Whenever I tell people that beer is often a far better partner to food than wine they normally smile politely and then (and I swear this is true) wait until I’ve left the room before bursting out laughing.

The notion that beer really can add another taste dimension to fine food is for many hard to swallow. Sure, beer is fun and refreshing, but its proper place is down the pub or in front of the TV while watching the footie, right?

For the majority of us, even seasoned beer drinkers, the general rule seems to be that if you’re going to eat well you need to drink well and that really only means one thing – wine.

If you recognise yourself in any of the above three paragraphs then this post is for especially for you. It’s what I ate for dinner at home on Saturday night and just as importantly what I drank with it.

Starter:

Kalix Löjrom on tunnbröd with finely chopped red onion and crème fraîche and black pepper. Served with Nils Oscar Jubileum 15, a saison-style ale whose bready malt character melted into the tunnbröd while the caramel and orange fruit flavours softened the saltiness of the löjrom and the spicy lemongrass and dry bitter finish sliced through the crème fraîche. A near perfect match. 4.6 out of 5!

Main Course:

Lamb rack roasted with garlic, red onion, fresh thyme and black pepper. Served with Jerusalem artichoke cream and almond potatoes (dug up from the garden only a few hours before) roasted with sea-salt and thyme and served with chanterelle mushrooms fried in butter with a hint of garlic. Accompanied by a meat sauce made from a generous splash of Nøgne Ø Imperial Brown Ale.

This dish was paired with Nøgne Ø Imperial Brown Ale, whose rich, almost vinous character complemented the sweet lamb meat beautifully. Bold flavours of brown sugar, nuts and raisins with a slightly burnt finish. The sauce made it difficult to tell where the space existed between beer and food. Another sublime match. 4.5 out of 5!

Dessert:

Åkerbärspärfait with crushed Werthers Original sweet topping, served with Oppigårds Amarillo. A strong match, with the near legendary tropical fruitiness of this pale ale wrapping itself around the explosively rich berry flavours of the åkerbär. The crushed caramel topping did however accentuate the beer’s firm hoppy finish. Great, but perhaps a barley wine or sweet strong ale next time? 4 out of 5.

Now you weren’t there and so weren’t able to experience the magnificence of these beers for yourself as they clicked with the food but I hope what you’ve just seen and read will open up the minds of even the most die-hard wine fans out there to the possibility that beer can be an awesome partner to food.

LATER THIS WEEK: I go from home-cooked to high class with my report from last week’s launch party of Melker Andersson och Daniel Couet‘s new Asian inspired restaurant Miss Voon in Stockholm. Find out how I get on while the rest of the room sips cocktails and wine and I discover there’s only one beer on the menu……

It has slowly dawned on me that I could live in Sweden until I grow excessively long nasal hair and lose the ability to control most of my basic bodily functions and I will not be a single day closer to understanding this country’s twisted relationship to alcohol.

Take for example last weekend’s Leva & Bo, the weekend supplement of Sweden’s largest national daily newspaper Expressen. It is a perfect case study in just how f”#ked up the messages we’re constantly being fed about booze are as well as a depressingly familiar example of beer’s lowly status in the mainstream media (an issue I’ve already blogged about here).

Under the headline “Välkommen På Poolfest” (Welcome to the Pool Party) Expressen’s ever-so-healthy looking GI-expert Ewa Skiöldebrand invites us to throw a summer pool party with tips on mouth-watering BBQ dishes as well as some “refreshing, healthy drinks”.

Accompanying this six page GI-tribute are several pictures of nutritious-looking green salads, avocado, radishes and sun-dried tomatoes artistically laid out on a table in front of a shimmering swimming pool on a hot summer’s day.

Photograph: Arne Adler

Oh and what’s that I spy on the table too? Why it’s a couple of glasses of red wine. At least I assume it’s red wine as the glasses in question are not actually referred to anywhere in the article (which does give recipes for several other healthy non-alcoholic fruit drinks) but there they stand none the less in amongst the raspberry smoothies.

