Category: Beer & Food

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Beer & Jerky

Fall has meant beer + food boxes in the mail. First was chocolate, then potato chips and now jerky!
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The beer is from Angel City. LAger to be exact. The jerky is from Lawless. Honey Chipotle flavor. (I also got Srirachelada and Sweet Sriracha jerky but that is too spicy for me, wish I had gotten the Aloha Teriyaki to pair with the Pilsner).

The jerky is well good but damn they could have turned up the honey and turned down the chipotle. The spice just grows and grows. Now I don’t know if the beer got warmed up in transport but it is a bit metallic and I remember the beer on draft was overly grapefruit before. Maybe the heat brings out a different side of the beer though because the honey is coming through clearly and does mitigate the chipotle heat.

OK, so I did try the Sweet Sriracha jerky. Wasn’t half bad. Again the heat overwhelmed my puny tolerance but it was less overtly hot than the other jerky and brought out more grapefruit from the beer too.

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IPA + Chocolate + Pumpkin

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I can be flexible at times. Case in point pumpkin beer. If you are a seasonal creeper, I ain’t got time for you. If it is after September 15th (preferably later) and you aren’t just doing some pie spice seasonal, then I will listen.

Toss in a high quality chocolate bar version of the beer and send me both and I will perk my ears up. Salazon Chocolate teamed with Flying Dog Brewery to do just that.

Here is the review: let’s start with the chocolate. Damn this has a lot going on. There is a rich dark chocolate base, salt kicks in as you as does a green hop bitterness that I had a hard time separating from the chocolate. But the subtle shades of each do show when you focus on it. I can’t pick up pumpkin notes but that is because the one-two bitter punch is just too strong. The beer has no pumpkin problem. I get more gourd than pie spice from the dark amber Maryland brew and it surprisingly works with the restrained hops that are used. The balance is quite well done. It’s not just a pumpkin ale with some hops added in.

I came in thinking that ate least the chocolate would be good but the beer is excellent. I don’t know if I would recommend sampling both together because the dark chocolate is just too bitter and rich. My palate needed water before I could fully enjoy the beer. Which I did.

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Neal Brothers – Chips & Beer Review

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In the mail came a box filled with (4) bags of potato chips. No, I am not a member of a Chip of the Month club, I was contacted by the PR arm of Neal Brothers Foods to pair craft beer with boldly flavored chips.

All four flavors are big. Even the “plain” salted is not just any salt. So I did not want to pair beers with equally vivid notes. Instead, taking my learning from recent beer pairing demonstrations, I went for beers that would play with certain ingredients and not the entire flavor profile. Strong enough to dance but not leading. I opened the two beers watched some football and taste tested.

Let’s dive in….
Starting with maple bacon flavor which has the maple part down. The bacon part is missing though. These are sweet chips. No salt presence to me. I paired it with Bee Line Honey Blonde from Track 7 Brewing. The goal was that the honey from the beer would mirror the maple syrup notes. What worked was that the dryness of the beer brought the sweet down nicely but the chips brought out a more mineral taste in the beer.

Next was the pink Himalayan salt bag, in the helpful pink bag. Not much salt going on here. If you had handed me a chip without showing me the bag, I would have said unsalted kettle chips. Boring but get the job done. The Bee Line added some character to the chip. The beer lost the mineral notes and became a better drinking with this chip.

For the boldest flavors, I opened up Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest. I wanted something bigger but without a distracting flavor. The first chip up was Montreal steak spice. This flavor betrays their Canadian heritage. And when first opened, the aroma burst out. Dill hit me first. Then dill hit me second. Then a smack of pepper. After two tame chips, this one really struck me. The Chico brewed beer held its own though. Decreasing the spice and adding a viscosity.

Before I delve into the last bag. The spicy Srirachup chips were the ones that I dreaded. Not a big fan of heat, am I. Just a touch is all I need. And by a touch, I mean parts per million small. But I told my fear to go away and grabbed a chip. A cross between sweet ketchup and Sriracha. Oddly, it was not the chip that I could eat the most of but I think it was the most well crafted flavor. Too spicy for me but not nearly as scary as I expected. It was well balanced and matched the description on the bag. The Oktoberfest served to add bread-iness that balanced the spice and sweet.

None of the chips blew my mind but it was illuminating to see how the beers helped the chips and vice-verse. I think I am on the right track of pairing beers that are not as splashy but I am thinking about cracking open an IPA and seeing how that works.

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Chili X 4

Select Beer in Redondo Beach will host their 4th Annual Chili Cookoff event tomorrow at their wonderful bottle shop and tap room on PCH.
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The following breweries will be preparing not only beer but chili for the glory of victory:

King Harbor, Brouwerij West, Phantom Carriage, Arts District, Three Weavers (has a chance to be the first two-time winner as well), HopSaint Brewing, Strand Brewing, Smog City Brewing and El Segundo Brewing.

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Regrained

Considering how many breweries are out there, that means a serious overload of grain that needs a home which is why I am glad to see another company taking that spent grain and creating granola-esque bars out of it.

Regrained currently has two flavors of bars on the market. Honey Almond IPA and chocolate coffee stout.
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If I run across either, I will review or pair with a beer.

