Food and Beer pairing

by Lisa Gros

The beer drinking public, I think, has progressed from quaffing a few pints with a buddy at your local watering hole to trying to match the beer to bring out the best in what your eating. This seems to be a natural progression as the diverseness and the quality of beer available increases.

But as we become more adventurous in trying to match beer to food, it would be helpful to have a road map to the basic principles of beer and food pairing. Unfortunately, there is not a lot written in this area, unlike for wine where the literature is rich and diverse. I do believe that some of the same principles, however, can be applied to beer and food. What I will attempt to do is put forth a series of articles which aims at developing a road map for beer connoisseurs to use.

Wine and food pairing has developed over the years from a pretentious set of rules to a more dynamic set of guidelines. It use to be that when one asked what kind of wine should be served, invariable the response would be red wine for red meat and game; white wine for white meat, mainly chicken and fish. Pork – the other white meat – could go either way depending on the way it was served. Today this approach is rather simplistic and considered too constraining. The color of the wine is not as important as the characteristics of the wine and the food. For instance, a rich complex cabernet is not the best wine to match with a halibut in a white wine sauce. Stands to reason, since the cabernet is too intense and would over power the mild and delicate flavor of the fish. However, you can pair, quite successfully, salmon with a light bodied red wine. The point is that color is not the determining factor in matching wine to food, but rather the characteristics of the wine – taste, aroma, complexity, weight etc. This is true for beer as well. Color, as I am sure you all know, says very little about a beer and, in fact, even within the same color range there is a large variance in alcohol, hops, and malt character. But as with wine, the general rule and understanding is a good guide for us. White wine and lighter colored beers will, in general, be less complex (especially in terms of malt complexity) than red wines and darker colored beers.

Many physiologists believe that there are four basic flavor components: salt, acid, sweet, and bitter. They say that these flavors are not perceived all at once, nor do all flavors last equally as long. The figure diagrams the flavor zones. Sweetness is perceived at the front of the tongue; it is logical, therefore, that sweetness is the first of the four flavors to be perceived. However, it is also said to not last as long as the other flavors. Saltiness and acidic flavor are said to be perceived next and are said to last longer then sweetness. Bitterness is perceived at the back of the tongue, and it is not surprising to beer drinkers that it is perceived last and the longest of all the flavors.

In addition to the timing and duration of the flavors, they also interact with each other. For instance, have a sip of your favorite IPA. Note the level of bitterness. Now ask the bartender for some pretzels and have a few. When you try the IPA again, the bitterness should be more intense. This is because the saltiness reinforces the perception of bitterness. Acidity masks bitterness, although only briefly, and it enhances the perception of sweetness. This may be why Italians like to sprinkle balsamic vinegar on their strawberries. Conversely, sweetness decreases the impression of acidity. Sweetness also decreases the impression of saltiness and bitterness. Take a barleywine, for example. The bitterness is balanced and smoothed by the sweetness. Lastly, bitterness reduces acidity.

These basic guidelines will be very important in the next article where we look at matching food with beer. We will try to balance the four flavors in each course.

A schematic depiction of a tongue. The labeled regions show where taste buds that detect chemicals associated with certain tastes are clustered. These locations are only approximate and, undoubtedly, vary slightly from person to person.