BELGIAN BATTLE
Beer dinner pairs ‘old’ brews with ‘new’ at O’Niell’s Pub
It’s a battle between the old and new Belgian beers with some tasty food pairings thrown in at O’Niell’s Pub in Nob Hill.
On March 20, the pub will host “A Duel Is Brewing! Old Belgium vs. New Belgium Beer Dinner.” It will feature five New Belgium Brewing Co. beers served alongside beer selections from old Belgian breweries to be compared while dining on special food pairings created for this special menu.
“These are styles that have been done for ages and ages, sometimes centuries in some cases in the Old Belgium, if you will,” Katixa M. Mercier, sales representative for Favorite Brands, which distributes the featured beers in New Mexico. “We thought how fun would it be to have a duel to kind of have the two beers be side by side so people could taste the sort of Old Belgium, the sort of original, the history, the longevity of where it came from and to see the American expression of that style.”
The dinner begins with mussels and fries served with New Belgium’s Tartastic Lemon Ginger Sour and Brouwerij de Brabandere’s Wittekerke Wild.
“What they’ve done here is that they’ve actually gone so far as to sour it,” Mercier said of Wittekerke Wild. “How they do that is they actually harvest microflora from these oak foeders and they put it in to open that spontaneous fermentation. What we’re seeing is it’s really becoming a trend in beer making. … As a result, it kind of gives this wit a sour flavor, but this real gorgeous aroma of sort of this floral and tart lemon quality.”
A Belgian endive salad follows with New Belgium Bohemian Pilsner and Brouwerij de Brabandere’s Bavik Super Pils. Next is leek and potato soup paired with New Belgium Trippel and Brouwerij Bosteels’ Tripel Karmeliet.
“Its recipe is one that comes from 1679, so a really old recipe where it was customary to brew equal parts wheat, barley and oats,” Mercier said of Tripel Karmeliet. “So you have this complexity that each grain contributes. Oats give it sort of that silky starchiness, the barley is kind of characteristic of giving it kind of full, toffee notes and wheat, of course, as it ferments can take on a number of different textures and aromas. … It has these sort of banana and vanilla top notes. It has a really mild lemon fragrance. (It) is velvety on the palate and has these gorgeous biscuit notes.”
The entree of Belgian Beef Carbonnade, which is a beef and beer stew, will be accompanied by New Belgium 1554 and Brouwerij Van Steenberge’s Gulden Draak.
“(Gulden Draak) is actually cross-classified as a wine and beer, so it’s technically a barley wine,” Mercier said. “The reason for that is that they actually have a secondary fermentation, a bottle condition that they do with wine yeast in the bottles. … They add wine yeast into it, and consequently it gives it these toffee and caramel notes, and it’s really beautiful.”
The dinner wraps up with a Belgian waffle with ice cream complemented by New Belgium Abbey and Huyghe Brewery Delirium Nocturnum.