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An Allagash Boneyard

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Sometimes you need an extra push to commit to a beer dinner. So, in that vein, check out this Boneyard Bistro menu and the Allagash beers that they are pairing with it….(One big plus is that you have some choice in this matter)

STARTERS
Pineapple & Green Chile Shrimp Sopes with Guacamole | Cotija
*Allagash Tiarna

or

Kobe Donut Sliders with Strawberry Jelly | Bacon Jam
*Allagash Avance

ENTRÉE
Crispy Jerk Fried Chicken with Mango Chutney | Smashed Plantains
*Allagash Victoria

or

Braised Short Rib with Ancho-Cocoa Mole | “Street” Corn | Spanish Rice
*Allagash St. Klippenstein

(another) or

Seared Scallops with Kafir Lime Rum Butter | Grilled Mango | Thai Basil | Fried Rice
*Allagash Little Brett

DESSERT
Bourbon-Cream Filled Churros with Coffee Dust
*Allagash James Bean

or

Stonefruit & Cardamom Cheeescake Truffles
*Allagash Interlude

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Cooking with Hops

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Most craft beer cookbooks either fall into the camp of A) what to pair with beer or B) cooking with beer. But what about using the ingredients of beer in cooking, specifically hops?

That is the task undertaken by the Kickstarter funded book: Hedonistic Hops – The Hopeheads Guide to Kitchen Badassery by Marie Porter with photographs (and some commentary) from Michael Porter.

This book walks you through from growing your own hops all the way to harvesting and then the recipes that they can be used in. Of course, you can always buy hops and use those and the Porters are nimble enough to make recipes that can be used with fresh hops, pellets and even the shoots and leaves too.

The tone is genial sometimes verging on the hokey. I am still wondering about the choice of “badassery” for the sub-title but overall it is like talking to the somewhat goofy aunt or the dad with bad jokes while they are cooking. It is a welcoming tone throughout and the instructions and hop information is laid out in a way to re-focus on cooking and not brewing.

The main chunk of the book is devoted to recipes. Starting with appetizers and sides, then proceeding to Main Dishes, condiments, desserts before finishing at beverages.

For me, the section on condiments and sauces was the most intriguing. Creating a BBQ glaze or hoppy butter seems to be something that can be used in many different meal preparations and I think is under represented in cookbooks. Same goes for the beverages section. Making hop accented ice tea or lemonade are cool and quick ideas that adds something extra to a dinner.

If you cannot get enough hops and like brownies with green flecks in them, this might be the cookbook for you.

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A Very Short Crawl

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A Mosaic Single Hop Imperial IPA doesn’t much sound like a beer from SoLArc Brewing. The Highland Park brewers tend to much weirder and hop-less beers. But add in Sumac berries and now it sounds more like their strange creations. Then factor in that the beer is brewed for the Josef Centeno group of DTLA restaurants and things start making more sense.

Recently, I made the short crawl through the four restaurants on 4th and Main tasting the same BacöBeer at each location but paired with totally different foods.
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I am not an adventurous eater by any stretch. But this was an opportunity to test how one beer, and a hopped one no less, paired with some really rich foods. As the above menu card details, this is not the typical food truck outside a taproom food pairing. And except for the shrimp, I had never tasted beef tongue, chicken liver mousse or bone marrow. This would make for a whole new world for me.

Plus, our beer hostess for the night Genevieve Hardison pulled out some other bottles at each stop to see how they paired with each course too. Each of the four restaurants have different cuisines so each, have different taps and bottle lists to accommodate that. The lists comprise a little from all sorts of worlds. The Mexican themed Bar Ama has Pacifico and Negro Modelo alongside Evil Twin and Insurgente while Orsa & Winston has Belgian and Japanese beers side by side.
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Onto the results of the pairing:
Course 1 – The flavorful but balanced bacö was the clear best pairing of the beer to food. The Sumac and the bitterness added to the harissa and aioli and also cleared away the rich flavor with the carbonation. We also tried the OG gose from Leipzig which was good but didn’t have the heft to compete.

Course 2 – The mousse was paired wonderfully with the kumquat gastrique and the IPA was too much for that combo of flavors. The Augustiner Edelstoff, on the other hand, was perfect. Light and simple it added a slight floral component to the dish.

Course 3 – I was looking forward to the shrimp since it was the one item on the list that was “safe” in my eyes. But boy the chile was kicked up on these. Granted my Scoville tolerance is low but these were powerful and that spice kick rolled over the Evil Twin smoked lager, Cowboy. (Which I really liked) and even over the Insurgente IPA and the SoLArc brew.

Course 4 – This was an elaborate spread with the really lovely amazake toast and the buttery bone marrow with a garnish of little micro greens on top. The best beer for this was the new-to-me Baird beer, The Carpenter’s Mikan. An orange meets potpourri beer that was both delicate and very flavorful. It added that citrus note while brushing aside the slickness of the food.
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For an IPA, it’s not really imperial, the BacöBeer pairs pretty well across those food spectrums. It never outright rejected the food it was paired with and actually was probably the best choice for courses one and three. I personally think that it helps out the bigger, heftier foods with strong flavors and works less well with lighter, more delicate flavors or anything with a bit of bitterness that sorta fights the Sumac.