Local restaurants team with beer makers for a new twist on gourmet pairings.
Beer is the world’s oldest and most popular alcoholic beverage. It can be found in just about every country and on every continent. More than 20 patron saints of brewing have been assigned to this well-liked libation, including St. Nicholas, who’s better known for his generosity (which inspired the tradition of Santa Claus) than for his connection to beer. For centuries, beer has accompanied food during celebrations and during ordinary meals. These days, beer is being paired with exquisite, multi-course meals, prepared by professional chefs—much like a winemaker’s dinner, but with a different twist.
It’s an idea whose time has come, as can be witnessed by the buzz that surrounded the April opening of Hopmonk Tavern in Sebastopol. The latest venture from Gordon Biersch co-founder (and Sonoma resident) Dean Biersch, Hopmonk’s combination of chef-created culinary treats with carefully selected brews from around the world (and some small lots of house-made beer) is being billed as “beer for foodies.” Clearly, we take our food and beverage choices seriously ’round these parts.
“Beer dinners” give brewers and chefs the opportunity to match the flavors of a wide range of different styles of beer with the latest gastronomic creations. It also gives brewers a new venue in which to market their beers, and sometimes that means an entirely different clientele.
The brains behind the brews
Ron Lindenbusch of Petaluma’s Lagunitas Brewing Company has a business card that reads “beer weasel, marketer and other beer stuff.” He says his first experience with food-and-beer pairing at an upscale dining establishment was in 1996, when he and a colleague stopped by Stars in San Francisco to see if they could get the Lagunitas IPA onto the bar menu. Celebrity chef Jerimiah Tower tasted the beer and immediately added it to the then-trendy restaurant’s offerings.
Lindenbusch is passionate about pairing beer with food and has collaborated with numerous restaurants in organizing dinners featuring Lagunitas beers. Most pairing sessions have been in the Bay Area, but some have taken place in other parts of the country including Aspens restaurant in Marrietta, Georgia, where a vertical sampling of the Lagunitas Hairy Eyeball 2003, 2004 and 2006 was paired with Kobe New York strip and Hudson Valley foie gras. Lagunitas brews a wide variety of beers, so Lindenbusch explains that he’s always been able to find a suitable beer for a particular dish. He usually works with chefs as they prepare their menus, discussing the types of flavors that work well together.
He says IPAs (India Pale Ale) are all the rage right now, and this style of beer is well-suited to food pairing. Its robust flavors and higher acid content cuts through and complements foods with spicy or intense flavors such as Thai, Mexican and Indian. Some of the richer, darker beers make excellent food matches for desserts. Lumpy Gravy (the Lagunitas staff are big Frank Zappa fans—hence the name), with its rich, dark color and subtle bouquet of what could be interpreted as raspberries and dark chocolate, goes well with decadent and chocolaty desserts. Another dark, slightly sweet beer, Brown Shugga, also pairs nicely with desert. Lindenbusch finds the biggest pairing challenge to be salad greens. One solution has been to use its Saison ale in a vinaigrette to dress mild greens such as butter lettuce.
Some chefs even like to do a little cooking with beer, but that can sometimes be tricky. “You don’t want the beer to get bitter, you need to keep the hops and malt married together,” says Lindenbusch. Many chefs are able to create a dish using a particular beer, then pair that course with the same beer. One chef created a rich, chocolate, bourbon, vanilla and espresso marble cake topped with a cappuccino stout reduction and fresh whipped cinnamon cream that was served with none other than the Lagunitas Cappuccino Stout brew.
Brew masters seem to agree that beer dinners have a much different vibe than wine dinners. They find them to be a little more relaxed and casual. Denise Jones, brew master of Moylan’s in Novato, has participated in more than 40 beer dinners in her 14-year career, including small, intimate dinners for eight to 10 people, and large dinners with more than 60 attendees. She enjoys working locally with chefs who use the region’s bounty but says she’ll travel if someone wants to showcase Moylan’s brews for a pairing.
She recently began planning beer pairing dinners with the Beach Wood BBQ in Seal Beach, Calif., and at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco. Generally speaking, restaurateurs and chefs will contact Jones (though some breweries seek out pairing opportunities as marketing tools), and she’ll personally assist them in putting together a menu that’s complimented by her beers. Jones says there’s “a mutual admiration” between brewer and chef as they take the flavors of one another’s trades and match them up.
Moylan’s Brewery has a sister restaurant, Noonan’s in Larkspur Landing, that’s hosted a number of food-and-beer dinners. Jones says it’s inspiring for chefs to have a new way to showcase their food. The dinners at Noonan’s are attended by both regular diners who appreciate the chef’s creations and people who are fans of the brewery beers. “Beer is meant to be consumed with food,” says Jones, pointing out the carbonation in beer lifts the lipids and fats from food off of the tongue. “It naturally cleanses your palate between bites so you don’t have layers of food built up.”
The minds behind the menus
Bruce Paton, executive chef at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco (who, years ago, was dubbed “beer chef” by a local writer—it stuck), has a website devoted to beer and food pairings (www.beer-chef.com). He’s hosted more than 50 beer pairing dinners over the past seven years and says he’s seen the concept “really take off” in the last two. In April, 135 guests attended his “Five Guys and a Barrel” dinner, and he created the pairings and wrote the menu for the World Cup Gala Awards Dinner at the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego.
Paton says there’s a wider diversity of people who attend his beer dinners than there is for most wine events. People of all ages, races and incomes come to his dinners; he has a somewhat regular following, but there are always new faces. Last year, he had a Brewster (what they call female brewers in Belgium) from Europe provide beers for an event, but he more often works with local breweries such as Lagunitas, Bear Republic, Anchor Steam, Drakes, Marin Brewing Company and Moylan’s, to name a few. “The brewers find me,” says Paton.
