Sitting in the trendy Stureplan restaurant surrounded by smartly dressed Stockholmers who looked like they did this sort of thing every day I was getting increasingly irritated.

And it wasn’t because I was trying to shake off the excess from the previous night’s lively BeerSweden Forum meet-up (although I confess it wasn’t helping my mood) or because I was clearly underdressed in my jeans and Tactical Nuclear Penguin T-shirt.

Rather it was because I couldn’t seem to find out what beers were going to be served with the exclusive three course press lunch I was about to experience at the opening of Melker Andersson och Daniel Couet’s new Asian inspired restaurant Miss Voon.

Miss Voon has been given a laid back Oriental look by leading interior designer Thomas Sandell.

I had already passed on the glasses of Pares Balta Cava Brut being handed out as we arrived and was scrolling down the impressive menu hunting for some hops.

I could see that for starters we were being tempted with a tartare of Salmalax from Bergen with wazabi and yuzu, to which it was suggested we drank a 2010 Sankt Anna Riesling.

Next up were mushroom dumplings in a misobuljongen with small cubes of Asian pear, followed swiftly by a venison chop with a celery puree and tamarind, to which Solaz Tempranillo /Cabernet Sauvignon from Bodegas Osborne in La Mancha, Spain was offered.

The meal was to be rounded off nicely with a rose hip sorbet accompanied by a delicately spiced sponge smothered in a white chocolate sauce.

It looked thoroughly thought through and outstanding except for one thing. Where was the beer? And then I saw it, right at the bottom of the menu in 7pt print:

”Det finns även öl. Ashai (sic) Superdry samt alkoholfi Carlsberg”*

My sigh was so long and so loud it momentarily stopped the chatter on the tables around me.

I suppose by now I shouldn’t have been surprised but I couldn’t help feeling disappointed and a little let down as I beckoned the friendly waiter over and asked for a bottle of Asahi.

It’s not that Asahi Super Dry is a bad beer (its crisp and neutral flavours and aromas can actually make it a very undemanding pairing partner) and its Asian connection is obvious (although I had to stop myself from pointing out that this particular bottle was brewed in the Czech Republic).

It’s just that I instantly knew that although it may stand an outside chance with the starter it was going to be an epic fail with everything else on the menu.

Only having one style of beer to choose from at a restaurant is like being asked to play a round of golf using only a putter. There will be a few times when it’s the right choice, but far more often it will be a complete mishit.

So I spent my lunchtime eating delicious food (the Salamlax being my personal highlight) furiously scribbling down beer pairings that I thought would match the food to a tee.

OK so it's a little rough but what about this for some beer suggestions Mr Andersson?

For starters the Asahi stood up fairly well to the sweet heat of the wasabi and soy flavours that coated the diced salmon chunks but it would have excelled if served with a glass of chilled American Dream or Leon from Omnipollo, whose gentle mix of light and dark malts and use of champagne yeast would have boosted the starter’s zingy fresh flavours to new heights.

Pairing Asahi with mushroom dumplings was never going to be a fair fight. The dish’s earthy, herby and autumnal tastes would have been much better complemented with a bottle of Sigtuna Höstporter, Dugges Höstbrygd or a BrewDog 5AM Saint.

Similarly the venison just ran over the Asahi whereas a bottle of Traquair House Ale, a Brother Thelonious or a Chimay Blue would have met it head-on. 

Finally my mouth was watering at the idea of the pleasantly spicy rose-hip sorbet melting into a mouthful of sweet US-style barley wine such as Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot,  Avery’s Hog Heaven or even a cool glass of Westmalle Tripel.

As it was once again I left a fantastic restaurant scratching my head and wondering what could have been. Miss Voon may not be a strict Asian concept but their bold use of oriental flavours mixed with some of the very best European ingredients is adventurous.

Pity the same can’t be said for the beer selection.

 *We even have beer. Ashai Super Dry and Alcohol-free Carlsberg.

I have a kind of bloggy confession to make. I’ve been going on (and on, and on) about the joys of pairing beer and food over recent months and yet when I look back through my posts searching for anything to do with this amazingly rewarding past-time I can only find a handful of articles. I have therefore fallen into the classic trap of not practising what I preach.

Not good enough!

Although, in my defence, I actually do practice combining the flavours and textures of beer and food all the time at home, where most evening meals (I tend to skip breakfast) are enjoyed with a bottle of beer to share at the table.

