Beer and the Science of Sweetness and Spice

  

I Drank in College so I'd Avoid Science

It has since been heralded the Craft Beer Revolution – the cult following of microbrews blossoming, overflowing into the mainstream throughout the last decade. Its popularization comes along with that of gourmet gastropubs; incidentally, these new style eateries feature an array of craft beers, while some craft breweries offer an eclectic gourmet food menu.  With the climbing interest in flavorful beers nation wide, that beer pairs as richly and complexly with food as wine does is substantive, and restaurants, wholesalers, even roaming food trucks are capitalizing on this truth.

 

However, be it gastropub-hosted beer pairings or to-the-source Internet research, recommendations for honing your pairing palate may leave you baffled. Why does one gastropub pair its spicy curry chicken skewers with an IPA, while another opts for a porter? Fundamentally, the beers are completely different. Baffling, indeed. But the answer is simple, perhaps overly simple: food (and beer) is all about taste – your taste. And your taste preferences vary from the chef’s and the brewer’s and your date’s and your mates’. Not to mention, your tastes can change. There is, however one unchanging, invariable constant when it comes to pairing beer with food. Science.

While preferences vary between individuals, tastes and flavors – and the combinations thereof – don’t. Much of this has to do with chemical reactions (that science stuff I mentioned earlier). For instance, bitterness and alcohol both, individually and collaboratively, enhance the caustic quality of spices, while the sweetness of malts counters that heat. So, why would a chef pair a bitter IPA with a spicy curry dish? Either he’s a sadist, or he wants to accentuate the spices in his dish. Oppositely, the chef pairing her dish with a porter might worry about that enhancing the spiciness with an astringent and characteristically ABV-generous IPA may overpower the other, perhaps more subtle flavors in her recipe. It all depends on the characteristics you want to home your palate.

A Homerun Match*

The Dish: The Dubliner’s Beef Curry Stew. A simple, yet delicious, and definitively spicy curry featuring tender pieces of beef and flavorful vegetables.

The Beer: Breckenridge Vanilla Porter. I love curry, and I like it with a  kick. Anticipating just that, I ordered this dish with Breckenridge Brewery’s Vanilla Porter. The natural sweetnes of malts, accompanied with this porter’s light vanilla tones and low ABV (4.0%), balances and calms spiciness without detracting from the aromas and flavor of this curry. Additionally, the malts’ light roasted flavor harmonizes with the wholesomeness of the beef chunks, working with the fat to create a filling meal.

The Outcome: This turned out to be a great combo, perfect for that particular night: warm, with outside seating. Not ideal for a super-spice meal; I didn’t particularly want my forehead to start breaking out in sweat, tears to start pooling in my eyes, and mucus to conspicuously drip from my nose – in front of my girlfriend.   

The But: I’m a hophead; IPAs are my favorite. If there had been a refreshing chill in the air, an IPA would have been a stellar choice to heighten the heat of this stew. And still, I could have taken it two ways: a somewhat carbonated IPA with the fruitiness of cintra hops (like Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA) would have turned on the heat, while the carbonation would have cut through the beef fat. Alternatively, I could have got the same kick, but with the satiation of wholesome meal with a smoother IPA like Ballast Point’s Big Eye IPA, or a super-smooth nitro-infused brew.

Of course, there’s more to beer than just hops and malts, more to food than just spice and fat. There are a plethora of taste and flavor characteristics in both beer and food that work wonders (or plunders) with each other. But it all depends on your specific tastes. With all the scientific rules out there regarding beer and food pairings (Sweet increases Salt, Acid calms Salt, Roast counters Sweet… it’s like an elaborate, quasi-arbitrary game of rock-paper-scissors), the only rule you should definitely follow happens to be a rule both of science and of thumb: experiment. Enjoy both what you’re eating and what you’re drinking. If the combination works out, great. If not, just order another beer. That always does the trick.

* Homerun is the actual term designated for a truly great beer-food match.