Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Mexican Food, Austrian Beer. Who Knew?

I was thrilled to receive my first write-in question last night! Check it:


Dear Brew-Ru,

I am having a party for about 20 to 40 people this Friday night where we are serving tacos and margaritas. What kind of beer goes with that? Is Blue Moon a good choice?

-Wondering in Pebble Beach



Dear Wondering,

Blue Moon would not be my first choice. Tacos & margaritas usually sport sharp, astringent, and spicy flavors and a beer like Blue Moon which is very soft and sweet, with a texture more like a wheat beer, will go against the grain. Actually it will get straight bowled over. Beverages with higher viscosity (in beer it comes from the sugar content, and is called "gravity,") will hold spice compounds to your tongue and palate, both exacerbating the spiciness and hindering easy movement between, say, chili verde and chili colorado tacos. Here are a couple of suggestions for specific brews and general styles that will lift and carry the spice away, preparing you for your next bite:


Mexicans are no fools - their beers may be given short shrift by some aficionados, but are pretty much perfect for their cuisine. Light, dry, highly carbonated and slightly bitter, they are based on a style called Vienna Lager, which itself is essentially a light lager in the same vein as Pilsners. That being the case, there are any number of beers that you could serve which would fulfill your needs without forcing you to resort to Corona: any German or Czech pils such as Spaten, Franziskaner, Czechvar, or even Austria's Steigl lager. You want to be careful of beers with an agenda of their own.


There are also a number of Californian beers that would work. West Coast IPAs have higher gravity than most lagers, but balance it out with much stronger bitterness than pretty much any other style of beer. Their characteristic citrusy, pine-needley aromas compliment most Mexican food well. Maybe it's chauvinism, but when it comes to spicy food these are the brews for me.


- The Brew-Ru

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

A little background - Ales and Lagers

There are only two kinds of beer: ales and lagers.

This comes as a surprise to most people. "But what," they say, "about all of those porters, stouts, pales, pilsners, Flemish reds and Belgian Whites? What about all those acronyms - the IPAs and the ESBs, the IRSes or RISes (but notably not RUSes)?" This is one of the rare occasions where a basic wine comparison is informative rather than confusing. Just as Vigonier and Cabernet Franc fall neatly under the umbrellas of "White" and "Red" respectively, so do all of those beer styles you've heard mentioned fall under the aegis of either ale or lager.

"This is all well and good," I hear you saying, gentle reader, "but what the hell does that mean? The taxonomy of the tartaric and the tannic is tautological - what logic allies itself to ale and lager?" Well I'm glad you asked.

Ales:
The first beers brewed were accidental ales. In a barrel of sweet barley water yeast set to work, a pleasant accident still familiar to us in the form of sourdough bread. These ambient, airborne, naturally occurring yeasts are the same ones that to this day create the true and traditional lambics. Over time, brewers bred for particular characteristics and developed strains and sub-strains specific to a beer, brewery, or brewer.

Ale yeasts are sub-species of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, also known as "Brewer's Yeast." It typically does its business on top of the fermentation vessel, and always for shorter periods and at higher temperatures than its cousin lager; the result is typically but by no means always stronger in flavor, less translucent, and higher in alcohol. Ales cover a wider range of the flavor spectrum than lagers, and include pretty much everything you drink that isn't a pilsner.

Lagers:
Down in the caves of Germany brewers used to hide their fermenting barrels to protect them from the spoiling heat of the central European summer - before refrigeration this was the only effective protection from runaway fermentation that would turn any brew to vinegar long before it could be served. But while their backs were turned trying to figure out if they had really been turning ontologial wine into doxologial blood, the Germans' Saccharomyces cerevisiae mutated into an equally real Saccharomyces pastorianus.

Lager is the German word for "store," or "to store." Pastorianus yeast typically ferments on the bottom of its vessel, and always at lower temperatures and for longer periods than its cousin. For reasons involving words like "phenols" and "esters" this leads to flavors that are most easily described as "clean." Lager includes the wonderfully refreshing and bready Stiegl and Weihenstephaner Original, which are both clear sparkling golden brews that leave little to be desired. It also includes opaque Schwarzbiers (blackbeers) and beef-jerky Rauchbiers (smokebeers). And Budweiser.

And that's it! A short intro that is both exhaustive and a survey. Ales and lagers run the gamut, and beyond that there are trends, but not rules, about color, style, strength, origin, and flavor. We'll explore them further in future Backgrounds.

A little background

I don't mean to opaque - really - so I've decided to start a series all about beer itself, as opposed to specific brews or particular bars. I would like it to be a guide for the perplexed, and of course part of the point is that I don't necessarily know which parts of the things I say aren't clear, so while the format will be more or less free-form, the goal is for all of you to

ASK ME QUESTIONS.

This can be about anything, anything at all. You want to know why Pabst deserves their Blue Ribbon? Great. You want to know the specific pH of Westmalle Trippel v. Achel? I'll see what I can do. Why I keep talking about lambics as sour and dry when they're clearly the beer equivalent of wine coolers? Bring it on. I want to know what you want to know. So don't hold back.

Thank you.