FABPOW! Orval and Orval Cheese

I have this theory; it’s simple and it’s yet to be proved wrong: Orval is the perfect food beer. It’s got enough body to support even the richest foods, yet it’s still remarkably light; it’s got enough alcohol to power through strong flavours without demolishing them; it has a savoury depth to it which aligns it towards the dinner table; it has a bite of hops at the end which is peppery and palate cleansing without leaving an over-bitter taste; and it has that little hint of sourness, a suggestion of lemon, which adds a great lift to any combo. Those beer-superpowers mean that Orval can work with almost anything.

I’ve FABPOW’d it before with a paella, which is one of my summer favourites, but with the Orval cheese it was something altogether more delicious.

Weakened by after-effects of the day before but slowly being restored to full vitality by the power-up qualities of a few more beers, we arrive at North Bar, Leeds, on Orval Day (everyday should be Orval Day). We order a bottle each and some bread and cheese. My aged Orval was bottled on my 25^th birthday so I got all giddy with the excitement of seeing my birthday written down on something I love (why does this happen? Even seeing my birthday as the best before date on a pack of biscuits is enough to make me buy them, even if I don’t want them). We try a side-by-side with the young and old, the young being bottled in August, and the difference is astonishing; I’d never had a bottle as young as the comparator but it was completely different, lacking the peppery bite and missing that unique spritz of lemony brett – I’ll stick to mine being about a year old. Then the cheese arrived next to a huge hunk of very fresh bread, the sort that rustles and crunches as you break it, depositing its crust over your lap. The cheese is creamy and mild but packs an enormous depth of flavour. A mouthful of that followed by one of the beer and it was like the two were hugging on the tongue at the joy of being reunited; something about the two together just worked unequivocally, both with their depth of flavour, the bite in the beer tempered by the richness of the cheese, the boost of the dry hop and the lift of the wild yeast lifting the flavour off the tongue and getting it ready for another greedy mouthful.

I might have been hungover, I might have still been drunk, I might have been over-excited because of the birthday bottling, I might have just been really hungry, I might have been swayed by the sight of everyone in the bar drinking from the bowling pin-shaped bottles, but that was a seriously good lunch. If you can find Orval cheese then buy it and eat it with a bottle of Orval – delicious!

Beer and cheese is regularly talked about with so many great pairings, but this was a new one to me – anyone had any new and brilliant (or terrible – give us a warning so we don’t make the same mistake!) cheese and beer moments?

Welsh Rarebit

I have no idea how I lasted so long without making Welsh Rarebit - it’s delicious! Struck with no inspiration for lunch but having a kitchen filled with all the important ingredients, last weekend became the perfect opportunity to try it out. Plus - you know me - I like to play around with beer and food and this is one of the more famous recipes to use beer as an ingredient.

It’s easy to make. Butter and flour plus milk to make a basic, but thick, white sauce. Add mustard, Worcestershire sauce, strong cheese and a splash of beer (I used Guinness as I had a bottle in the cupboard), stir until smooth with a texture that’s spoonable but not too runny. Then toast one side of bread, flip it over, put the cheese topping on and grill until bubbling but not burnt.

It’s like the most luxurious cheese on toast you’ve ever had. And it goes great with beer too. I suggest a malty brown ale to go in the sauce, although Guinness was also good. To pair with Welsh Rarebit I’d like a hoppy brown ale to match the cheese, the toast and the punch of heat from the mustard.

Goaty

This is not a proper blog post.

Well, it kind of is, but there's not much substance to it... It's more of a test, since I just found that I can upload blogs via email from my blackberry.

The picture was part of my dinner last night and it was bloody lovely. Cantillon Gueuze with goats' cheese is a fantastic pairing because there is a similar 'goaty' character in both; the lemony sharpness and creamy-sharp cheese match perfectly; the savoury depth of the beer and the fizz hit the bottom and top notes. Fantastic.

Now I hope this email blogging thing works... Imagine the possibilities!

Beer and Food Night at Pete's

Last weekend I went down to Pete’s for dinner and to open a few bottles of beer. He knocked up wicked array of food and he’s written about the dinner on his blog, so I won’t go into the food stuff other than to say this: Pete is a bloody good cook and his dessert was flipping fantastic (the dessert recipe is on his blog post). As he covered the food side, I’ll get the beers stuff down. We started in the best possible way: a bottle of Punk IPA to ease us in. Then came an Boon Oude Kriek, all light and blush and sweet and sour with cherries and an air of a cool summer breeze brushing against a clean t-shirt standing out in the countryside. It was a great pre-dinner drink. We had a Rother Valley Boadicea Pale Ale which was pretty average, kind of citrusy. Then we stepped up a bit and opened a De Dolle Extra Stout. It looks like coca-cola with a frothy head, it smells of coffee, chocolate, smoke and spice. It’s got a great balance to it, an elegant lightness, an earthy hop finish. We enjoyed this one a lot. With the main of sausage stew we had Hopdaemon’s Leviathan, a 6% ruby-coloured strong ale which is very sweet and malty with dark, roasted fruit. It worked well with the dinner (it was a ‘let’s just open this one!’) but for me it was just a little too cloying on it’s own – an earthy porter would’ve been a great match. Hopdaemon’s Skrimshander IPA, on the other hand, is a superb beer. It was here that we opened the star beer of the night: Gadds’ Ancestors. A 9% whisky-barrel aged porter. I really enjoy BrewDog’s Paradox Smokehead for it’s earthy-salty-phenolic quality, but I thought the Gadds’ was even better than that. Smoke, a phenolic, medicinal note and dark chocolate all lavishing around the glass. In the mouth it’s so smooth and clean, so chocolatey and smoky and rich but at the same time elegantly subtle with just the faintest hints of some berry sourness that worked oh-so well. Bloody good. I only wish I’d bought a few more (although, as of this weekend beermerchants are now stocking a few Ramsgate beers - there's a blog post here too). Then dessert and the star pairing: cherry beer with a dark chocolate and sour cherry pot. So simple, so delicious and just perfect pairing. The cherry beer was just the usual red-paper-wrapped one from the supermarket but it was ideal, mixing with the heavy roast bitterness in the pudding and catching onto the pockets of sour cherry. A ballet of fruity and bitter-sweet with roasty and dark. Also with dessert we opened a BrewDog Longrow which is all smoke, cherry and chocolate and fantastic. The beer is totally excellent but it didn’t work as a pairing this time, which just meant that we finished the bottle after dessert with blue cheese - yay! We opened a Cooper’s Pale Ale at one point but I barely had any before throwing it down the sink – I didn’t think much of that one! There was a BrewDog Hardcore IPA to go with the strong cheddar and this was a good match, although maybe slightly overpowered by the brash hops. An Anchor Steam beer also popped up, a classic. And then I had to leave for the train (with bottles left unopened!) home and I was absolutely stuffed. I do love nights of eating good food and drinking good beer just for the sheer hell of it.