One of his favorite pairings was a Point Reyes blue cheese flan paired with a beer from Russian River Brewing Company. On Paton’s website, Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo, owners of the brewing company, agree. Their quote reads “One of our all-time favorite pairings was blue cheese flan and duck confit with our Double IPA, Pliny the Elder. This beer is very bitter and hoppy and can be a difficult match. But Bruce got this one perfect. Of all the beer and wine dinners we’ve attended, this one is still the best food and alcoholic beverage pairing we ever had!”
Bob Hurley, of Hurley’s Restaurant and Bar in Yountville, thinks the reason beer and food pairings are gaining popularity may be because today’s beers are better than ever. “America has come an incredible distance,” he says about the evolution of beer. In his younger days, he remembers a very limited American beer selection, highlighted by Budweiser and Coors. When he first started in the restaurant business, he used to go for European imports, but now he selects mostly microbrews from the United States. “Northern California has incredible microbreweries. There’s been a real evolution of beers,” says Hurley. He still travels to Europe and finds that, nowadays, he’s less impressed with what’s there because the quality of locally brewed beers is so outstanding.
Hurley’s restaurant hosted its first beer dinner this past February, and he plans on making it an annual event. During its conception, he anticipated possibly 35 patrons. People ended up filling the restaurant to capacity (about 75 participants). The feedback was mostly positive—the only critique was that the event lasted too long due to audience questions and some lively interaction with the evening’s brewmaster. Beer and food pairing dinners usually feature four to seven courses (Hurley’s had seven), costing anywhere from $50 to $75 per person.
The fare can range from casual to gourmet and similar to wine dinners, there’s an element of education and the opportunity to interact with the maker of the spirits, in this case the brew master. Since the chef is generally in the kitchen preparing the meal, it’s up to the brew master to discuss the pairings and what makes them work. Many beer drinkers are unfamiliar with the processes of brewing beer and appreciating its nuances and are therefore very interested in learning about these aspects while dining on their carefully selected feast.
Hurley says, “My job was to avoid compromising on the food” even though it was being paired with beer, not wine. With his pairings, he looked for flavors that would both compliment and contrast. “The only thing you don’t want to do is conflict. You don’t want to change the flavor of the beverage,” he says.
For his first dinner, he choose the New Belgium Brewing Company of Fort Collins, Colorado, because he was personally familiar with its wide selection of Belgian-style beers that he thought would go nicely with some of the food selections he wanted to offer. Their brew master, Peter Bouchaert, attended the dinner and was able to field the dozens of questions asked by diners. Hurley would like to work with local breweries for his next beer dinner and plans to feature a number of selections from different breweries during the meal.
The passion behind the pairings
West County Grill (located on the plaza in Sebastopol), one of Sonoma County’s newer eateries for foodies and wine aficionados, hosted an Irish food and beer fest on St. Patrick’s Day. Manager Heather Marquardt’s brother, Ryan Marquardt, is a brewer at Lagunitas Brewing Company, so Chef Darren McRonald (a Chez Panisse alum) decided to try pairing their beers with the bounty of the county. The $55 prix fixe menu started with a rich and creamy leek and potato soup with smoked haddock paired with Saison and Czech Style Pilsner. The next course was a traditional Irish-American house-cured beef brisket cooked in Brown Shugga and served with cabbage and spring vegetables, along with Censored Ale and IPA. The final course was a desert offering of whipped cream, Irish liqueur and crisp, coffee-flavored meringues coupled with a vertical tasting of Hairy Eyeball 2005, 2006 and 2008.
For this occasion, McRonald had already thought about what he wanted to feature. He told Lindenbusch the types of dishes he planned on serving, and the Lagunitas rep brought by a selection of beers for the chef to try. After sampling them, McRonald altered his menu slightly.
The people who attended the event were mostly people with prior beer dinner experience and were very curious to talk to the brewer. McRonald says the highlight of the evening was the vertical tasting. “People got a kick out of that,” he says.
He personally enjoyed developing a relationship with the brewery and was happy with the success of the event. He also says he’d like to do it again with other brewers. The bar always keeps a local beer on tap, and with plenty of regional choices around, rotating brews is easy.
Lindenbusch makes education of his brewery staff, vendors and himself an ongoing commitment. At a vendor appreciation soiree at the brewery in March, he manned a table of cheese and beer pairings. He personally finds that cheese can sometimes be challenging to match with beer and was asking for opinions as people tried different cheese-and-beer combinations. Featured were a 104-month-old aged Wisconsin cheddar by Grandpa Z’s, Ig Vella’s dry aged Jack, the Marin French Cheese Company’s Rouge et Noir Schloss and the infamous Point Reyes blue. Lindenbusch made several years of Hairy Eyeball available, along with the usual suspects on tap in the brewery’s informal employee and guest “bar,” which was tended to by one of the breweries unassuming owners, Carissa Brader. Lindenbusch would love to see chefs offer a “crusty and dusty” desert course featuring ripened cheeses and aged beers.
Beer connoisseurs are passionate about their food and brew, but they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously. Hurley jokingly comments that he thought hosting a beer dinner at a restaurant nestled in the heart of Wine Country would prove him a “heretic.” But the event turned out to be more casual than some of his other dinners, with a higher noise level than usual and everyone was “just out to have a good time” says Hurley.
He thinks the increase in these types of dinners can be attributed to the fact that almost everyone enjoys a good beer on occasion. He believes that beer matches with food have been going on for a long time, but that now, chefs and brewers are reaching out to the public with creativity and quality that’s better than ever. As a result, beer makers dinners offer a fine new spin on a beverage that’s been around since biblical times and shows no signs of ever going away.
Click here to read "These Kegs have Legs" by Bob Klose
