Video:How to Pair Food and Beer

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Transcript:How to Pair Food and Beer

Hi, my name is Garrett Oliver. I'm the brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery and the author of "The Brewmaster's Table", here for About.com. Today, were going to talk about how to match traditional beer with great food.

Why Pair Beer and Food?

Many people think of great wine as the best accompaniment for food but in fact, beer has a much wider range of flavor. And when it comes to all the nice beers that you have available to you today its a great thing to learn how to pair them up with things that you might be eating.

Basics to Pair Beer and Food

You want to look at the overall impact of the flavor of the beer and match that up with the impact of the food. What that means is that you don't want a big muscular strong beer, for example, going with really light, delicate fish. You don't want one thing to overwhelm the other. You want these two things to be in harmony.

Pair Sushi With Beer

So we're going to start with the lightest one first and the lightest one is going to be our wheat beer. Uh, this is called brooklyner weiss. This is the German style of wheat beer. Americans have a strong tendency to put a lemon in it though they don't do that in Germany. And this is a very light style of beer. It looks like it has a little bit of color to it. And, it generally does have a haze, that's normal because there's yeast actually in there, which is very nutritious.

Now, this today were going to be pairing up with sushi. Its funny if you go to Japan, you, even though this is a German style of beer, the Japanese are brewing this German style of beer today because it is so great with Sushi. It has a lightly tart finish to it - it has a very light flavor.

In the background some flavors of bananas, and cloves, a little bit of bubble gum. And this all works, this fruitiness works really nice with sushi. This is the German style but there's also a Belgian style which has a little bit of a orange peel used in the kettle and that gives you some very nice flavors as well.

Pair Beer and Pizza

Nest, were going to be pairing up an amber logger with Pizza. As you can see this has a nice amber color and this color is coming from malts that have been caramelized. And its that caramel character that's going to latch on to the crust, that nice toasty bit of the crust that you have going on in your pizza. And you have nice hop flavors and aromas that are going to work well with the cheese and cut through that tomato sauce.

Pair Buffalo Wings and Beer

Now suppose you have something pretty spicy, lets say buffalo wings, then you want to go for India Pale Ale which is usually referred to as IPA. This is an old style of beer from England that's now very popular in the Unites States. It usually has a light amber color, uh but the thing that really distinguishes India Pale Ale is hops. You have a lot of hop flavor and a lot of hop aroma, so that's going to mean a big bitterness and that's going to give you the cutting power to really work well with spicy food. Whether its buffalo wings or Thai food or Indian food or even Szechuan Chinese, IPA is going to be a great choice.

Pair Beers With Burgers

Sometimes there's nothing better than a burger. And when it comes to burgers, nothing's going to be better than brown ale. Now, as you can see, this color is a lot darker. Not only have these malts been caramelized but some of them have been roasted. And that's going to give you chocolate-y flavors coffee flavors, roasted flavors. And that's going to really latch on the char flavor that I hope you've got on the outside of that hamburger. If you've cooked it nice it's nice and dark on the outside, and bright and juicy on the inside. And these flavors are really going to latch onto that. So, whether it's a hamburger, or a steak, or a barbeque, brown ale is going to be a great choice there.

Beers and Desserts

And finally, of course where people usually don't think about beer, dessert. In this case were going to have some chocolate cake. Now this beer is called black chocolate stout and I think you can understand where this is going. This has a big chocolate-y flavor, it taste like a bar of dark chocolate with a little bit of espresso going on. And just the same way where coffee or chocolate are going to be great with chocolate cake, this is going to be a wonderful flavor.

The style is called imperial stout and these were strong stouts originally made for Catherine The Great. Well, these types of beers now have wonderful big chocolate-y flavors, they're going to be great, not only with a chocolate cake, but you can also pair it up with cheese cake, with ice cream, or really any type of dessert. This is going to be wonderful and in fact people tend to out desert wines with the desserts, I think dessert beers are actually better.

Thanks for watching! To learn more visit us on the Web at About.com.