They’ve somehow managed to sneak in there but it doesn’t really matter because after all red wine is sooooo GI isn’t it what with all those antioxidants and all. The fact you practically can’t turn a page of Leva & Bo without seeing an advert for wine probably has nothing to do with it. No, not at all.

Where it gets even more conflicted is that on the final page of the article there is an advert for yet two more red wine boxes which carries the obligatory government health warning, this time rather ironically the message “Half of all those who drown have alcohol in their blood”.

So if I understand this right it’s OK for the newspaper supplement to indirectly promote drinking 11% +ABV red wine while having a pool party as long as you’re careful not to drown while doing it?

Turn the page and beside the full-page ad for a 3-litre box of Kongsmosel Riesling (which I’m sure could also make you sink to the bottom of swimming pools if drunk in excess) is yet another “10 Best Wines….” column from Leva & Bo’s grape expert Gunilla, this time tipping us off for the best bottles to uncork with tasty summer salads. Once again the association is clearly being made that whenever healthy food is served wine is never far behind.

What is far behind (occupying the bottom edge of page 56) are some expert tips from Leva & Bo’s resident beer scribe Lasse Råde.  Rather than the 10 suggestions proffered by Gunilla, Lasse manages to keep it down to just four and rather than all that nonsense pairing wine with summer salads Lasse gives it to us straight under the snappy headline “Good and Cheap”.

He continues: “Being the cheapest doesn’t always mean it has to be bad – at least not where beer is concerned. Here are four of the cheapest right now!”

Lasse then goes on to share with us his thoughts on four beers whose single most notable feature is that you get change out of 11 Swedish Kronor when you buy them. His particular favourite is Åbro’s Femkommatvåan (which translated means 5.2 and specifically refers to the amount of alcohol in it). In my world it would specifically refer to the score I would give it – out of a thousand. Lasse is somewhat kinder, describing it as “well balanced with a little bread, some citrus and a discreet bitterness”.

So what do you make of all this? That your next pool party will be a huge hit as long as you served up some low-carb zucchini and a cheeky glass of shiraz? That wine is the best alcoholic drink to serve up with summer foods?

Well that’s exactly what Leva & Bo seems to want you to think.

It also seems to want to keep the tired old Swedish concept of stor stark alive too by rehashing yet another derisory article about cheap industrial beer that does absolutely nothing to highlight beer’s food pairing prowess or its numerous healthy qualities (when drunk, as with other alcoholic drinks, in moderation of course).

The unappetising truth is we’re drowning in blatantly biased coverage of this country’s two favourite alcoholic drinks and most of the time beer is barely managing to keep its head above water.

Alcohol-free brands have become more popular while sales of beer and wine took a dip in the second quarter of 2010 according to figures released by the Systembolaget this week.

Sales of beer in particular started out flat against 2009 with a drop of 0.4% for the first three months. The trend worsened slightly in the second quarter as total beer sales fell by 6.2% over the same period in 2009.

These figures are posted against a backdrop of a small rise of 2.2% in total sales of alcohol in the monopoly for the first half of 2010 and an increase of 2.5% in the total number of customers compared to 2009.

The biggest winner in a quiet 6 months sales period are alcohol-free brands – which includes beer brands such as Estrella Damm Non-Alcoholic and Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Alkoholfrei– with sales jumping over 27% on last year for the first six months of the year to 545,000 litres.

Relatively small in the bigger picture perhaps but a significant trend that the Systembolaget’s Press Officer Lennart Agén is happy to note.

He says: “It is naturally pleasing that demand for our alcohol-free products is so large. It demonstrates that many customers are interested in their health (Ed note: this rather suggests that drinks with alcohol in them are not good for us Lennart, which is not necessarily the case) and that more people would like to eat and drink well without alcohol being involved”.