Like yesterday for example, when we decided to have a BBQ at the summerhouse and catch the last warm rays of another wonderful summer’s day up here in Norrland. Fancying something a little more ‘exotic’ than the more traditional pork and salmon meals I’ve recently prepared on the BBQ me and the missus went for spicy Thai-style beer skewers, to which I paired BrewDog Punk IPA.

Here’s what we did:

Cut the thin beef slices (lövbiff) into long strips and put onto wooden skewers (make sure to soak the skewers in water for approximately 30 minutes before so they don’t burn so quickly on the BBQ).
Rub the strips with roughly-cut fresh garlic, lime juice and lime & lemongrass pepper, fresh coriander, soy sauce and sunflower oil (to help them stop sticking to the BBQ grill).

Flash cook on the BBQ (they really only need a minute or two each side otherwise they dry out and adopt the texture of shoe leather) and serve immediately with lightly salted Basmati rice.

To this serve with a dip made of:

Fresh lime juice
Soy Sauce
Fresh chopped Garlic
Crushed chilli
Fresh coriander (this is the secret to this dip so make sure whenever possible to use freshly picked coriander).

.
I drank Punk IPA with this meal (actually I had a sneaky bottle before while waiting for the BBQ to glow ) and the beer’s tropical fruit body practically made out with all the lime and coriander. I can also imagine the coriander ‘core’ to this dish makes it a good fit for a Belgium Wit beer (like this one), a herby pilsner (like this one) or a piney US hop bomb (like this one).

There. I feel a little better now, although the Beer and Food category of this blog is still more frozen chicken nuggets when it should be grilled jam-glazed free-range chicken breasts (if you know what I mean).

So please, if any of you have beer and food pairings that work for you, whether you’re a professional chef or a passionate amateur who likes to match their meals with beer (or add it to the ingredients) then why not send them (English or Swedish) to me at darren@beersweden.se and I’ll happily add them to the blog.

Together we can make mealtimes more interesting! Thanks

*This article is based on a post I made over at the new BeerSweden Forum, where members are beginning to add their own recipes and tasty food/beer combos. For inspiration and much more you really should get over there and check it out!

Disclaimer: I’m BrewDog’s Scandinavian representative. I am also the one who ALWAYS gets to peel the potatoes.

I could tell by the Tiger suits, the jewellery and the manicures that I was deep into wine territory.

To the table on my left was old money – a middle-aged man with a plain but superbly fitted pink shirt and cuffs hiding a gold Rolex. His female guest was younger, pretty but not beautiful, with sunglasses perched on top of immaculately dragged back blonde hair.

To my right the business brigade – more flashy, expensive but ill-fitting suits, iPhones on the table and gold company credit cards at the ready.

I'll have a Carlsberg Hof with that mate. Don't worry about a glass. I'll drink it straight out of the bottle.

As I sat down with my guests for lunch at Villa Källhagen in Stockholm’s swanky Djurgården district I spied the crisp linen napkins, the swirls of handmade butter, the freshly baked bread rolls and the oversized wine glasses. Such attention to detail boded well for a good meal, I thought to myself.

After some polite conversation with my guests while perusing the menu I opted for the grilled steak with green beans and a herb-infused baked tomato. I had seen one being brought out to the table beside me. It looked perfectly cooked, shining with glaze and utterly delicious.

“And would you like some wine with your meal?” asked the charming waitress, pen eagerly poised on paper to record my reply.

I sighed inwardly. Was it really worth it, I said to myself? I mean, what’s the point in asking when I already know the answer? I took a deep mental breath anyway.

“No, but I’d love to see your beer list please”.

I watched her face, waiting for the inevitable reaction. First came confusion, followed quickly by a nervous smile and then a look I swore bordered on mild pity. Wait just a few more seconds, I thought to myself. Here it comes.

“We don’t actually have a beer list I’m afraid. But we do have a selection of beers from Spendrups. They are a Swedish brewery. They are very nice”.

Nice they may be, but Spendrups’ Lättöl, Mellanöl or Premium Lager Ekologisk will never, ever be the right drink to pair with grilled steak. In my world it’s a culinary blunder on a par with serving tinned mushrooms with truffles or squeezing tomato ketchup on foie gras.

What makes this incident all the more distressing is that not a single person sitting at my table rolled their eyes, threw their napkins on the table in disgust or burst into contemptuous laughter.

Why? Because the same thing is happening right this second in the most exclusive, impossible-to-get-a-table restaurants in Sweden.  It’s so routine it’s become expected and accepted.

Nor does it seem to matter how expensive the menu, how many White Guide listings or the number of Michelin stars awarded. Quite the opposite in fact.

