Sometimes you need a beer – nothing else will do. Circumstance has something to do with it – you can’t spend a stag do knocking back glasses of Liebfraumilch, and there’s no point wandering around Munich’s Oktoberfest with a tumbler of 21-year-old single malt. Weather plays a part too – on a really hot day the only alcohol I can stomach is ice cold beer (preferably in an ice cold glass), and after a miserably wet December day the only drink I want when it’s pitch black outside at 3 o’clock is a decent pint of British ale. Fortunately, for this column, food plays a pretty important role too.

Last time around I promised you beer matches and stickability – something you could use to build a conversation with your customers, so this month I’m going to focus on food that I think just goes better with beer – meaty pies and stews. Although red wine does a great job with a lot of these dishes, I think this is where beer really comes into its own and I want to encourage you to proudly match British food with the national drink.

More than ever restaurants and customers are coming round to the idea of rediscovering their cultural identity through sourcing and eating food and drink produced in this country. It is impossible to overestimate how important eating locally produced food is – our wellbeing, climate, common wealth and sense of self are all intrinsically wrapped up in what we eat.

Beer drinking has been part of the fabric of life in this country for a couple of thousand years. Unlike wine, which was the drink of toffs and foreigners, beer (which for the majority of those 2,000 years meant ale) was the drink of the working poor. For a long time it was safer, and therefore more popular, than water, and for a while we, as a nation, averaged almost four pints a day for every man, woman and child; with beer providing up to a fifth of the total energy in our diet.

There are plenty of hearty British dishes that I could have listed opposite, and dipping into a range of old cook books will help you source many more. As a broad tip if you want to go in for matching beer then to really enhance the match it’s worth using the beer in the recipe wherever possible. Cooking with beer is very different to cooking with wine, so here are a few tips to remember if you decide to go down that route.

The first thing to remember is that bitterness is a prominent flavour in beer, which means that using beer as the sole base for a stew or a sauce (which is perfectly plausible for wine) can result in too bitter a flavour. Likewise, if you’re using beer in a sauce or gravy don’t make it more than one third to a half of the total liquid (depending on the bitterness of the beer).

As well as having more bitterness, beer generally lacks the acidity of wine, so you are likely to need to adjust the seasoning more carefully and you should ensure that your chefs are tasting all the time (something they should be doing anyway).

Finally, if you’re marinating meat in beer you shouldn’t leave it for longer than a couple of hours. You’ll get all the benefit of the beer flavour in that time, but leave it any longer and the enzymatic activity can be so vigorous that the meat can go off.

So what follows is a selection of some beloved British dishes and beer suggestions that might go well with them, plus a few vague recipes that would work remarkably well with beer if you’re looking to put something a little bit fancier on your menu.