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.

Eat Big Before Turkey Day - and other healthy tips for Thanksgiving

Tips for a Healthy Thanksgiving. Heard Them All, Have You?

A Google search of "Healthy Thanksgiving Tips" will pull up roughly 144,000,000 results in a matter of 0.17 seconds. It's safe to say there's a hellova lot out there for making Turkey Day both satisfying and slimming. But those tips are all the same; seriously, go look at them: Ease off the butter; skip the stuffing; rethink going for thirds; each glass of wine is an extra 100 calories... Makes you less and less thankful the more you read about it. So, here are some tips for a healthy Thanksgiving that you won't find on the first page of Google (hey, no one reads past the first page anyway. True story.) and that won't have you holding off on that next glass of wine. (What the hell kind of advice was that anyway, Health Living!) 

OMGMO

Jeremy Seifert's documentary, GMO OMG, explores just WTF is in the food we eat.

To say that the debate over GMOs is hot right now is putting it lightly. It's scalding. Touch it with a whisper and someone's going to get burned. Unless you don't so much as skim magazine headlines in the checkout line or watch TV, or unless your Twitter feed is down, or your Facebook has been so ingeniously hacked that all politically unstable content is somehow totally blocked (which means your "social" life consists of Instagram food-porn, viral videos of adorable animals doing adorable things really adorably, and some dude you met once with the uncontrollable desire to tell the world that he's "just chillin with some ramen noodles watching my fav shows #Liveisgreat.") then you've undoubtably heard of GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms. You may even know what they are, maybe even why they are bad for you. Wait, are they bad for you? Well, scientifically, we're not even sure.

Special K(alories)

A good marketing campaign deludes consumers, saying that Special K is exceptionally healthy and will lead to weight loss. In fact, without petite portions and strict adherence to healthy dieting and exercise, it could make that muffin top of yours poke out a bit more. Fact of the matter is, eating one small bowl of almost any cereal can help you lose weight. It's called portion control. This is an extended post comparing Special K products with Lucky Charms. Enjoy. 

Almonds: The Good & Bad About Healthy Nuts

Photo from: www.wisegeek.com - Thanks, guys!

Nut Check

Health crazes sprout likes weeds in the spring these days. I've covered Greek Yogurt in the past, and will get back to that later; and as soon as my hebetude abates, I'm going to explain why your healthy cereal is making you fat. But right now, I'm going to give a very brief info-mash about healthy nuts. The best nuts. And while my inner child (who, incidentally, is very superficial) could go on and on with an Austin Powers prowess in making too many crass innuendoes and puns about nuts, I'm going to get right to some straightforward info on almonds that you won't find on About [dot] com.

Oikos Ain't

Gullibility + Laziness = Ignorance

Ignorance pisses me off.

So does the fact that so much of our choice in food is not just unhealthy, but by ratio of ingredients barely constitutes food at all. (Take a look at nutritional label of popular foods; many of the ingredients aren't just difficult to pronounce, they're damn near impossible to digest.) But, what really concerns me (and pisses me off) is everyone knows this, though few seem to mind. How many of you jump on a food-craze wagon because you saw an advertisement market it as healthy? Be honest. Have a cup of Greek yogurt in the fridge? Well, maybe you do, but maybe you don't, despite what the label says. 

Indeed, Greek yogurt is the vogue health food right now. What's not in vogue is learning why it's healthy. And dare not ask if it's actually healthier than regular yogurt. 

http://twentytweets.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/greek-yogurt-yay-or-nay/

The good news: by and large, Greek Yogurt is healthier (Phew!). 

The bad news: you're not sure why (Hmmm, he's right...). 

Many of those four-ounce tubs of what you're told is Greek yogurt (Oooh, it's so exotic! I think I'll pay way too much for it...) are really just standard yogurt, with a little sumtin'-sumtin' thrown in. I say sumtin'-sumptin' because I'm not exactly sure what it is. And, chances are, neither do you.

Let's go over what Greek yogurt is:

Happiness Is

Just now, awaiting the arrival of my dear friend Alyson to come pull me from the throes of lonesomeness and uncertainty (that's a WHOLE other metaphorical monster awaiting disclosure! But she's a soon-to-be-psychiatrist, so maybe she'll lend a hand there), I was peeling away the skin of some very ripe mangos. You see, we're going to confine all these mango chunks into a blender, flick the ON switch of the wheeling, jagged, sordid machine and mini-machety the saccharine fruit into juice. We'll add rum, of course. We'll sit by the pool and muse and laugh and chat and reminisce.

As I was peeling away the skin of one hunk of mango, a flashback backslapped me with a memory of climbing the (Haitian) mango tree behind St. Andrew's School. And then of being a fearless, bridle-less, invincible island boy: salt on my sunburned skin, sand imbedded in my sun-bleached hair. Sucking the seed of the mango I thought of two things: a few days ago, preparing a fruit bowel, my boss proclaimed "Why do mango's have such large seeds!" It was not a question; it was consternation. "So ya can suck da seed!" I explained, a distant Bahamian dialect inconspicuously following my words off the tip of my tongue. She didn't get it. She doesn't get much.

It secondly reminded me of my father, his voice, his view of life as an invariably beautiful thing. (In the endless wake of his passing, I find this distraughtingly ironic.) He would have said--and every soul out there who knew him, would know for sure, and could hear his voice--smiling, hunched over the sink with an over-flow of mango juice spilling down his chin: "Happiness is!"

Ironic, too, is that my mother--just yesterday--discovered a previously non-existant allergy to mangos. What luck. How sucky to not get to suck a mango seed!

None of this has much relevance to anything in the world, except that isn't it nice that biting into fruit can unearth the pleasantry that is fond memories.