The Today Show & Beer

A number of people wrote to say that they couldn't write fast enough to catch all of the beers I recommended yesterday on the Today Show—not surprising, since the segment went so fast I didn't even get a chance to talk about all of them myself! Here's a rundown of the choices, with the general pairing suggestions that went along with them.  

1. For fried foods, try a hoppy beer (for instance an IPA, India Pale Ale). To my mind, the citrus/pine/floral notes of hops are just the thing to cut through the fat of fried foods, as is the prickly bitterness they impart. The beer I poured was Dogfish Head's 60 Minute IPA; the two that weren't opened (but are terrific, too) were the Lagunitas Brewing Co. IPA and the Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA.

2. For spicy foods, try a lager or pilsner. Lagers are one of the two main categories of beer (ales are the other), and pilsners are a subset of lagers—which unsurprisingly originated in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Both are crisp, light (not as in 'light beer,' hideous stuff, but as in 'light on their feet, graceful, invigorating, etc.') golden beers, pilsners typically a bit hoppier. I poured Pilsner Urquell, one of the great names in Pilsner; also shown was Victory's Prima Pils, from Pennsylvania.

3. Don't judge a beer by its color. The idea here is that even if a beer is very dark—Guinness is a case in point—it's not necessarily any "heavier" than a lighter-colored beer (the color comes from the degree to which the malted barley is roasted; charred barley makes for very dark beer). My favorite factoid here is that Guinness actually has slightly fewer calories that Miller or Bud (125 vs. 143 for a 12 oz. serving—see this great chart  on the realbeer.com site). Note that's for Guinness Draught; a shopping snafu left us with bottles of Guinness Extra-Stout on the show, which has higher alc. and so has higher calories.) And yes, Guinness does go very well with raw oysters. In addition to the Guinness, we showed Anchor Porter, a terrific American porter made by Anchor Brewing in San Francisco.

4. Think about beer the way you think about wine—ales pair like red wines, lagers like white. Hence the pairing of Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale (one of my go-to, all-time, fave ales) with the big juicy steak the Today Show folks had lovingly cooked the night before & then brushed with some sort of glistening substance before we went on. Also hence the pairing of Brooklyn Lager with grilled white fish (I'm not sure what sort of fish it was—old, by that point). The ales we didn't pour, but which are still very good, were Old Speckled Hen from the UK's Morland Brewery and Stone Brewing's Arrogant Bastard Ale, which should be drunk simply for its name, of course. The lager was Samuel Adams Boston Lager.

5. Match flavors with flavors. A good general rule. Doesn't have to apply to wheat beers, which is what I chose for the segment, but was effectively illustrated (or would have been, if we hadn't run out of time) by pairing Hoegaarden, a classic white Belgian witbier flavored with coriander and curaçao orange peel against chicken with a citrus salsa. The other beer was a German wheat beer, Hacker-Pschorr Hefeweizen.

6. You aren't a lunatic if you want to pair beer with dessert. Seriously. Among others, really rich Scotch ales, Belgian lambics, and oddball displays of brewing genius like Sam Adams Utopias do work with dessert. For the show we poured Utopias, which is truly unlike any other beer I've come across—it smells more like a blend of Oloroso sherry and good Cognac, clocks in at 25% alcohol, and (hold your breath) costs about $125 a bottle, when you can find it. To be drunk at room temp, in a wine glass. And it works great with chocolate (as does Sam Adams Chocolate Bock, which is radically more affordable). The other beer we had on the table was Lindeman's Framboise, a raspberry lambic from Belgium.