Welcome to the Jungle
While beer-and-food pairings have become far more commonplace in recent years, crafting a multiple-course pairing menu can present all sorts of new considerations.. Most educational resources (like books and websites) focus on one plate and one beer at a time. In planning for a full dinner, chefs are called upon to think on a considerably grander scale about everything from how the courses will work cohesively, to managing portions, to managing people, to accounting for constraining menu themes.
Sean Z. Paxton of the TV show The Homebrew Chef is one of the country’s renowned beer chefs and has been involved in elaborate menu planning. “Are you working with one brewery and their whole beer lineup?” Paxton asks rhetorically, reflecting on the themes that he’s encountered. “Are you looking at something like a Belgian beer dinner, where you’re celebrating Belgian beer and all the different complexities of all the different styles and flavors? I’ve done dinners where it’s focused all on hops and IPA, and six courses of IPAs—would you hit a lupulin threshold?”
There’s the goal of making each course part of a progression of flavors, as Paxton puts it, as well as showcasing each beer successfully. While there’s no lack of resources on how to generally pair beer styles with different foods, the devil’s often in the details.
“Name me three IPAs that taste the same,” Paxton says as a way of making the point. Accounting for underlying nuances can be as important to the process as knowing classic pairings, particularly when working with craft beers far outside traditional style guidelines.
To better understand the beers they would e working with, the Vail Cascade group traveled to Denver’s Breckenbridge Brewery where brewmaster Todd Usry organized a tasting.
Usry describes the scene that developed: “I had myself, my quality-control brewer, our lab guy, another one of our brewers who’s just got a real good palate, and my wife (who does public relations for the brewery), and then they brought down their contingent. You should have just seen the table we sat down at with 24 beers on it.” Bemis’ first formal craft-beer tasting included Breckenridge’s 72 Imperial Chocolate Cream Stout and whiskey-barrel-aged Vanilla Porter, as well as Bell’s Two Hearted Ale and Hopslam Ale.
“He was very, let’s say, introspective,” says Usry.
“We’d throw out kind of our design on the beer, what we were trying to achieve in making the beer and the flavors we were looking for—and you’d see him smile to himself. He’s got this kind of a wry smile, and you could see him smile to himself and nod his head and know… that his brain was just churning away.”
Having established common ground, the groups gradually tasted the full lineup of beers, exposing Bemis to the craft-beer lexicon while trying to formulate pairings. They eventually narrowed it down to seven pairs of beers, which helped shape the underlying structure of the final menu.
For the first time, Bemis came to terms with what was being asked of him in his inaugural beer dinner
