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.
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.
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.
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.