Craft beers give wine fundis food for thought
Samantha Venter
BEER is a beer is a lager, right? Wrong! For those who still think of beer as the stuff produced by industrial giants and guzzled by the gallon at sports matches, there is a whole world of flavour waiting to be discovered.
Craft beers – and beer-and-food pairing – are catching on in South Africa in a big way and enlivening the palates of hardened lager lovers. They are importing and brewing craft beer, flocking to the numerous craft beer festivals across the land, blogging about it, buying and selling it online, and dreaming up foodie combinations for its wide range of flavours.
Port Elizabeth has not been left out of the trend, with South African micro-brewing pioneer Lex Mitchell doing a roaring trade in his Boar's Head range brewed on site at Bridge Street Brewery, while demand for the Bavarian craft beers imported from small family-run breweries by Cape Town's Brewers&Union has local distributors WineZani on-the-hop.
WineZani's Eugene Joubert said craft beer's attraction lay in the growing move to "hand-made" artisan, boutique products made with pure ingredients and no additives, as well the fuller, richer tastes and aromas resulting from slow, natural fermentation.
"You don't get that 'beer-bloat' feeling with craft beer. It's unfiltered, unpasteurised, and slow matured over six to eight weeks," he said.
Natural fermentation means the bubbles are there in the beer naturally and do not evaporate on standing.
One way to spot a quality craft beer, Joubert demonstrated, is to gently swirl it and watch the foam re-cap the beer.
The trick with pairing food and beer is to go for hearty, lively flavours, adding stronger flavours the more hoppy and bitter the beer is. Similarly to wine pairing, a general rule of thumb is to pair sweet with sweet, and tart with tart, and you can use a very hoppy beer in place of a pairing that calls for a wine with strong acidity.
On the lines of wine pairing, pale unfiltered ales can be treated like unwooded white wines, the fruity Weiss (wheat) beers like a wooded white, an amber lager like Brewers&Union's Berne like a lighter style of red wine, and the dark lager like a full-bodied red.
The kitchen whizzes at Colonial Kitchen in the Bridge Street hub showed Weekend Post the possibilities of beer and food pairing recently, in what may well become a regular event, said co-owner Ananja Bouwer.
New to the Brewers&Union range, the Sunday Easy IPA is a gently spicy, lightly citrusy pale ale, sipped alongside a panini holding bacon, matured boerenkaas, onion marmalade and rocket. The strong tangy flavours went really well with the beer, with the sprinkle of lemon zest on the sandwich bringing out the citrusiness of the beer.
Another new addition, is Handwerk All-Day IPA, its golden syrup colour offering herbal, honey, baked apricot flavours that are a perfect partner for spicy food, much like a slightly sweeter white wine like Riesling or Gewurztraminer pairs well with curry. We did just that, pairing the beer with a Thai-style three-bean curry to great effect.
Incidentally, craft beer is best served not ice-cold – a few degrees up the scale allowing the flavours to develop better.
The unfiltered Helles lager is a lighter beer, brewed for six weeks unlike the eight weeks of its siblings. It's an easy-drinking option and great with seafood, balancing well with Colonial Kitchen's salad of sumac-marinated, lemony charred calamari.
The brewers of the Berne amber lager lightly roast the barley, giving a slightly darker colour and nutty, caramel flavours. A flatbread topped with braised lamb, rosemary-infused balsamic reduction, mature mozzarella and basil made a great match – the flavoursome slow-cooked lamb and the sweetness of the balsamic reduction balancing with the toasty bitterness of the beer and enhancing its herby flavours.
The Dark Lager has even more toasted barley, lending it a dark colour and full flavour, but do not be misled by the colour – it's a lager, not a stout. It's also, says Joubert, "the wine drinker's beer" because of its richer layers of flavour and full mouth feel.
A good friend of wild, meaty tastes like biltong, game and oxtail, we enjoyed it with a kudu burger topped with biltong, herby cream cheese and caramelised onions. The onions brought out the beer's toffee-ish flavours and it went down a treat with the strong meaty flavours, balanced with the sweetness of some roasted baby tomatoes.
The star pairing of the outing came from the range's best-selling Steph Weiss, a traditional Bavarian style which has wheat added to the mix of barley, hops, yeast and water to lend a distinctive layer of fruitiness.
Also known as "Germany's breakfast beer", the creaminess of the beer goes well with eggs, carbonara-style sauces, salmon, lobster and Emmentaler cheese.
Bouwer interpreted this with a hand-made tagliatelle topped with a soft poached egg, creamy Hollandaise, smoked salmon and slivers of mild young Parmesan. The medley of creamy, eggy, smoky and slightly tangy flavours truly made the fruity beer sing.
The Brewers&Union range is available at selected restaurants including Colonial Kitchen, Bridge Street Brewery, Charlie Superstar, Bocadillo's, Ginger and De Kelder, as well as bottle stores such as Preston's and Spar Tops. The Newton Park Tops has arguably the widest range of craft beers in town and changes their line-up regularly to introduce new styles and tastes.