The shocking truth is that with frighteningly few exceptions Sweden’s finest eateries are serving us exactly the same beers as the pizza restaurant around the corner.

In the next post: I take a closer look at the menus of five of Sweden’s most celebrated restaurants, see what beers they’re serving, ask why beer seems to be a such a culinary afterthought and whether we beer drinkers can do more to get our favourite drink back into fine dining.

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!

Today I wheeled out the BBQ I bought in a sale at a motorway service station a couple of years ago and rather carefully placed it on the little patch of wooden decking outside the front of my house.

I say rather carefully because my ‘Made in China’ BBQ started to rust the very first day I broke it out of the packaging, managing to shed the nuts and bolts that keep it together seemingly by itself until it now barely manages to stand on its three independently minded metal legs, wobbling precariously like someone who has been drinking pints of barley wine on an empty stomach.

When it comes to buying BBQs I’ve discovered that people fall into two main camps. The first group go ‘all-in’ and buy a top-of-the-range Ferrari of a BBQ complete with infra-red rotisserie cradle, warming rack, utensil holder, a thermometer that measures up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (in case you should want to incinerate your food) and essential add-ons such as a wine/champagne bucket and GPS.

(I made that last feature up, but amazingly not the ones before it. Some of these luxury ‘outdoor kitchens’ (”oh darling BBQ is soooo common don’t you think”?) are so over the top they come with everything and the kitchen sink).

I on the other hand have my tent pitched in the camp that treats BBQs like disposable razors. I use them. abuse them, leave them out in all weathers, let them rust, then tip them and buy another one.

Once I had arranged the legs of my latest BBQ in the correct position so that it wouldn’t fall over and scatter glowing charcoal on the decking I set about trying to scrub the dried food remains and rust from the year before off with a wire brush but quickly gave up, reasoning (as I do every year) that the flames will kill any bacteria. And anyway it all just adds to that delicious ‘outdoor flavour’.

Whenever I’m busy working the BBQ – and any man will tell you just what hard work it really is – I always need a beer in my hand. Without it I feel slightly naked, as though my manly ritual of ‘provider of food and master of fire’ is somewhat lacking.

But I really never need to be because BBQs and beer go together like Linda Rosing and plastic surgery – and there’s a fantastic selection to choose from this summer at the Systembolaget.

Some of the best BBQ beers are those with some malty sweetness to them that pick up on glazes and honey-based marinades and work together with crispy, salty skin to add that little touch of contrasting sweetness. Try Samuel Adams Honey Porter (Systembolaget Art No 1580. 18.90SEK. 330ml bottle) or even go one better and make a marinade out of it! Here’s how:

BeerSweden’s Porter Marinade

(Works wonders with beef steaks and lamb)

1 bottle           Samuel Adams Honey Porter

65ml               Olive oil

2 tbsp.            Dark syrup

2 tbsp.            Balsamic vinegar

1 tsp.               Instant coffee (yes, that’s right, instant coffee!)

6 cloves          Garlic, crushed

2 tbsp.            Chopped fresh parsley

1 tbsp.             Chopped fresh rosemary

1 tsp.               Cracked black pepper

1 tsp.               Crushed red chilli peppers

Combine all these ingredients in a bowl and then marinade your meat for between 4-6 hours before cooking. You can also brush the meat while on the grill to help stop it drying out and boost the beery flavours.

Beers with a pronounced roasted malt bitterness to them also add interest to BBQ-d food, being powerful enough to mix it up with the burnt, caramelized meat flavours of steak and beef burgers. Samuel Adams Black Lager (Systembolaget Art No 1535. 15.90SEK. 330ml bottle), with its specially roasted caramel and chocolate malts is just the job, as well as being a refreshing and more flavoursome alternative to the ubiquitous BBQ lager.

But perhaps the most trendy BBQ beer this summer is American Pale Ale, bursting with hoppy tropical fruit and grassy pine flavours that slice through fatty chops and steaks like a knife through butter. These beers are great to drink on their own or combine with grilled food, where their herby, spicy notes have a party with meat and vegetable skewers that have been drizzled in olive oil and sprinkled with herbs. Try Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (Systembolaget Art No 1525. 22.90SEK. 355ml bottle) or Red Seal Ale (Systembolaget Art No 1503. 22.40SEK. 355ml bottle).

So if you haven’t already done it then what are you waiting for? Dust off the BBQ and get grilling – with some tongs in one hand and a beer in the other of course!