Boozeflash Beer Club at Lounge Bar & Grill
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Boozeflash: Beer Club at Lounge Bar & Grill
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Beer and food matching events are, apparently, all the rage over in the US. As the craft brewing (essentially small scale, quality brewers making a range of interesting and often quite experimental beers) revolution moves with haste over the Atlantic, chefs and brewers have been keen to pair food and beer like many would food and wine.
The folks at Cross Keys and North Bar have already held events with two US breweries - Flying Dog and Sierra Nevada - and now Lounge Bar & Grill are setting up a monthly tasting event. But rather than focus on the work of one brewery, Lounge are going to take a different type of beer (lager, ale, stout, porter) and find five of the same style, but different enough in taste to pair with five courses.
Their first ever event features lagers from around the world, alongside a sumptuous five course meal. Now, the only problem with lagers from around the world is that a lot of lagers are very, very similar indeed. And many of them are pretty bland. This proved to be something of an issue for the evening. The event started off with some great canapés (meat balls, mackerel crostini and seafood chowder) but the matching beer - an American lager called Pabst Blue Ribbon - was merely a light, refreshing lager with little in the way of taste and no real hop bitterness. It does, however, gain bonus points for being the original beer Homer Simpson drank before he moved onto Duff.
Things really picked up with the starter of scallops and sweet potato pizza (less a pizza, more a crisp dough bass with scallop and sweet potato on top). While the dish was great, the pairing of beer was even better. The lager was an Australian called Bluebottle, which was designed to go with seafood and really worked, thanks to its floral, perfumed nose and a slightly spiced palate of clove, cinnamon, cardamom, marzipan, almond and citrus - a pretty exciting beer.
In between each course, a representative from the beer supplier for the evening, Kato Enterprises, talked through what he’d picked and why they were paired. While his talk rarely went into the details that true beer geeks would appreciate, he was humorous and made the complex art of beer seem simple to those with only a fleeting interest.
The biggest problem with the lagers came during the main course - a divine duo of slow cooked belly pork with bratwurst and sauerkraut and pork tenderloin with a warm potato salad. The lagers paired with them - Memmiger premium from Germany and Windhoek from Namibia - were both traditional German-style lagers, brewed under the German Purity Law (which restricts the content of the beer to just water, hops, malt and yeast), which means that they’re both pure and crisp, but lack any distinctive flavour and are more-or-less interchangeable.
The final course again showed the pitfalls of pairing lager with a whole meal. The dessert of glazed lemon tart with goats cheese cream was, again, glorious, but the pairing with the classic Vedett lager, from Belgium, just did not work at all. While you could see the theory behind the idea (the coriander and dried orange peel in Vedett should lend itself to a sweet), in reality, the bitter hop flavours just clashed with the rest of the dish. Leaving the paired drink and dish best enjoyed apart.
The slight issues with the beers are, hopefully, just teething problems for what was the first ever Beer Club that the Lounge Bar & Grill have run. We’ll almost certainly be back at the next one with, hopefully, a more varied array of beers to taste.
The next Beer Club is on 19 January 2010 at Lounge Bar & Grill, St Johns House, Merrion Street, LS2 8JE, 0113 244 4234, http://www.loungebarandgrill.com
Posted on Monday 16th November 2009
TG
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