On Pairings With Thanksgiving Dinner

It's the time of year where all the newspapers and bloggers compile lists.  The Best... The Worst... The Most... etc.  My favorite form of this list is when The Best gets tied to food and drink.  The best turkey recipe (Alton Brown's brined turkey is, by far, what I consider to be "the best"), the best mashed potatoes, the best stuffing, the best apple pie, and the best beer to go with the most American of holidays, the glutton-fest of Thanksgiving.  The trouble is not everyone agrees on what it is to be "the best".  One man's taste symphony is another's 5-year-old-kid-that-found-how-to-open-the-piano.

So today, instead of creating yet another list of beers to have on Thanksgiving, I have taken a cue from Metacritic and created my meta analysis of Thanksgiving beer pairings.  You can find my complete list of suggestions here.

Topping the list is Belgian Ales.  This category covers Belgian beers from trappists to tripels.  Perhaps nothing goes better with food than Belgian beers.  They are complex enough to have flavors that both complement and contrast a wide variety of foods.

A distant second goes to the neighboring style of Saison.  Saison is another good choice due to it's spicy, complex character and crisp mouth-cleansing palate.  This is my personal favorite style for the holiday.

Bronze goes to Brown Ale.  Another fine choice.  Nothing puts me in the holiday spirit like the roasty and nutty character of a brown ale.

This year I will be going the route of a first Thanksgiving style dinner and drinking Crispin's The Saint, an apple cider fermented with Belgian abby yeast and maple syrup.  It is delicious, and a nice nod to that first meal.

On Pairings With Apple Pie

Fall weather means fall activities and fall food which is what brought me last weekend to an apple orchard where I picked up an entire bushel of apples. Now, since I live alone using all these apples has been a challenge. Between apple butter, apple bars, and just plain eating them, I have done a good job at conquering the 20+ lbs of apples. But of course you can't have fresh picked apples at your disposal and not make apple pie. While most people agonize over whether to use golden delicious, Jonathan, or Fuji, my main concern was beer pairing. 

My thoughts first turned to a nice, thick stout. Stout is a classic pairing with deserts. The thick, creamy texture of a nitro-poured stout complements many dessert textures, while the bitter, roasty flavors contrast and play off the sweetness. While this is a nice thought, stout is still more of a winter beer. Perhaps this beer is more for leftover pie after Christmas dinner. My second thought (which was actually Karen's thought) was for an unconventional choice: heffeweisen. The spicy clove and banana phenols could play well with the cinnamon and nutmeg in the pie. But again, wrong season. Fourth of July, yes; first Autumn chill, not so much. The search continued with IPA. Something in the British region, perhaps. A bitter backbone to stand up to the sweetness of the pie. Some floral and mild dark fruit aromatics. But no, American pie¹ and British beer just doesn't feel right.

I finally settled on Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale. This beer gives the hoppy bite of an IPA without being too overwhelming and lends a nice caramel sweetness that complements the apples quite nicely. Plus, it's seasonally and culturally relevant, and tastes amazing. Score. Now that I had my beer I could make my pie. The beer was integrated into the pie in two different ways. I replaced the water in the crust with the beer and also added a tablespoon to my whipped cream topping. I thought about soaking the apples in the beer but thought that it would make things too bitter and be a waste of a perfectly good beer. I don't think the beer added much to the crust, but it gave the whipped topping a subtle bitterness that I didn't quite enjoy at first, but ended up liking in the end.

Crust:

Not exactly homemade... let's just say it's a secret recipe from my Aunt Betty.

1 egg for egg wash

Filling: 

6 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced. (I used Fuji and golden delicious)

3/8 cup sugar

1/2 cup flour

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

juice and zest from 1/2 a lemon

Whipped cream:

1 cup heavy whipping cream

1 tbsp Sierra Nevada Northern Hemisphere Harvest Ale

1 tsp vanilla

1/8 cup sugar

For the pie:

Form the pie crust according to the box's Aunt Betty's instructions replacing the water with the Harvest Ale. Combine filling ingredients and place them in the pie. Cover with the top crust and crimp the edges with a fork. Beat the egg and brush over the top crust for a nice golden brown crust. Cover the top of the pie with aluminium foil and bake in a 400°F oven for 25 minutes. Remove the foil and bake for another 20-25 minutes until the crust turns golden brown. Set aside to cool.

For the whipped cream:

Chill your stand mixer bowl and whisk attachment in the freezer for at least 15 minutes. Add the heavy cream and whisk on medium high (7 on a Kitchenaid) until soft peaks form. Add the sugar, vanilla, and beer. Whisk on high until stiff peaks.

¹ Yes, I'm aware that the all-American apple pie isn't American at all... it's British, but that doesn't mean it doesn't feel American... at least to most of us on the left side of the Atlantic.

On Making Cheese

What's this?  A blog about beer and the first post is about making cheese?  Well... yes, yes it is.  And why not?  Beer and cheese share many things in common.  First, they are both delicious.  Both beer and cheese can be creamy or dry, dense or light, clean or funky, simple or complex.  Both have traditions stretching back thousands of years.  Egyptians used beer to preserve the nutritious value of their grain crops.  They used cheese to preserve the nutritious value of their milk.  The array of flavors created by subtle differences in procedure are incredible.  With beer, for example, changing the temperature at which you mash grains by a mere 4 degrees makes a completely different beer.  Cheese is the same.  Small differences in time, pressure, or temperature cause dramatic changes in the character of the final cheese.  Lastly, both are creations of microorganisms that humans have reined in to do our bidding.  The basic outline of the two processes are very similar.