Beer, Sausages, Cheese and Chocolate!

Rashleigh Arms Beer & Food night

A real mixture of food and drink and one which you would think could make the average person quite unwell, but this featured in a recent night I ran at the Rashleigh Arms (pictured) in Charlestown.

Beer and food is probably second only to craft beer as being  the buzz words in the beer industry at the moment. Every brewer, small or large is trying to associate their brand with a food dish. In truth, the brewers have not really cracked the association as yet with consumers. There is a lot of talk of thinking beer rather then wine when dining, but in practice very few people think like this. So there is a lot of work still to do!

However, you have to start somewhere and I like a number of other Beer Sommeliers are running beer and food nights of varying types. My night at  the Rashleigh turned out to be a huge success. It helped tremendously that licensee Rob, really wanted to do the night and was also very organised.

We started with matching the sausages first. The Cornish Bratwurst was matched with Korev, a fine crisp, clean Cornish Lager.  If you think of German sausages and beer/lager and how well they go together, it was hardly surprising that this worked well. This was followed by a sausage flavoured with 1913 Stout, which of course was matched with the beer of the same name, followed by a cracked black pepper sausage that matched Admiral's Ale. A spicy sausage matching a spicy beer, it worked well.

Next onto the cheese. This is perhaps the best food match of all as the acidity in the beer cuts through the creaminess of the cheese. Cornish Yarg went down well with Smugglers Vintage, the rich toffee vanilla of the ale balancing the fullness of a powerful cheese. A real surprise was how well smoked cheese matched Clouded Yellow with the natural banana, clove and coriander of the beer, scrubbing the tongue clean of the smoked cheese ready for the next mouthful. A real match of contrasts but they worked very well together.

Finally onto the chocolate and what we really needed here was a fruit beer, but St Austell don't have one in the range at the moment (watch this space!). However using Proper Black, a black IPA, full of citrus hops and expresso coffee flavours, then this was a fine match with a coffee flavoured chocolate.

In total we had over 50 people for the evening, all of which had been introduced of the concept of matching beer and food when dining. In my view there are no rights or wrongs with this concept, but some combinations do work better than others. Luckily everyone is different so try some experiments of your own.