I admit it was a long way to go for dinner.

From Umeå in northern Sweden to Helsingborg on the country’s south west coast it was 1146km to be exact. Bored while boarding I calculated that if I had flown due west instead of south I’d have got halfway to that volcano.

Looking at it another way (I was, after all, really bored) if I had started my journey in Helsingborg and travelled south I could have sipped champagne in Champagne or downed a pint of London Porter in London.

But these are the sorts of irrational things a beer fanatic like me is prepared to do, particularly when something of a brewing rock star comes to town.

Garrett Oliver is possibly the most recognisable face in the international craft beer scene. Not only is he the Head Brewer at Brooklyn Brewery in New York and the man responsible for craft classics such as Brooklyn Lager and Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout but he’s also the author of THE book on beer and food, “The Brewmaster’s Table”.

What Mr O doesn’t know about combining food and beer probably isn’t worth knowing. His book is essential reading.

He was in town to attend the Danish Beer Festival the following day. When I first met him an hour before the starters were served he was mildly fuming after discovering two of his headline beers hadn’t made it over the pond because of transportation problems caused by, you guessed it, that volcano.

The menu designed by Mr Oliver.

But being the consummate professional he is Mr O made some last minute adjustments to the menu and 65 people sat down for a master class in beer and food pairings at the stylish Gastro Restaurant in Helsingborg.

Here’s what we ate (and just as importantly drank).

Starter

Tartar of lightly smoked halibut, cream of garlic leaves, white asparagus, raw prawns and quails egg.

To this course we drank Brooklyn Sorachi Ace (that is so new they hadn’t even had time to label the bottles) and Brooklyn Local 1.

For me the winner here was the Sorachi Ace, a beer that’s named after a new Japanese hop variety and that bursts with citrusy lemon flavours. This saison style beer had a nice mineral quality to it and was delicate enough to work with the different flavours in the starter without overpowering them.

Main Course

Herb-crusted fillet of lamb, fresh potatoes infused with tarragon and vinegar, spinach, tip morels, nettles and lamb sauce.

To this we drank Brooklyn Local 2 and Brooklyn Brown Ale.

Now I’m a sucker for lamb and this classically prepared course was sensational. It was just crying out for a beer with some sweetness and spice and it found it best in Brooklyn Local 2, a bottle-fermented Belgium Abbey style beer that oozes boozy rum and dark sugar flavours.

Although I’m a fan of the brewery’s Brown Ale, Mr O’s caramel and roasted tribute to the beer style once popular in the north of England ran out of steam with the lamb, becoming a little thin and one-dimensional.

Dessert

Chocolate ‘fondant’ with caramelised cherries and vanilla ice cream.

Brooklyn Black Ops and Monster Barley Wine finished the meal off nicely!

To this we drank Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout 2009. Now I saw this match coming a mile away and it didn’t disappoint. BCS is one of the best beers to come out of Brooklyn and its luscious chocolate flavours combined seamlessly with this dish. Although a 10% ABV beer BCS is surprisingly ‘light’ in the mouth and had just enough fizz to handle the ice-cream. I didn’t know whether to drink it or cut straight to the chase and pour it over the dessert. Sensational stuff!

To round things off we were served two digestifs – a Brooklyn Monster Ale from 2007 and some Brooklyn Black Ops (which I reviewed not that long ago here).

The Monster Ale is truly a beast of a barely wine, all sticky brown sugar and rum—soaked fruits. The three years it had spent in the bottle had been good to it and it could have comfortably stayed there for several more years.

Happy and full up after an amazing meal.

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A sweet and alcoholic high to finish a fantastic meal on. A little later in a nearby pub I shared a beer with Garrett and asked him how he had successfully managed to convince so many people that beer was such a great companion to food. Often, according to the great man himself, better than wine.

“I tell people they need to try it. Only by experiencing the amazing combinations between beer and food for yourself can you really ‘get it’”.

(A big big beery thank you to Fredrik from Malt, Humle Jäst & Vatten for treating me to more than one stunning beer in the early hours and for letting me crash on his couch!)

Don’t get me wrong now – I like wine. I really do. I’ve had countless meals where wine has helped elevate the food to a whole new level. There’s no question wine offers us some very exciting pairing possibilities.

But it can’t do everything.

Let us for a moment try and remove the emotion surrounding the issue of whether wine or beer is better with food. After all, I’m pretty biased and I know many of my whiney winey friends are too.

With the application of cold logic that would make Mr Spock proud it is generally accepted that wine has around 400 separate compounds that contribute to its aroma.

It is also generally accepted there are around twice as many relevant substances in beer.

Beer matches more foods than wine. It's only logical.

