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Chicago Gourmet Tue Sep 30 2008

Pairing Fine Cheese With Craft Beer

How many of you have hosted a wine and cheese party? How about a beer and cheese party? If it were up to Greg Hall, the latter would be a lot more common. As the brewmaster for the Goose Island Brewing Company, there is little doubt that Hall knows his beer, but he has also been involved with the American Cheese Society. The Chicago Gourmet seminar Hall hosted offered four Goose Island beers paired with three cheeses and one chocolate:

• Harvest Ale and Uplands Pleasant Ridge Reserve: This ESB style beer pairs well with firm cheeses like the Pleasant Ridge Reserve or Jasper Hill Bandaged Wrapped Cheddar.
• Matilda and Chimay cheese: this Belgian style beer works well with washed rind cheeses like the Chimay or Meadow Creek Farm Grayson.
• India Pale Ale and Jasper Hill Bayley Hazen Blue: IPAs can be a hard style for food pairings because it has such an assertive flavor. The saltiness of blue cheese balances out the hoppy, bitterness of the IPA to highlight smooth, complimentary flavors.
• Pere Jacques and Scharffen Berger 60%: The caramel flavors in this Belgian style beer pulls out the sweetness of dark chocolate.

(Mindy Segal and Greg Hall)

Additional guidelines for pairing beers and cheeses:

• Beer is great for cheese because of three things: Alcohol, CO2, and bitterness. These qualities balance the heaviness of cheese and help to cleanse the palate.
• Balance the heaviness of the beer to the heaviness of the cheese.

• Regional pairings often work well.

• For a light cheese, like a chèvre, a wheat or a pilsner is probably the best choice.
• Malty beers are best paired with hard cheese
• Gruyère works well with brown ales, drawing the nuttiness out of both.
• Oatmeal Stouts work well with Stilton or a Roaring Forties blue cheese.
• Lambics and salty cheeses, like a Manchego, work well together. The two acids balance each other out. Fruit flavored lambics are very difficult to pair.

Hall's conversational manner of speaking and engaging anecdotes made for an excellent seminar. The basic piece of advice that he wanted us to leave with was this: It is hard to go wrong when you plan a tasting around a few different styles of beer and a few different types of cheese. Simply buy what looks interesting and invite a few friends over.

— Gemma Petrie / Comments (2)