The Brews Brothers

It’s 106 miles to Burton-on-Trent, you’ve got a restaurant full of customers, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and you’ve got branded glassware. Beer and food matching? Hit it, says Martyn Cornell…

Could you persuade your customers to stump up £75 a head to drink beer for an evening? You could if your name was Nathan Outlaw. Cornwall’s latest superstar chef put on two sold-out ‘beer and food masterclass’ events at his Seafood and Grill restaurant in Rock, near Wadebridge, in October. Each dish on the five-course ‘taster’ menu was matched with a beer from the local Sharp’s Brewery.
Outlaw is just one of a growing number of classically trained chefs to discover that beer – proper, artisanally brewed beer, made with love, care and attention – offers just as many tremendous taste pairings with food as wine does.

Supremely versatile
Indeed, beer supporters argue that not only can beer, with its often caramelly, roasty, sometimes tannic flavours, match wine as an accompaniment to dishes such as grilled meats, it will go where no wine dares to go, partnering extra-spicy dishes and desserts such as chocolate or even ice-cream, with which a good coffee-flavoured stout can make an ideal match.

And, perhaps just as importantly, offering a good beer menu while the restaurant down the road has just two or three almost identical Euro-lagers can give you a USP that could help bring in extra custom in these cash-strapped times.

Certainly, Outlaw will be repeating his two successful beer-and-food events next year, according to Ian Dodgson, operations manager for the restaurant at Outlaw’s base, the St Enodoc Hotel. He will also be keeping some of the dishes from the tasting on the regular menu. Those dishes include local mussels with the Sharp’s Brewery’s cardamom wheat beer; Cornish duck leg with Honey Spice Triple, a honeyed wheat beer; local Porthilly beef and oyster pie cooked with Seafood Stout; and chocolate fudge cake with St Enodoc Double, a variation on the Belgian Trappist style of beer.

It was, Dodgson says, ‘very successful – people weren’t entirely sure what to expect, but they went away very surprised. The idea was to persuade them to order beer for flavour, as you do with wine, to use it as a proper accompaniment to the food, not just a drink.’

‘Well-matched beers enhance the

dining experience as well as, if not

better than, wine’ Nathan Outlaw

The success of the evening didn’t just depend on Outlaw’s cooking skills, of course: ‘You’ve got to get the beer supplier right,’ says Dodgson. Outlaw’s St Enodoc operation is lucky to have Stuart Howe, head brewer at Sharp’s, as a neighbour. The brewery, founded in 1994, has already co-operated with another Cornish cooking superstar, Rick Stein, in creating two beers specifically designed to accompany food: Chalky’s Bite (flavoured with fennel seed) and Chalky’s Bark, both named after Stein’s late dog, which have been so successful they are now available on the shelves of supermarkets around Britain.

To call Howe a passionate beery experimenter would be to underplay his inventiveness: among his recent creations is Heston Ale (named, he insists, after the M4 motorway service station), which included offal in the brew.

Howe has strong views on beer and food matching. He says, ‘I do think the beer world should try to get away from the “try something new and different” beer and food approach and just talk about compatible flavours. As soon as you talk about beer and food being unusual partners, you’re entering into short-term gimmick territory.’

Of the tasting events with Outlaw he says, ‘My approach to events like this is to let the flavours do the talking and show enthusiasm while letting diners discover the beauty of beer and food for themselves. Well-matched beers enhance the dining experience as well as, if not better than, wine. Some people are closed-minded and will never accept anything other than wine and food. If you spend your time verbally bludgeoning this lot into accepting the concept, you risk alienating those willing to embrace it.’

Howe also cautions against using food-and-beer promotions just to shift product, ‘For every step forward beer takes with a well-thought-out beer and gastronomy event, it takes 10 back when someone recommends serving a pint of commodity pilsner or session bitter with food in a misguided attempt to sell more beer.’

At the Old Brewery restaurant in the Old Royal Naval College by the River Thames in Greenwich, London, however, beer and food have been central to the offer from the first day it opened last year. The restaurant, as its name suggests, has a microbrewery at its heart, which reproduces the brewing that would have gone on at the site when it was still a hospital for the Royal Navy and the sick sailors needed their pints of porter every day.

The restaurant is run by Meantime, which owns a much larger brewery elsewhere in Greenwich. Its head chef, Daniel Doherty, was classically trained in the French tradition, with an emphasis on wine with food, before he was headhunted by Meantime’s boss, Alastair Hook.

