Beer and Cheese: A New Marriage?

Beer and cheese may not be the first things you’d pair together, but believe it or not, the union of the two go all the way back to the Middle Ages. In fact, in Belgium, exceptional beer and cheeses were such an important part of their everyday lives, that even today it is a delicacy and small bowls of cheese are often served in beer bars to accompany your beer.

You may think the best suited alcoholic beverage to accompany cheese is wine. Although cheese can make the cheapest of wines enjoyable, wine can be overpowering to our taste buds at times and make it hard to relish delicious cheese to the fullest potential.

On the other hand, beer and cheese are both farmhouse products which automatically means they compliment each other. Typically, a farmer’s diet back in the day consisted of cold meat, cheese, and beer. Beer and cheese have very close origins, in the fact that barley, which is a cereal grass, is a product used to make beer and milk is a by- product of a cow eating grass. Consequently, the fact that they share such similar characteristics means that they are both alike in flavor and aroma and ultimately compliment each other greatly.

Source: https://www.craftbeer.com/educational-resources/craft-beer-cheese-style-guide

How to pair beer and cheese

Try having your favorite beer with a plate of different cheeses and find one which you most enjoy with it, as the preference is the best way to find a pairing. Also, putting together complex beers with complex cheeses is a good tip when it comes to pairing the two.

Here’s a list of ideas when it comes to pairing beer with popular cheeses:

* Pale Ale with Sharp Cheddar

* Wheat Beer with Feta

* Fruit Beer with Mascarpone

* Pilsner with American Cheese

* Brown Ale with Colby

* Amber Lager with Parmesan

* Octoberfest Beer with Swiss Cheese

Basically, the main thing when it comes to pairing beer with cheese is having a play around with the process, experiment with your own preferences and remember that beer is the beverage which goes with all types of food or on its own, so theirs a huge variety of possibilities!

A Helpful Serving Tip:

Buy raw milk, cow, goat or sheep cheeses. Milk that is not pasteurized and has not been processed will culture while milk that has undergone pasteurization processes produces cheese whose scents and flavors are removed. Contrarily, cheese that are produced from raw milk are richer, fuller and support traditional cheese-making processes.