Judging Pairing and Pop-ups

CAMRA welcomes crafty kegs

I was pleased to see that, last year's AGM vote notwithstanding, in 2019 CAMRA seems finally to have accepted craft beer into its world, courtesy of a special Key Keg "pavilion" at the Great British Beer Festival. The pavilion featured bars offering ales from Magic Rock, Wild Beer, Siren and Tiny Rebel and there was another whole bar of key-kegged goodies from the likes of the Kernel, Eight Arch, Pig and Porter and more. I did my rounds and sampled several beers but, like last year, the bulk of my time at the festival was spent in an activity. Last year it was a Belgian beer tasting session. This time I went for beer judging.

Why beer judging? Am I planning to offer my services at the next local beer festival? Well, maybe, but my main motivation was to learn more about blind tasting, about how to describe beers accurately and to just be more beer-aware. I was also interested to find out how much I knew compared to people who had had a lot more experience at analysing beers than myself.

I also thought it would be interesting to learn how CAMRA manages the process of selecting its champion beers.That part of the day was an eye-opener. It turns out that there are just five categories of ale that are assessed at the summer festival - milds, bitters, best bitters, strong bitters and golden ales, to which is added a sixth, catch-all category: "specialty" [sic] beers. To these are added the winners of the winter festival judging, these additional categories being old ales/strong milds, porters, stouts and barley wines/strong old ales.

It seems to me that there are several key omissions from the above list but one in particular stands out like the sorest of thumbs. What about IPA, a style so prevalent in 2019 that CAMRA stalwart Roger Protz has devoted a whole book to it? No one can argue that IPA is mainly available in keg form either. I defy any serious pubgoer to visit any three bars in their home town and not find a cask version on sale in at least one. I would argue that there may soon be a case for the inclusion of wheat beer, for sours and even for saisons, since these are all styles that are being brewed in cask in sufficient quantities to justify their inclusion in CAMRA's judging.

How's the mouthfeel, then?

So many beers, so little time.

And so to the judging event. There were around two dozen of us and the tables of six were made up of people with a range of judging experience, from CAMRA officials, with many years of judging experience, right the way down to neophytes like me. We were asked to assess three different batches of ales, in three different categories : milds, best bitters and a variety round. This involved a total of thirteen beers. Perhaps deliberately, no attempts were made to serve the beers in prime condition. This did, in part, replicate some of the things that can go wrong with beer. Some were flat, others had spoiled, and none were in prime condition. Still, most were drinkable.

For me, it did provide an opportunity to compare different beers in the same style and attempt to define what they had in common as well as what made them different from each other. We were encouraged to discuss our reactions as a group before coming up with our scores. There were opinionated voices, of course, but the debates were mostly amiable and surprisingly consensual. 

My highest score, though not by much, went to Castle Rock Preservation Best Bitter, a beer I knew by name but had never drunk before. The surprising lowest score went to Tiny Rebel Cwtch and I wasn't alone in scoring it low. The consensus was that it had spoiled before it was served up to us.

So what did I learn? Reassuringly, the main conclusion I drew was that I knew more than I thought I did. The session also underlined an important lesson about any assessment of food and drink: it's all about the taste. What I like to drink is almost certainly not the same as what you like. And what does that tell you? That certain agreed rules are necessary if you hope to be objective.

Does my beer taste big with this?

BBQ pork ribs, accompanied by Lost Pier's Double Fruited Sour

My first experience of beer and food pairing was five years ago or so, when Charita bought me an "experience" for my birthday. It was at a restaurant in the centre of Brighton which is no longer there. We had four smallish plates, all of which had a different beer to accompany them. I don't remember any of the dishes but I do remember that one of the beers was Brewdog Punk IPA. It was the first time I'd drunk a fruity, floral pale ale and it made quite an impact.

Then at last year's Great British Beer Festival, I bought Jeff Evans' excellent book So you want to be a beer expert, and found that it had an interesting feature on beer and food pairing. It prompted me to begin paying attention to the beers that I was drinking with my evening meal, and when I went out to eat I tried whenever possible to find a beer that would complement my food. My interest more than piqued, I next bought what looked to be the definitive tome on the subject, Mark Dredge's Beer and food matching. It taught me a lot. However, fascinating as the book is, it seemed as though too many of Mark's suggested beers were neither native to the UK, nor readily available on import.

I decided that it was time to do my own research. By happy coincidence my wife Charita (aka Momma Cherri) had started to offer soul food cooking and dining experiences in our house and I saw an opportunity to practice the skills that I needed. I began to experiment by pairing beers with some of the dishes that I was already familiar with. I did, however, take some important lessons from Mark Dredge's book. First of all, the richer, spicier, more complex the dish, the stronger the beer needed to be. Second, and the opposite of the first, subtle, delicate flavours went best with beers that were similar. Desserts, unsurprisingly, went best with sweeter beers, and so on.

But I came to one conclusion that I don't think I've come across anywhere else and it's this. If you don't care for a particular beer style - for instance I am not keen on pale lagers or pilsners - then don't bother trying to pair it with the food that supposedly goes best with it. Besides you can usually find a similar style that does go and which you prefer. For pilsner read wheat beer, for best bitter read session IPA, etc.

The first Momma Cherri dining experience at which I curated was a surprising (to me!) success. The matches were as follows:

Starter: Catfish Goujons - Northern Monk New World IPA
Main: Meat Jambalaya - Wild Card DIPA
Dessert - Peach Cobbler - de Halve Maan Straffe Hendrik Tripel

The next stage involved leaving the house ...

Popping up in Portslade

Having linked up with Charita via the Momma Cherri dining experiences it was just a small step to hooking up with some of my favourite pubs. I had noticed that the Brooksteed Alehouse in Worthing and the Bison Craft House in Hove had regular pop-ups where they invited caterers such as Kitgum Kitchen and Pizzaface to pitch up outside and sell their wares to the pubs' patrons. When the Foghorn in Portslade advertised their first pop-up I went in and asked if they would be interested in a visit from Momma Cherri. They were.

We've now done two at the Foghorn and, as a result of my connections, Momma Cherri has now also appeared twice at the Castle in Worthing, as well as the Holler (now UnBarred) taproom in Brighton and even The Pub micropub in Broadstairs! I was able, at both Foghorn pop-ups, to find out what beers they were likely to have available and to make some suggestions as to possible matches. These appear to have been well received although I was extremely disappointed that, at our second visit, a possible tie-in was missed. A few days beforehand, I had visited the pub and discovered that they had, on tap, a Key Lime Pie Sour from Four Pure. It also turned out to be a quite fantastic beer. When I got home I suggested to Charita that she put Key Lime Pie on the menu for Saturday, only for us to discover that the Four Pure had been replaced by Northern Monk's We Were Mint to Be! OK, it's also a lovely beer but even so ...

Still, Momma's Key Lime Pie and Four Pure Key Lime Pie Sour - is a different kind of tie-in possible here?

Notes and queries

You can book a Momma Cherri dining experience via Air b'n'b (it's not just places to stay, you know!)

Also, if you haven't discovered Momma's You Tube channel, you really should. Even if you hate cooking it's worth watching because it's funnier than most stand-up comedy. OK, I'm biased, but seriously, check it out!

And if you want to contact me you can find me on social media:

Twitter: @goateephil

Instagram: @goateephil

Facebook: www.facebook.scom/goateephil (or goateephilbeer)

If you're visiting Brighton and Hove, I'm on Air b'n'b too, offering beer tours of Hove.