Beer with that?

The Monteith's Wild Food Challenge encourages Suzanne Dale to enjoy a good brew

Photography and styling by Tamara West

You may have noticed it when dining out this July — a menu that includes a rather creatively named dish paired with a beer or cider. The 16^th annual Monteith's Wild Food Challenge is on again with 143 teams from restaurants around the country vying for $15,000 in prize money for the best match.

The competition takes in all sorts of establishments from Logan Brown in Wellington to your local pub. Not to be confused with the Wild Food Festival in Hokitika, wild food in this case could be the protein chosen, the way the main element of the dish is prepared or it could be an unusual complementary ingredient. Or it could be all three. Though it’s unlikely you will be offered deep fried locusts or huhu grubs, the Green Man Pub in Wellington has created The Stag’s Roar, a local venison denver leg and lightly crumbed lambs’ kidney on kumara celeriac mash. It comes with an optional shot of stag semen…

Head judge and creator of the event Kerry Tyack is a man who really knows how to pair beer and cider with food, and he admits it’s quite a complex business. At the Monteith’s Brewery in Greymouth, where new and interesting small batch beers are created for the local market, a lunch to launch the challenge included crispy Canterbury pork belly paired with Monteith’s Apple Cider. So obvious when you think of it, but so divine.

Here are Kerry’s tips to consider when pairing beers and ciders with foods, some matches from Monteith’s and how to best serve your brews for optimum flavour:

• When looking for a beer to match to food, taste the beer first before the food. Neither food nor beer should overpower the other.
• It is fine to serve beer with dessert. Opt for the sweetness and maltiness of darker beers. Belgian fruit beers are also good with desserts and cheeses. Try alcoholic ginger beer with feta cheese, pilsner with washed rind cheeses, double-hopped India Pale Ale with ripe camembert or brie.
• In Kerry's opinion, hard cheeses go better with beer than wine. The sweetness of beer suits the lactose in the cheese. Porter is a good option with flavour-added cheeses such as those with cumin.
• Be careful with garnishes in your food. So often, Kerry says, it's the last bit of sauce or aioli drizzled on top of the dish that throws off the match.
• If you really want to analyse how well a match is working, you are going to have to eat quite a bit of the food and really drink the beer. Once food hits the palate it changes so you need to drink and eat through the dish to see how both will work together.
• Lagers and lighter ales are great with dishes with more subtle flavours such as shellfish and chicken. However, a contrast of flavours will work well too. Think lagers with spicy foods and lighter curries.
• Pilsners and more bitter beers are good with herb flavours, tomato or capsicum sauces and smoked ingredients. They go well with mussels steamed in a garlic broth. Some pilsners also work well with spicy food. Where you have a dish using chilli, you need a beer with enough strength of ;lavour to contrast it, so a pilsner would be a good option. You don't want the flavour of the food to overpower the beer.
• Dark beers are perfect with hearty meaty dishes with rich sauces but they also go well with raw oysters and cured meats.
• Malty beers go well with lamb, beef, veal and pork.
• Apple cider is wonderful with pork, with a strong soft blue cheese and with gouda cheese and crackers.

Serving to savour

1. Like cider, Kerry says beer should be served one degree lower than room temperature if you want to really appreciate the complexity of the drink. Hops vary in character and, as well as acting as a preservative, they add bitterness and aroma to beer. The aroma is an important part of the tasting experience and if you serve beer too cold you will lose that.
2. Never drink beer from the bottle if you want to taste it properly. The narrow bottle neck will only deliver the beer to the front of the mouth where sweetness is tasted so that will be your overriding impression. If you want the aroma and want to understand the complexity of a beer it should be in a glass so it can coat all of the taste buds.
3. It may be popular practice but it is a mistake putting cider over ice. It just kills the apple flavour.
4. Unlike wine tasting, when you taste a beer, you shouldn't spit it out. Yay! Bitterness is tasted at the back of the throat so you need to swallow beer to taste it properly.