and Summer
to Spicy Foods
Pasta Sauce
Stephen Beaumont on
Matching Beer to Spicy Foods
If you travel where hot and spicy food is served as a matter of course, even if that only means travelling as far as your local Tex-Mex restaurant, you will always find people enjoying their food with plenty of cold lager. While there is certainly nothing wrong with this practice, it is somewhat misguided in that these diners are actually looking for nothing more in their beer than a fire extinguisher, a liquid so cold and thirst-quenching that it counters the intense heat of the chilies. They don't want beer, they want ice water!
It was a Toronto restaurateur named John Maxwell who first introduced me to a different way of looking at beer and hot food pairings. Up to that point, I had willingly subscribed to the cold lager philosophy and because I love chili peppers and fiery hot sauces, that meant that I was drinking my share of cold lager with many of my meals. But that all changed at an annual convention of the Canadian Amateur Brewers Association where, during a beer luncheon orchestrated by John and chef Matthew Flett, I sampled a chicken in mole sauce dish paired with a local pale ale.
It was a revelation! Even though the mole sauce was only mildly spicy (as a mole should be), there was enough pepper there to tip me off to the point that John was making with this match: Instead of cold lager for hot food, why not try a hoppy ale? It was a brilliant suggestion and one that I immediately took to heart and began to practice. Hops and fire...how wonderful!
The reason for using hoppy ales to mate with spicy foods is actually quite simple and for the most part, the same reason wine writers recommend high acidity wines such as German rieslings to handle gastronomic heat. The key in this relationship is the ability of the ale's hoppy bitterness to mellow the flame of the spice without needing to be served at the lager's mouth-numbingly cold temperature. After all, you are presumably eating the spice because you like the flavour and sensation you get from it, so why would you want to freeze your mouth and your palate with ice-cold beer?
The other reason for the superiority of the pale ale as a mate for hot and spicy fare lies in the fullness of its body relative to that of pilsners or North American lagers, or rieslings. Because there is more to peppery foods than just the pepper, you need a beer that will hold up to the spice not just because of its hoppiness but also because of the presence of formidable character. For this reason, even the hoppiest of pilsners will not handle food heat as adeptly as a pale ale or, if very a four-alarm blaze is involved, an IPA with the extra hop and a bit more alcohol to help fight the flames.
This wonderful marriage works anywhere foods are cooked to be significantly hot -- Caribbean rotis and jerks, Tex-Mex cuisine, certain Thai foods, the hotter styles of curry and some of the spicier Cajun fare. In retrospect, however, I do not think that the relationship extends to traditional Mexican foods and admit that I probably would have chosen a doppelbock for the mole sauce back at that beer luncheon -- but I'm glad that John saw things differently.
A Taste for Beer © Stephen Beaumont, 1995
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