Better Beers for Dessert

My grandmother Sadie, born around 1910, was a famously bad cook. I assume most mothers in Butler, Oklahoma in the 1910s and ‘20s taught their daughters how to cook, but for reasons I never learned, it didn’t take with my grandma. Thirty years later, now relocated to the bountiful land of Oregon, Sadie gave birth to her second daughter, who received the same culinary education she had. By the time her daughter gave birth to me in the late 1960s, she was trying to work her way up a corporate ladder that lacked rungs for women, and had no time for cooking. (She remarried when I was in college, and told her new husband she would marry him on the condition he never expected her to cook for him. He agreed.) I was raised on bad 70s food, and “home-cooked meal” are three words that for decades struck dread in my heart. Needless to say, I carry on the family tradition of cooking badly.

I mention all of this to explain why I don’t write about food and beer pairings. While my aesthetic sense of flavor is good, I rarely have any idea which ingredients or processes went into the meal I’m eating. I try to avoid swimming into waters deep enough to drown me. Nevertheless, I was invited to attend an unusual event at one of Portland’s best restaurants, Le Pigeon, where the food was paired with Athletic’s non-alcoholic beers. I didn’t expect to be able to write much about it (and told Athletic as much when they invited me), yet to my surprise, the final course delivered an epiphany.

Non-alcoholic beer is good, but in that 1990s sense that faux-meat was good—it tastes fine, but not like the genuine article. Brewers haven’t yet figured out how to make it pass for regular beer, but drinkers no longer have to choke down the horrible concoctions offered to an earlier generation. Many companies make N/A beer now, but Athletic is doing it as well or better than anyone. You may not be fooled by them, but they’re tasty on their own merits. Of the line, their golden, Upside Dawn, is especially delicate and well-made. (We interviewed Athletic on episode 61 of the pod.)

Still, while the pairings were good and the food exceptional, I couldn’t help but wonder how the dishes would present with an equivalent regular beer—until we got to dessert. Over the years, I’ve been to a number of beer dinners, and the final pairing was typical: a chocolate tuyau (“tube”) of chocolate, filled with chocolate pudding, drizzled with melted chocolate, and garnished with dried strawberries, paired with All Out Stout.

Beer dinners typically finish with a big finale, so many of the pairings I’ve encountered, stout gets employed for similar tasks is strong and intense, matching decadence with decadence. Yet a chocolate confection and 8% stout is over the top. It’s sort of like serving a tumbler of melted 70% Guatemalan chocolate with the dessert. Superficially, they work together, but the effect is excessive. The pastry chef has already turned the dial to 10; adding more always produces less.

But the All Out was not a regular stout. It had a much thinner body, and the roasty notes weren’t buffered by residual sugar. They were nakedly sharp, featuring an acidic undertone. Before I’d coated my tongue in unctuous layers of fat and sugar, it seemed too thin for a stout (though nice as a dark beer), and had a slight worty scent. But once I’d had a bite of chocolate, the pairing was transformed in that alchemy that the rare pairing produce. The thin body didn’t compete with the dessert and allowed the malts to blossom on the tongue. I discovered bread and nuts, and the wort scent vanished. The beer’s acid did exactly what the strawberries were added to accomplish—cutting through the sugar and fat. The flavors of both liquid and solids enhanced each other without competing, and the sum was greater than the parts.

I’m not sure what this says about non-alcoholic beer specifically, but it definitely says a lot about pairing more generally. Don’t overwhelm the food! Through 80% of the meal, I wondered what alcoholic beer might bring to the table. But the final pairing made me wonder about the potential of non-alcoholic beer, and whether it has a unique place at the table alcoholic beer can’t match.

In the window of opportunity Elon Musk offers to envision a post-Twitter world, I invite you to leave comments and reflections here as was the way in the old days before social media. What are your thoughts about beer and food pairings?