Of the 107,991,000 litres of beer sold so far in 2010 it’s not possible to see what percentage of this is craft beer. My gut feel from talking to several of the Swedish microbreweries is that this is a great year for sales with more and more beer drinkers breaking out of the ‘stor stark syndrome’ and trying quality brews. If you’re a craft brewer reading this then let us know whether your beers really are bucking the trend here in Sweden!

Other than the usual figures released by the Systembolaget that prove we’re still happy with it (I always feel a mild sense of desperation when I read these stats, as though the monopoly is like one of those ‘career kids’ at school that desperately wants everyone to like them) the most interesting fact I could find involves midsummer.

Apparently a jaw-dropping 2.5 million of us paid a visit to the monopoly during the annual midsummer celebrations week in June, with 1.1 million people stocking up the day before midsommarafton alone – the most visits to the monopoly in a single day ever!

In a country with a population of just over 9 million that’s a pretty impressive figure don’t you think? It also sheds some light on the nation’s current relationship to alcohol, with the country’s unofficial national day one of its booziest too.

I’m sure Mr Bellman is looking down on us all right now with a big grin on his face. And a large glass of something extremely not non-alcoholic of course.

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Hello,

You won’t have heard about me. I’m just a guy that’s really interested in craft beer but I thought I’d drop you a letter anyway to tell you a little bit about it.

I’ve decided to take the initiative because to be honest I’ve got a bit bored of waiting around for you to reach out to me. I suppose you’re all rather busy flitting around the Napa Valley taking film footage of grape vines or researching feature articles about the chateaux of the Medoc region.

The reason I’m writing is because over the past few years something quite amazing has happened here in Sweden to our beers and I really think you, and more importantly, your audience, should get to know about it.

Now before I go on I will concede that the reputation of Swedish beers in the past hasn’t been that great. Most of them were (and some still are) fizzy, pale, chemical and altogether rather nasty, so I understand the idea of giving them airtime or column inches has been about as appealing as a pint of warm Falcon Export.

But that was way back in the 90s. Since then a new generation of Swedish microbreweries has grown up, inspired by thousands of years of brewing culture and energized by the radical new-thinking of brewers from the US.

These breweries, with a mixture of creativity, vision and sheer stubbornness have started brewing beers that consign the tired old concept of a stor stark to the last millennium; beers that break a few rules and that challenge our understanding of what beer should be and more importantly what it can become.

In Sweden right now, this very second, these brewers are busy creating beers that this country can once again be proud of.

But of course you probably haven’t heard about this revolution have you? I’ve been scanning the pages, tuning in and flipping channels for years now hoping to hear and see some serious, consistent coverage in amongst the thousands of “10 best wines to have at Easter/Crayfish parties/Christmas/bar mitzvah” articles published by you lot every year.

But other than a few lack-lustre write-ups from a wine journalist on a bad news day there’s been practically nothing.  It’s as though you’ve all let one of the single most significant developments in Sweden’s food and drink culture in modern times simply pass you by.

The good news is that it’s not too late. You may have missed the start but the party’s only just begun. Craft beer from Sweden and around the world is rapidly winning back ‘share of throat’ among drinkers who realise great beer is every bit as complex and interesting as wine and just as worthy of a place at the dinner table.

These same drinkers are increasingly curious to know about the people and the stories behind their beers and the quality and origin of the ingredients used to make them.

And that’s where you come in. If you could devote a little more time and coverage to the craft beer movement here in Sweden you’d help fan the flames of its development, motivate the craft brewing industry and broadcast an appreciation of what great beer is to a wider audience.

Remember you have a responsiblity to beer drinkers as well as wine drinkers to report what’s going on out there today. I’d say we fans of craft beer  have waited long enough. It’s your round now.

Best regards

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Darren Packman

A beer lover.

On a recent trip down to Duras in southern France I spotted this temporary road sign warning drivers of the dangers of skidding on grape juice and skins that can fall off the back of lorries transporting the harvest during the recent vendage.

It clearly goes to show that wine can be hazardous to your health and is ‘jus’ another good ‘raisin’ to drink beer instead.

Sorry. Just couldn’t resist it.