FAB POW! Thornbridge Halcyon with Extra Mature Cheddar

Here we go. A hip new serial feature for Pencil&Spoon which was dreamt up yesterday while I was having a run. FAB POW! The Food and Beer Pairing of the Week!

Simple really, I just say a great pairing that I’ve had and you can tell me any cool ones that you’ve had. We can share the wealth of eating and drinking under a nicely onomatopoeic title that makes it sound camply cool like a comic book superhero fighting the bad guy (in fact it sort of is like a superhero and his sidekick, beer and food I mean, fighing together to save the world).

I’m starting with a themed choice as today I am going up to Thornbridge Brewery for the day (I'll be on the train when this auto-posts itself at 9a.m). FAB POW! Thornbridge Halcyon with Extra Mature Cheddar. The beer's a 7.7% IPA and it’s got that essential feature of the heavily-hopped beer: it drives you crazy wanting more. It’s a rollercoaster of sweetness and bitterness, one follows the other in a vicious circle, and it’s addictive. The caramel base lies beneath the citrusy fruit smack. Put this up against the kind of cheese which makes you wince with its strength (you know the one, it makes you mouth pucker) and you get a heavenly match. The cheese fills your mouth and the beer flows over it, mixing on your palate, lifting it up and away in different directions; tangy, sweet, salty, sharp, bitter, more sweet. And it’s BIG. It’s uncompromising. But it’s brilliant. The beer is fruitier and the cheese creamier. And don’t just take my word for it, here is what Kelly Ryan from Thornbridge says. And if you want the beer then Beermerchants are selling it. It’s one of the very best IPAs you can buy in the UK (Beermerchants have also got Bracia and Jaipur which are stunners). There it is. FAB POW! done. Anyone had anything good recently? I wanna know!

Beer and Cheese 1: Dorothy Goodbody’s Wholesome Stout

Today comes the first of a series of beer and cheese pairings to try different beers with a range of different cheeses to see what works with what. The possibilities are endless.

Today’s, the first, takes CAMRA’s choice for the 2008 Bottled Beer of the Year: Dorothy Goodbody’s Wholesome Stout from Wye Valley Brewery. It’s a 4.6% stout and very good indeed. It’s smooth, gluggable, full of fantastic roasted grain flavours, chocolate and coffee with a lingering dry hoppy finish.

It’s got a really cool logo with the voluptuous pin-up of Dorothy draped across it. The beer itself is pretty sexy too; dark, enticing, complex and full of flavour. The bottle says it’s good with cheeses, but doesn’t mention specifics, so this little impromptu tasting was to see how it worked with a few cheeses that I had in the fridge. I hadn’t tried the beer out of the bottle and I hadn’t tried it with any of the cheeses before I recorded it, so it was all off the cuff.

The Brie was creamy and mild but the beer did nothing to enhance the flavours, and what you most want is for the match of cheese and beer to lift off into a new direction, not lie flaccid and flat and skirt around each other awkwardly.

The sharp, creamy goats’ cheese was much better: the cheese is full of goaty punch and the beer sweeps in and lifts the palate with plenty of sweetness while the cheese still lingers throughout. This was a surprisingly good match.

The mature cheddar was Black Bomber from Snowdonia Cheese Company, and it’s fantastically strong, tangy and rich. The match was okay but not great; the cheese is probably too much for the beer to handle and the beer doesn’t get its chance to shine.

The Colston Basset stilton is one of my favourite cheeses there is. It’s creamy, smooth, strong and delicious. It worked really well with the stout, softening the coffee roast flavour and bringing out the sweetness within. And eating this after, with some crackers, it was an even better combo.

The final cheese was thrown in as a Valentine’s special - a white stilton with strawberries and white chocolate. It’s almost unpalatably sweet, kind of crazy, mainly full of strawberry flavour with the mildly sharp stilton underneath. It’s interesting. But it did work fairly well with the stout. The strawberry and chocolate paired up and the cheese and the roast flavours danced around a bit.

I say in the video that the goats’ cheese works best, but when I tried them all again after it was the stilton which I enjoyed the most. The best thing about this was the actual beer itself. It’s a really great bottled stout. And while none of the matches were amazing, there were some good ones.