Beer and cheese marry well

Who can forget those great Kiwi cheese and wine parties of the 1970s and 1980s? You remember – those little cubes of rubbery Colby and Edam with a pickled onion or segment of pineapple neatly skewered on to cocktail sticks. Such culinary masterpieces were routinely served to grateful partygoers each clutching small, globe-shaped glasses filled with the sugary box wines of the day.

(Whatever happened to all those funny little round glasses?)

As New Zealand gradually earned a reputation as a worldclass wine producer, its citizens came to appreciate the range of flavours and styles within the world of wine, and began tradingup to higher quality wines. And, in recent times, it’s been the same story with cheese. Sure, most Kiwis might still have a block of something claiming to be ‘‘Tasty’’ lurking in the fridge, but it’s probably not brought out when guests are invited to dinner.

Soft, hard, mild, strong, smooth, sticky, sweet, tart or stinky, these days the diversity and quality of the best New Zealand cheeses can be compared to that of our wines. But do wine and cheese really work well together?

‘‘It’s rare to find wines that echo any flavours in cheese,’’ claims the American brewer and beer and food protagonist Garrett Oliver. ‘‘With wine, you’re almost always working just with contrasts’’.

So does beer cope any better? The answer, according to Oliver, is an unequivocal yes. Beer is far less acidic and usually combines very well with cheese; ‘‘Beer has carbonation and bitterness to cut through the paste of cheese and then uses its full range of flavours to play wonderful harmonies.’’

In his excellent book, The Brewmaster’s Table, Oliver identifies three major BEER considerations when matching beers with cheeses. First, he suggests trying to achieve a balance between the texture and flavour intensity of the two. Milder cheeses harmonise better with gently-hopped lagers and delicate wheat beers, while stronger cheeses can handle more robust stouts, porters, or barley wines.

The next consideration is whether to complement or contrast the flavours. To complement, you should look to echo some of the flavours in the cheese with similar characteristics in the beer. For example, the nut and caramel aromas found in many aged, semihard cheeses - mature Goudas and the like - are plentiful in malty beers like brown ales, bocks and doppelbocks.

But contrasting flavours and textures can also work well. Most cheeses are high in fat, many are creamy and they’re almost always mouth-coating. Unlike wine, beer’s natural carbonation makes it brisk and palate-cleansing. The yeasty spiciness and soft spritziness of Belgium’s Abbey and Trappist beers and their Kiwi counterparts look out for Moa St Joseph’s and Ben Middlemiss Nota Bene makes them a delightful foil for the fatty texture and flavour of many soft white cheeses.

Served with fresh multigrain bread and pickled onions, as in a classic ploughman’s lunch, an earthy, sharp, mature farmhouse Cheddar (like Barry’s Bay Wainui) contrasts delightfully with most English-style pale ales (try Townshend ESB). Alternately, a malty brown ale will complement the cheese’s nutty flavours.

And on the subject of pickled food, Oliver insists that if you wish to avoid an unpleasant clash of acids, pickled foods are always far better matched with beer than wine.

Oliver reckons dense, sticky goat cheeses require a highly carbonated beer. Tart, light-bodied and modestly hopped, spritzy German wheat beers do a great job of cleansing the palate between mouthfuls. Yeasty hefeweizens from Kiwi breweries such as Zeelandt, Croucher and Tuatara are equally impressive.

With their chocolate, coffee, charred and other dry, roasted malt flavours, big stouts and porters can also handle the complexity of a tangy, well aged cheddar or a sharp, blue vein cheese. 8 Wired istout, Wigram Czar Imperial Stout, Sparks Outlander Extra Stout and Three Boys Porter are just a few Kiwi beers that will work wonderfully with either of these styles of cheese.

But perhaps the ultimate marriage made in beer heaven is achieved by the pairing of a creamy blue vein cheese with an English style strong ale or barley wine. The London brewer Fuller’s 1845 Vintage Ale is a fantastic partner for a Stilton or similarly tangy blue cheese, but so too is a five-year-old bottle of Renaissance Tribute Barley Wine, from the award-winning Blenheim brewery.

As Oliver concludes, when Stilton meets barley wine the harmony of flavours is nothing short of astonishing. ‘‘A great barley wine just wraps around those flavours, caresses them with its sweetness, then subsumes them into its profoundly deep malt flavours, a riot of fruit, sherry, baking bread, and earth. Absolutely stunning – the perfect end to a great meal.’’

Cheers!