The same 2:1 ratio applies to flavour compounds. Wine (essentially a single ingredient – grape juice) simply cannot match the myriad of flavours beer offers us because beer embraces an endless number of other ingredients, including spices, herbs, chocolate and liquorice (to name but a few).

So more smells and more flavours increases your chances of finding better matches with beer and food than wine, right? It’s just plain logic!

OK, that’s enough for starters. Let’s move on to the main course. What are the main rules for pairing beer with food?

The first rule is – there are no rules. As with anything to do with taste everything is subjective. The fun of beer and food pairing is in the doing. Only by experimenting will you find the best combinations for your palate.

Matching intensity – if you have a dish with delicate flavours and aromas you don’t want to go battering it with a heavyweight beer. Try and balance the flavour intensity of your beer with your food. For example a green leaf chicken salad would work well with a spritzy pilsner or a Belgium Wit beer whereas a slice of chocolate cake requires the malty muscle of a Belgium Trappist beer or a robust porter.

Work in harmony – there are two main schools of thought when approaching beer and food pairings – compare and contrast. I’m a compare fan, that is I like trying to find harmonising flavours in my food that are also present in my beer. An example would be the sweet malty flavour of a Dunkel beer with roast pork, where the caramelised flavours of the meat meld with the toffee notes in the beer.

Like for Like – Our senses can play tricks on us sometimes. When similar elements are in both your beer and your food they tend to balance each other out rather than build on each other. So a sweet beer with a sweet dessert actually makes both the beer and the dessert less sweet. Acidic foods with acidic beers taste less acidic and hoppy beers served with herby sauces soften each other. Try a rauchbier with a chunk of smoked meat and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Spice is nice – but only with beer! Since alcohol generally intensifies the burning sensations of spicy food wine is a poor partner to ‘hot’ cuisines. Beer on the other hand performs beautifully, picking up on the spices and helping to putting out the fire.

Think regional – if you’re eating an English shepherds pie the chances are an earthy English bitter will pair perfectly with it. A classic American hamburger isn’t complete with a zingy American Pale Ale to wash it down with. Look at what beers the locals drink when they eat – and copy them!

I hope this small ‘taste’ is enough to get you hungry for more beer and food pairings. Over the next few months I will be posting a series of pairing suggestions with beers that are available at the Systembolaget. Stayed tuned!

Beer has been enjoyed with food for thousands of years. And then suddenly, somewhere in the middle of the 20^th century, most of us simply stopped doing it.

The explosion in ‘New World’ wine was partly to blame but the rot had set in long before that. Wine successfully traded on its reputation as a symbol of culture, inviting drinkers to join its elite club for the entry fee of a bottle of Bordeaux, cleverly creating demand by limiting supply, pushing ‘terroir’ and selling ‘status’.

The beer industry on the other hand took the other path. In a rush for profits it started cannibalising itself, with the large national breweries buying up the smaller regional set-ups.

Beer's reputation as a drink to enjoy with food got lost in all the macho marketing hype.

They in turn were devoured by international brewing conglomerates who pumped out beers so bland it was easy pickings for the wine aficionados. They gleefully turned their collective noses up at beer and delighted in telling us that wine was the natural partner to good food.

They had a point.

Sure there were some countries, some beer bastions, where beer continued to be enjoyed with food.  In Britain it has always been popular to have a pint of bitter with a traditional ploughman’s pub lunch. In Belgium the combination of mussels with the zany gueuze style of beer is still a national treasure, while bratwurst with malty märzen beers is a patriotic pleasure still enjoyed by a lot of Germans.

But the majority of us believed the word on the grapevine. Beer’s relationship with food was downgraded to TV dinners while wine was served in the world’s most exclusive restaurants.

But as in most good stories it is always darkest before the dawn. When the sun rose over California in the US in the mid 70s it heralded the start of a beer revolution by a few pioneering brewers who said enough was enough.

Tired with drinking tasteless beer and watching beer’s reputation drain away they started on the long journey of reclaiming beer as a drink of real character.

Since then a new generation of craft breweries around the world have risen up, producing adventurous, creative, delicious beers that when matched with food can turn good meals into great ones. At the same time we’ve started to rediscover the pleasures of matching ‘old world’ beers with food again.

Tomorrow – I give tips on how to pair food with beer,  matching strengths, finding harmonies and comparing and contrasting flavours.

In recent years wine has become the de facto drink at the dinner table. But it wasn’t always that way.

For centuries it was beer that was the preferred tipple at the table, proudly served with food way back, in fact, before the discovery that grapes could be transformed into wine.

In many countries a man’s worth was measured by the quality of the beer he poured at his table. In northern Europe, where beer was more popular than in the warmer grape-producing regions, wine was something to be sneered at and looked down upon.

