese
The creamy texture and subtle notes of soft goat cheeses such as Montchevre Bucheron are fantastic when paired with the subtle fruitiness and light coriander spice of Belgian-style witbiers, the banana and clove notes of German-style Hefeweizens, and American wheat beers.

Fresh Soft Cheeses
When pairing with subtle fresh cheeses such as fresh mozzarella or burrata, consider the intensity of the beer you select and skew toward the lighter side of pale wheats, Helles lagers, and similarly light and bright beers such as Kölsch. Anything stronger can bury the nuance of the cheese.

Brie
Soft ripened cheeses such as Brie and Camembert do exceptionally well when paired with earthy beers such as saison and bière de garde. Or for a very fun pairing, try it with a mixed-fermentation farmhouse ale or quick sour ale aged on fruit.

Cheddar
The most popular pairing for sharp cheddars is IPAs, as the bold flavors of the hoppy beers stand up to the intensity of the cheeses. The common English ancestry of the cheese and the beer style add another layer to the pairing, beyond flavor itself.

Blue Cheese
Blue cheese as a category can range from dry and sharp to subtle, creamy, and sweet funk, so take into consideration the nature of the specific cheese as you’re pairing. The creamy sweetness of Mycella Blue is the perfect pair for sweet oatmeal or milk stouts, while roastier imperial stouts can pair well with more robust blues such as Stiltons. Less sweet but still creamy blues confidently pair even with hoppy beers such as IPAs.

Beer Cheeses
Here’s a chance to pair for pure complementary flavors, as Chimay Grand Cru is washed in Chimay beer as it ages. In the same vein, the curds of Vermont Farmstead Cheese Company’s Alehouse Cheddar are soaked in two types of beer from Harpoon Brewing as part of the cheesemaking process, so it’s a natural to pair with IPAs and hoppy pale ales.

Funky Cheeses
Limburger’s funk develops with time like a great gueuze or wild ale —starting mild and growing more intense as it ages. When to eat it is a matter of personal preference, but it works well at any age with a Belgian-style strong dark ale. The residual sugar in beers such as Cuvée Van De Keizer Blauw or Allagash Odyssey help soften yet focus the cheese’s funk. For really funky cheeses with strong barnyard notes, such as Irish Durrus, try a beer with earthy notes but a bit of sweetness such as a honey saison.

Tangy Ripened Cheeses
For cheeses such as Cypress Grove Chevre Humboldt Fog, a light sour beer such as a Berliner weisse or Gose can make for a nice pairing, as long as the beer itself isn’t too acidic (sour) to the point where it overpowers the cheese. A dark lager such as New Belgium 1554 can also provide a crisp but rich accompaniment to the cheese.

Hybrid Cheeses
It’s a beautiful thing when American cheese makers, unburdened by tradition, develop their own unique approaches to cheese. Karst begins with cultures of both cheddar and Gruyere and develops ultimately into a slightly sweet and nutty cheese that pairs well with sweet and malty beers such as Odell Isolation Ale winter warmer.

Jamie Bogner