There are lots of worthy reasons to put food and drink together. It’s fun to do and full of surprises, giving people an extra impetus to visit a brewery or restaurant—or your home, for that matter.
An especially potent benefit is that pairings give people permission to try something new. After a training I once led for a beer distributor in Texas, a woman there told me, “I hate IPAs, and actually I don’t care much for blue cheese. But that was really good together.” Changing minds means building our fan base.
Done well, a great pairing dinner can be a transformational experience—the wine folks have known this all along. With beer’s extraordinary capacity for pairing, why wouldn’t we want to play in that same sandbox?
In Sync
While we generally call the process “pairing,” I think the Brazilians have a much better word that actually gets at the heart of it: harmonizacão, or harmonization. You’re not just trying to create a match; you’re trying to build a relationship between two partners. It’s a dynamic process that can enhance both the beer and the dish, and it often creates something entirely new.
The range of possibilities in the world of food presents an enormous variety of intensities, tastes, aromas, and textures. These need to harmonize or contrast with the qualities of the pairing partner. And if there’s one beverage on the planet that comes close to matching food’s vast range, it’s beer. From the most delicate low-carb to confectionary stouts to hop-drenched IPAs to sours, the range is breathtaking. It’s genuinely hard to find a food that simply doesn’t work with any beer.
Beer is a bit acidic; some are strongly so. Because of fermentation, there’s a pleasing fruitiness. The kilning process used for malt fits the cooked flavors of food like a glove, sharing flavors even with deeply roasted coffee and chocolate. Some styles have a fair amount of sweetness as well. Unique among beverages, beer is bitter, which can be an extremely useful taste in pairing. The bottom line: Beer has more tools in its pairing kit than wine.
What Does the Science Say?
Sensory science is on a roll these days. New tools have led to exciting insights about how our sensory systems are put together. Sometimes the research results are startling, while other work underscores the common-sense things that many of us have figured out through practical experience.
Because we’re dealing with taste, mouthfeel, and aroma when pairing, it’s important to know that each has a different sensory footprint. Tastes, as you’ve likely experienced, don’t blend into each other like artists’ paints; instead, they retain their salty, sweet, or other attributes in the mix. However, those tastes do interact, and these are important tools in our pairing kit. For example, sweet balances out bitter—as does salty with sour, to a lesser extent.
Mouthfeel—such as creamy or astringent textures, peppery heat, or minty cooling—is quite complex. Some traits, such as astringency, seem to blend seamlessly with tastes, especially bitterness.
Smell, meanwhile, operates entirely differently from either taste or mouthfeel. While we have close to 400 olfactory receptors capable of responding to an unlimited range of volatile chemicals, we only rarely smell them singly. Hops, for example, contain many hundreds of terpenoids—those chemicals responsible for their floral, piney, and citrus flavors. Individually, none of these chemicals smells exactly like hops; instead, we smell them as a “pool” that scientists term “configural,” which means the identity of individual odorous chemicals is lost. What we smell instead is their integrated essence. Most foods and drinks have components that work this way—and pairings sometimes do, too.
Also, there are plenty of interactions among different senses. In a process known as multimodality, the chemical senses merge just after they enter the brain, working their way up into cognitive areas in the neocortex. This process has many implications for food pairing. One thing we all learn through this multimodal process is congruence: which things belong together, and which do not. This allows us, for example, to create pairings in which an aspect of beer—such as toastiness—can pair with cheese, resulting in a startling simulation of a grilled cheese sandwich.
If you’re presenting pairings, congruence is a major objective. It’s very pleasing, while its opposite is perceived as dissonant and unpleasant. However, don’t forget that people find a little novelty thrilling, too. The art is to know just how far you can push your audience, and that depends on their adventurousness and their trust in you.
Also remember that we are quite susceptible to suggestion, a phenomenon called “verbal framing,” which makes presentation an important part of pairing. Personally, I like to set people up with just enough information to get their bearings, but I try not to tell them exactly what they’ll be experiencing—it’s much more fun when they find out for themselves.
The Rules
There are many ways to put together a pairing: enhancing contrasts, showcasing either the food or the drink, or trying to make the partners blend seamlessly into one another.
Whatever the intent, I think there are three things that always need to at least be considered.
First, think about the overall intensities of the two partners. These intensities could be in any of the senses, but tastes can be especially potent. The idea is not to find a precise balance, but rather to ensure that one partner doesn’t stomp all over the other. In beer, gravity, bitterness, and roastiness are the main vectors, while other malt characters, hop aromas, and fermentation play secondary roles. In sour styles, acidity can be quite powerful.
Second, find ways to deal with interacting tastes and mouthfeel sensations. There are multiple well-known interactions, many of which have been verified by the science. The chart at the right lists documented sensory interactions that are useful in food-and-beverage pairing. Bitterness in beer—and I would include roasty/toasty flavors here—is especially useful because it can reduce both sweetness and fattiness. Tannins in wine function similarly, but just for fat—one reason why red wine works with red meat. If you’re working with chefs who are more accustomed to pairing with wine, be sure to explain this—or better yet, demonstrate this—for them.
Finally, find harmonies in aromas. The dominant strategy is generally to find common aromatic molecules that link the two partners; whole books have been written about this. Beer is particularly versatile because it’s rich in two types of flavors that are minimal or nonexistent in wine: citrusy and floral terpenoids and cooked flavors from the browning reactions known as Maillard and caramelization. Besides the fruity and spicy characters of fermentation, these offer abundant connecting points for pairing because all of these are present in many kinds of foods.
However, matching via similarity is not the only way. Each of us carries a catalog in our heads of our past experiences and associations, and these are ripe for exploration here.
Vanilla and dairy products such as cream have virtually no overlap of aromatic chemicals, but this association is so strong for us in ice cream that if you add a drop of vanilla to something fruity, the overwhelming impression is of ice cream. Beer and food partnerships are loaded with these—smoky and meaty, cheesy and toasty, caramelly and roasty. Put a spicy hefeweizen together with a milky burrata mozzarella, and the beer stands in for spiced peaches, now drenched in cream.
Presenting Beer and Food
Many of these tips are common sense.
You want the venue to be appropriately lit and free from extraneous odors or loud music, either of which can derail the sensitivity of the senses. People usually need a menu of what’s coming—but without too much detail, preferably with some room to take notes. Wine glasses work well when one-third full. Water and a vessel in which to dump unconsumed beer are essential.
Because we’re doing food, skip the crackers or other palate cleansers. Portions should be appropriate for the number of courses and the total amount of beer to be consumed—and don’t forget to count the “welcome beer” handed to guests as they filter in.
People often ask whether there’s a right order—beer or food first? Well, it’s all getting mixed up in our mouths, so there’s no technical mandate here. However, if I’m presenting my beers, I like people to taste them without a mouthful of food first. If I were presenting cheese, I’d want a clean taste of that before a sip.
With a flight of several pairings, it’s generally best to start with a relatively delicate pair and move to more intensity from there—you don’t want powerful flavors in an early pair interfering with lighter ones later. To keep the element of surprise, midway through you can offer something bright and palate-cleansing and then start upward again.
If you can, make your audience active participants. This may involve them being able to choose from different beers or foods for a pairing, something that’s easy to do when the tasting is in a walk-around format. Feeling like they’re part of the act encourages people to try the pairing game at home with their friends, drawing them ever closer to the art of beer.
Context is everything when trying to understand what role beer has played for human beings over the past 10,000 years. Laying it all out on the table for people really does make it more meaningful, and it’s always thrilling to experience.
