Beer Pairing - 2012 Winter Edition Brewer's Notes

For this edition of our Beer Pairing, we served 4 beers.  Three were paired with food, and the fourth was served as people arrived.

The arrival beer was again our Brown Ale (second edition if you're following the blog).  It's an English style nut brown ale, with low alcohol (4.6%) and a smooth creamy texture.  It has a sweet caramel aroma with a nutty backbone and hints of chocolate.  Quantities were limited, but again this beer was well received.

The first beer for the pairing was paired with the chicken and mac salad.  It was our flagship beer, Blackout.  This beer is best described as a strong dark ale with vanilla beans.  It's creamy texture and vanilla and chocolate aroma and flavor make it perfect for a cold winter night, which here in San Diego means 60F.  Guests enjoyed this one and high ABV helped loosen people up a bit.

Notes: This version of Blackout we served was our revised version.  As said before, we were more than happy with the previous versions and recipe, but I had an idea and ran with it.  It paid off, as the result was a higher ABV beer (10.5%), a shorter conditioning stage, and a more simple and repeatable recipe.

The second beer, we paired with both the fries and tacos.  This was Me Too, our IIPA.  This highly hopped, but not overly bitter double IPA has a nose of pine, grapefruit, and citrus.  The body is medium-light, with a moderately dry finish.  A very nice 9.6% IIPA that will make even non-IPA drinkers thirsty.  We paired this with both the tacos and the fries for the spice enhancing qualities of the hops.  We thought the combination of pine and citrus would complement the spiciness of the dishes.

Notes: This recipe was based partially on the winner of the adjunct sugar vs no adjunct sugar IIPA taste test we did.  This does have some adjunct sugar (dextrose), but we altered the malt bill slightly and added a second dry hop addition.  We used 9oz of hops between the two dry hop additions.  Or, nearly 3.5lbs per barrel in the dry hop alone.

The third beer was paired with the desert.  We chose our Weizenbock for this.  This is one of our rotating seasonals for fall/winter and will continue to be so.  The sweet caramel malt flavors mixed with the clove spice and banana esters from the yeast made this the perfect beer to pair with the toffee bread pudding.

Notes: This is a pretty traditional German weizenbock finished off with a bavarian weizen yeast (WLP351).  I really like this strain for weizenbocks and dunkel weizens, it just compliments the caramel and chocolate notes perfectly) 

As promised, the theme for this beer pairing was quite opposite from that of our summer supper club.  We went with all high ABV beers for this one, as made sense for winter.  The next Beer Pairing will be in spring and will feature a spring seasonal, as well as a few others.  Details to come.