by Steve Lonsway
When it comes to food and drink pairings, wines have seemed to dominate the conversation. But as craft beers become more available and more accepted, we sense a shift. Beer flavors are very diverse and offer a fun opportunity to find what your palette truly enjoys as it can be vastly different for every individual.
Beers, like wines, come in an array of flavors from light and refreshing to bold with full flavors. The most important thing to consider when pairing beers with food is deciding if you want the flavors to contrast each other, or complement. For instance, pairing a chocolate stout with chocolate cheesecake can work well if you’re looking for the flavors to continue. Personally, I would want it to contrast in this scenario. I would tend to lean towards a lighter lager or ale so that the beer can rinse my palette of the heavy flavors from the chocolate cheesecake. Conversely, pair a lighter dish like a summer salad of mixed greens, goat cheese and fruit with a heavy beer, and the heavy beer will just overwhelm the flavors. In this instance, I would recommend a saison, farmhouse ale, or pilsner so that the flavors of the salad continue.
You also need to consider the complexity of the dish. If there are a lot of components in the making of the dish, sometimes the beer chosen can pair with some of the components and not all. This gives you a great opportunity to try a couple of different beers to really pinpoint what you enjoy most. I find that darker beers do not go well with fish. The acidity from the fish tends to really play with the flavors of these beers. I have learned to always use lighter to amber styles that do not have a lot of hop bitterness when pairing with fish.
Carbonation also comes into play in pairings. This is the true advantage that beers have over wines in pairing events. The carbonation, or fizziness in beers, really helps to cleanse your palette, allowing for a “refresh” to occur. This is the result I get when I follow up that bite of seafood with a light lager.
My go-to pairing is a nice spicy dish (think chicken tikka masala) with a highly hopped pale ale. The bitterness from the hops really enhances the spiciness of the dish, which makes you crave it more and more. Another guilty favorite of mine is a nice medium-rare grilled steak paired with an aggressive porter or oatmeal stout or even better, a smoked beer. Stone Arch’s Scottish Ale is a really good food pairing beer. Because there are low hops, and thus low bitterness, it really complements a lot of dishes. It also has a slight malt sweetness and a faint smokiness in the finish which really allows it to pair well with a lot of different flavor profiles.
Have fun in your adventures of pairings. The results are fascinating!
This article was originally published in the July 2025 issue of Appleton Monthly Magazine.