New departure
‘It had never crossed my mind before to use beer with cooking,’ says Doherty, ‘but when Meantime approached me about the job, Alastair opened my mind to it. He was so enthusiastic about the whole idea.’ The restaurant’s menu includes dishes such as rump of mutton marinated in Hospital Porter (brewed on site) with black pudding and celeriac in a liquorice reduction, pork terrine and crispy pig’s ear with apple sauce – which ‘goes terrifically well with Meantime Wheat beer; we discovered that by accident,’ says Doherty – and lemon tart with Kent hop meringue.

Doherty talks with the brewers about fresh ideas – ‘they made a strawberry beer in the summer, and the kitchen made a strawberry terrine with it; it was summer, strawberries were around and we thought, “everybody likes to eat strawberries in the summer”’ – and is planning a tasting menu with six or seven dishes cooked with beer ‘just to show what can be done’.

‘It’s not enough to offer a lot of “me-too”

indentikit lagers, even if they are

from far-flung countries’ Zak Avery

When you walk into the restaurant ‘there’s a brewery there, there’s beer on the menu, the walls are decorated with a timeline of beer, but we still have a well-thought-out wine list and we don’t ram the beer angle down people’s throats,’ Doherty says. All the same, ‘we recommend a beer with every dish on the whole menu – whatever beer works best with that dish, be it a Meantime beer or not.’ Beer, Doherty says, ‘is very affordable – an excellent beer costs much less than an excellent wine – and it’s more drinkable. You can have a [75cl] bottle of porter, you couldn’t drink a whole bottle of wine.’

Not every chef can have a brewery close by, like Outlaw, or on the premises, like Doherty (although with more than 700 small breweries now open in the UK, there is likely to be one very near you). There are, however, plenty of experts available to give advice to any restaurant wanting to expand its beer offering.

One is Zak Avery, owner of TheBeerBoy, a beer, wine and whisky event-planning consultancy based in Leeds. He says: ‘The key to getting it right is understanding what you’re doing. It’s not enough to offer a lot of “me-too” identikit lagers, even if they are from far-flung countries. Offering a spread of styles and flavours is the goal, and you could easily do that by concentrating on just one country. The UK has a great diversity of beer styles, as does the US. Their beers are easy to enjoy, but can also offer a lot of complexity.

‘Find a supplier who knows what it is talking about, and understands how food and beer go together. Sit down with your staff and have a beer and food tasting – they are going to be selling the beers for you so it’s important that they understand the idea too,’ says Avery.

Don’t be shy
‘If in doubt, get some serious professional advice – buy a book. The Brewmaster’s Table by Garrett Oliver (£9.99, Harper-Collins), head brewer at Brooklyn Brewery in New York, is considered to be the definitive book on beer and food matching, and a pretty good beer reference book in its own right, although there are plenty of other decent food and beer matching books available.’

One company keen to offer advice and practical help is Different World Drinks, a subsidiary of the brewing giant Molson Coors. DWD’s Gary Corrin says, ‘We supply a range of training that we can tailor to the needs of any outlet – anything from a 15-minute tasting session to a full-day masterclass and brewing session.

‘Beer and food training is better in a more in-depth session, as it’s important to build a good understanding of beer flavour before building food matching in. But, even in a short session, we will try to pre-arrange some canapés from their menu or bring simple foods such as chocolate or cheese to demonstrate how versatile beer can be. Even the most dismissive people never fail to have that “penny drop moment” when you start to open their eyes.’

‘An excellent beer costs much less

than an excellent wine and you can

drink a whole bottle’ Daniel Doherty

As with any new concept, training is key. Front-line staff, says Corrin, ‘need to be able to talk about flavour and provenance in the same way as they can about wine or spirits, so it’s vital to take the time to bring the category to life for them. At DWD we have run beer masterclasses, sampling evenings and tutored tastings for staff and customers, which have given outlets a platform to grow a new passion and confidence to give customers a more informed choice on selecting their beer.

‘We’re often asked to help host beer and food events for customers who have spotted the opportunity to do something a little different and add incremental revenue to their venue on days that would normally be less busy. Local brewers and good suppliers jump at the opportunity to support these events, so the best tip is to seek these out and work in partnership with them,’ says Corrin.

‘We are putting together a wine versus beer event with a leading UK sommelier where the paying diners will decide the better-matched menu of a six-course dinner served with wine and with beer. It’s in its infancy at the moment but we hope to do more around the country with a view to opening up a few people’s eyes!’

Editorial feature from Imbibe Magazine – January/February 2011

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