It’s no secret that wine and cheese make a delicious couple, but did you know that beer and cheese pair just as well — if not better?
Just as beers range from bitter to spicy to creamy, so do cheeses — and there’s a beer out there for your favorite slice or cheesy cooked dish.
Generally the more pungent a cheese, the stronger of a beer you’ll want to pair it with, while sharper cheeses work best with bitter beers such as IPAs and pale ales.
If you’d prefer to try out different pairings before committing to an entire block of cheese, there are some great places around town that serve specialty beers and cheeses, such as Trappeze and Aromas.
Duck-Rabbit Milk Stout (5.7 percent ABV)— Darker beers work well with creamy cheeses, both sweet and pungent. However, the strong flavors of stouts and porters can easily overwhelm a cheese, so it’s best to find one with similar flavors, such as mild cheddars with nutty browns and soft, smokey cheeses with smoked beers.
Duck-Rabbit Milk Stout
This brew is a lighter-bodied stout in the likes of Guinness, and has malty flavors of semi-sweet chocolate and coffee. It’s also low on carbonation and bitterness, which better lends it to soft, creamier cheeses with similar mouth-feels.
Moylan’s Hopsickle Imperial Ale (9.2 percent ABV) — Savory cheeses such as Parmesan, Romano, sharp and extra sharp Cheddar practically beg to be washed down with a splash of hops.
Hopsickle boasts a triply-hoppy imperial ale that’s perfect for the job: It has a good amount of both bittering and flavoring hops that work well with the sharpness of the cheese. And with a sweet, thick feel to it, it also wonderfully complements the dry, crumbly body of aforementioned cheeses.
If you’re a fan of hops, this brew is simply delicious: its piney flavor, hoppy bitterness and alcoholic bite are well balanced and yield one very tasty ale.
Sweetwater Fresh Sticky Nugs (8 percent ABV) — Though it’s classified as a red ale, Nugs’ bitter, hoppy profile works well with sharp cheeses like those suggested for pale ales and IPAs, but has a wide range of appropriate pairings.
Other possibilities include Parmesan, Gouda and Monterey Jack — whose spicy peppers work especially well with the beer’s fresh green taste.
Like Hopsickle, it’s loaded with hops — which is to be expected from a label riddled with a pothead marketing team’s clever nugget references —but they mostly contribute flavor rather than bitterness.
Overall, it’s one of my favorites from the Dank Tank series, which has explored ambitious recipes ranging from Barleywine to Quadruples.