But even here wine’s reputation as the perfect partner to food began to grow. Society’s great and good hailed wine’s extraordinary ability to complement the very finest of foods, the media got caught up in the whole story and beer’s illustrious past was quickly forgotten and it found itself hastily relegated from fine dining restaurants to fast food joints.

This is how many of us imagine wine and food.

There’s no doubt the wine industry in recent decades has done a remarkable job of associating their wares with quality cuisine. Take the mantra “red wine with meat and white wine with fish”. It’s ingrained in your mind too isn’t it? Even though you’ve probably no idea how it got there. It’s been repeated so many times that it’s now become a widely accepted truth, like bad things coming in threes and the grass always being greener on the other side.

Conversely the beer industry in recent years has, by its own admission, done a pretty lousy job of telling us any different, preferring to spend its marketing millions on targeting loutish young male sports fans rather than foodies.

In all but a scant few countries beer has become the drink equivalent of sliced bread – universally available and utterly forgettable. It is now commonly chugged from cans while watching the big match and downed in burp-inducing quantities with pizzas and other fast food.

And this is what many of us eat when we drink beer.....

Beer has taken on the role of your ugly best mate. You like to spend time with beer and have fun when you’re with your other friends and their ugly best mates but you would never take him home and show him off to your parents or invite him to a dinner party.

No, no. That’s when you bring your friend wine along. Wine makes you look good you see, more sophisticated, more refined, more grown-up.

The truth is our brains have been ‘wine-washed’. We stopped questioning a long time ago whether wine actually deserved to be served with every course. We’ve just accepted that it must be right because everyone else is doing it.

However right now there are some new whispers going around the dinner table. People are starting to talk ever more loudly about a new generation of beers with characters and flavours that many wines are finding hard to match. Beer, it seems, is on everyone’s lips these days.

Coming tomorrow…..

Things get worse before they get better but beer finally starts to makes a comeback at the dinner table.

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If there’s a food and drink combination that’s more misunderstood, more just plain wrong and yet more blindly followed than wine and cheese I don’t know of it.

Wine and cheese is considered by many to be the gastronomic mating equivalent of when Brad met Angelina – a pairing so perfect that it has become food law dutifully followed by restaurants and at dinner parties around the world. I’d put money on the fact that whenever you see the cheese plate coming out you automatically look around to check where that bottle of red wine is, don’t you….

Perfectly understandable of course. We’ve been told for decades that wine – specifically red wine -  is the obvious partner to cheese. After all the Romans did it, and if it’s good enough for Julius Ceasar then it’s good enough for us, right?

Well no. No it’s not all right any more. It’s high time this particular food and drink myth was busted. The fact is that beer is a better partner to cheese than wine. That’s a bold statement to make but I’m going to tell you why.

I spent several very happy months travelling around Sweden in 2009 conducting a beer v wine dinner event with a very nice sommelier called Henrik. Before each event we would sit and talk (often rather heatedly and at great length) about food and drink. One of our favourite topics was what to serve with cheese and here rather surprisingly Henrik was prepared to raise something of a white flag.

You see that fact is that Henrik and a lot of other wine experts know the dirty secret that wine isn’t actually that good with cheese. It can however make average wines taste a little better – a trick that has allowed hotels and restaurants to flog us countless millions of bottles of crap wine for years. Cheese coats the palate and blunts the flavours of wine – even the bad flavours. It’s the great equaliser but it’s more a food marriage of convenience rather than a love affair.

If you want to experience some real ‘gastro passion’ you’ve got to be prepared to break this stupid food law and try beer instead,

Beer harmonises with cheese in a way wine simply can’t. Beer and cheese share a common ancestry, both traditionally produced on farms and both containing plenty of earthy, musty and yeasty flavours that complement each other so well. If you think wine has a historical right to cheese think again. Monks in Belgium knew of the heavenly match of cheese and beer as far back as the Middle Ages, happily consuming both in their monasteries even to this day.

Wine is a bit of a one trick pony when it comes to cheese, relying largely on the interplay between fruity sweetness and salty/sour cheese. But beer can do all that -  and much more.

The rich, nutty caramel malt flavours of beer are impossible to find in wine yet they meld effortless with the nutty flavours of many cheeses such as mature cheddars. The spice and acidity of a Belgium wit beer is a mouth-watering combo with goats cheese, cutting through the cheese’s soft body whereas red wine merely bounces off it.

And don’t even get me started on Stilton and barley wine (yes, this is a beer), where the decadent rich fruits and deep malt flavours of barley wine can take an earthy, barnyard and salty Stilton to a whole new level.

As with all food and drink pairings there are no written rules but here are some of my favourite beer and cheese matches to get you started:

Cheddar with IPA – the idea here is to match the big hoppy flavours of IPAs with the sharpness of mature cheddars.

