Beer needs to be taken seriously by sommeliers - and it also needs to stop blaming wine for its problems. By Hamish Anderson

This issue I have decided to move away from wine and discuss a liquid close to any sommelier’s heart (particularly after a hard day’s tasting): beer. Consumption is falling and it still has a serious image problem; lager is full of chemicals and makes you fat and violent, while real ale drinkers are overweight beardies. Wine, by contrast, is seen as good for you, sophisticated and downright cool.

It’s puzzling. Beer does not make you fat, and five large buckets (sorry, 250ml glasses) of Pinot Grigio in the pub are just as likely to make you a violent drunk as an ocean of strong continental lager.

For me, beer is part of our national heritage, even if we have done our utmost over the last 30 years to destroy it. But its fortunes, happily, could be about to change. Indeed, there is a case for saying that beer is the new wine, with sommeliers squarely in the sights of those trying to revitalise it.

Imbibe runs regular features on beer and even Decanter has seen fit to cover it. It is not uncommon to find a page of artisan beers tucked into the front of a good wine list, and I would suggest that if you don’t have one, then you are missing a trick.

Industry luminaries such as Michel Roux have been recruited to the cause, while beer and food matching – limited a few years ago to the likes of Guinness with oysters or bitter and ploughman’s – is slowly starting to take off. The Michelin-starred Quilon in London, for instance, now offers a beer and food matching menu.

This is not to say that I am about to rip up my wine lists and fill the Tate’s cellars with beer – far from it. But I see no reason why the two can’t co-exist. If you are interested in good food, wine and spirits, why not also beer? It is natural that the country’s proper dining establishments should be championing it.

If you are interested in

food, wine and spirits,

why not also beer?

Interestingly, this was not the message I got when I attended a course run by the Beer Academy recently. The underlying message was very much that wine drinkers were to blame for the parlous state in which beer finds itself.

Graphs were produced to show that wine may contain more calories than beer – a tenuous comparison to make as the calorific content is mostly the alcohol, and the abv of beer and wine varies hugely.

The food and beer matching session was interesting, and inspired some ideas that I can use in our various restaurants. However, we were informed that there was a greater variety of beer styles than wine (rubbish) and at one point, as we tasted a piece of smoked salmon (delicious with a highly hopped IPA), it was announced that it was nigh on impossible to find a wine to match with it.

What actually shocked most was the lightweight content of the course and the level of knowledge among some of my colleagues. Run twice a year in London (compare this with the number of people passing the WSET’s advanced certificate), the course drew only eight attendees.

Our number included the assistant manager from the White Horse pub in Parsons Green, and I found myself in awe of his knowledge. From Leeds, he was the Gérard Basset of the beer world – both passionate and articulate. Frankly, he ought to have been employed on the spot to travel around the country banging the beer drum.

At the other end of the spectrum was someone who put together the list of drinks for one of the largest national pub groups. Yet he knew less about beer than me and certainly had less enthusiasm.

It was eye-opening stuff and highlights how lucky we are to have organisations like the Food and Wine Academy or the WSET providing training and passion.
Beer needs to stop blaming its ills on wine, and find some energy, passion and commitment of its own.

Editorial feature from Imbibe Magazine - November / December 2009

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