Goats Cheese and Mozzarella with wheat beers – both these cheeses are light and fresh so the uplifting, breezy flavours of a Belgium Wit beer or German Heffeweizen complement each other perfectly.

Gouda with low-hop/high malt beers – because this style of cheese is usually cured with brine, wine or even beer it’s best enjoyed with a milder beer that leans towards malty sweetness rather than bitter hops. The nutty character of brown ales can work wonders with Gouda!

Blue cheese with porters and stouts – powerful blues need a powerful beer to match them and the deep roasted, chocolate and coffee qualities in many porters and stouts do just that.

Brie and pilsner/lager – brie and other soft cheeses with bloomy rinds often have fairly low taste profiles so it’s good to match them with more delicate beers such as pilsners. An added benefit is that pilsners/lagers are generally more carbonated, helping to scrub the mouth out after eating sticky soft cheeses.

I found this video of perhaps the world’s greatest authority on beer and food, Garrett Oliver, who is not only the head brewer of the highly respected Brooklyn Brewery in the US he’s also the author of ‘The BrewMaster’s Table’, a book I consider to be the bible on beer and food matches and one I’d warmly recommend you buy.

The specific cheeses and beers he tries on film are hard or impossible to find in Sweden but his message is spot on. So move over wine. Cheese has got a new best friend and its name is beer!

Just come across this very good article in Vin & Gastronomi. The journalist, Magnus Henriksson, is in my opinion one of the best beer writers in the mainstream Swedish media who is actually paying attention to what’s happening in the beer scene in this country.

Good job Magnus – and some great beer and food combos too!

Forget chickens and eggs. What came first – bread or beer?

Well the answer’s bread but it’s a closer call than many of you may think. Beer and bread share an ancient history together that spans back over eight thousand years to Sumeria (modern day Iraq) where it was commonplace to use bread to make beer.

The exact circumstances behind the first brews have been blurred by time, but it is generally considered that a Sumerian baker accidently left some bread dough outside in an earthenware bowl where it was soaked in a downpour and then heated by the sun, turning the bowl into a kind of mash tun and open fermenter all in one.

I still struggle to see why anyone would have thought of drinking the sludge in the bowl but apparently someone did, discovering the pleasing effects of alcohol in the process. The rest, as they say, is history.

Far more appealing than drinking bread-flavoured beer is eating beer-flavoured bread. I’ve called this recipe ‘One-Handed Beer Bread’ because it’s so easy to make you can do it with one hand tied behind your back.

Beer bread is cheap and simple to make

This is what you’re going to need:

Ingredients
all-purpose flour 430 g
granulated sugar 16 g
salt 6 g
baking powder 16 g
beer 330-355 ml (The darker the beer the darker and more ‘heavy’ the flavour. Just experiment to find your favourite combination)
Optional glaze 1 egg & 2 tsp (10 ml) water, beaten. This gives the loaf’s crust a beautiful, dark golden colour.

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.And here’s what you need to do:

Heat oven to 375F/190C degrees. Combine flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a large mixing bowl. Slowly stir in beer and mix just until combined. Batter will be thick. Spread in a greased 20cm loaf pan, brush with egg glaze if desired, and bake for about 45 minutes or until golden brown and a toothpick stuck in the centre comes out clean.

Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan and cool for 10 more minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature. This bread will keep for 1-2 days stored in a plastic bag or airtight container and it can be frozen. Makes one loaf.

Oh and it goes great dipped in beef stew or with cheese!

Oven roasted leg of organic lamb from Häljegård farm just outside Umeå spiked with fresh garlic and rubbed with Garam Masala and Tandoori spices, accompanied with sweated green peppers, tomatos, red onion, garlic, fresh coriander and chilli and a raita made with grated Swedish apples, tumeric, corriander and dried apricots (which I’d smuggled back from our recent trip to France) .

It was the Indian influences in this dish that made me choose Belhaven’s Twisted Thistle IPA. The sweet spicy hops were more than a match for the heat from the Garam Masala, Tandoori and chilli while Twisted’s lengthy bitter edge cut through the creamy raita like a knife.

Do you ever secretly worry that your pilsner is big enough to handle a spicy curry or that your favourite porter can really get up close and personal with that tempting slice of dark chocolate cake?

Probably not. But if you do want some tips on what dishes go well with beers then check out this clever little website. Just choose the food you’re going to eat and the online beer sommelier will instantly generate a list of recommended beer styles for you to try.

Being an American site there’s a slight bias towards US styles but in general I thought most of the matches were spot on and some of them were more than a little intriguing.

I never knew for instance that a brown porter is game enough to lock horns with a bison burger or that a Belgium strong pale ale is the perfect partner to pan-fried octopus.

I’m off to ICA now to try and buy a bison…..