BrewDog Dinner Part 1

BrewDog's favourite bedtime reading comes from Mark Dredge at www.pencilandspoon.blogspot.com

He writes about our 2 favourite things, beer and food, in such a fresh, insightful and cutting edge manner. We were thrilled when Mark accepted our invitation to pair some BrewDog beers with food and write a series of guest blog articles on his findings.  Here is the first instalment. The recipes will be made available as a download soon!

BrewDog's Dinner

Food and beer are natural accomplices and if you like to drink good craft beer then I'd happily bet that you like good food too. The whole ‘wine or beer with food' argument is dull. Beer wipes the floor with wine in all categories, in all styles, all courses and all occasions. I'd willingly put a beer up against any wine you've got and for any course. Try me. The beauty of beer is its variety of style and strength and its spectrum of flavours - flavours impossible to find in wine. It has an inherent savoury quality; it has all the fruits you can think of; malt from bread to caramel to coffee; mouthfeel from water to syrup. It's casual yet refined, simple yet complex.

If you have a plate of food and it tastes nice with the beer you have then you've got a match. Matches are easy. What you want is more than just a match. The food and beer should meet, spin around and then launch off in a new direction. It's a result greater than the sum of its parts. It's 1+1=3.

Punk IPA

Traditional logic tells you to have an Indian dish. Don't. That was with the old-school IPAs; this is new-skool. The juicy tropical fruits and zesty, citrusy hops lifts this into the American class of IPA and that means a different cuisine: Thai. The fresh, fragrant spices are softened by the creamy toffee malt, the fruity sweetness combines perfectly with the fresh ingredients and then the fizz and the big hop finish - similar to a bite of citrus acidity - cleanses your palate. Thai green curry is a winner as the coco-nutty sweetness and lime sourness waltz around with the beer (the sugar in Thai food balances the bitterness of the beer perfectly). Simple seafood is also great with a Punk - prawns or squid. Chili is no problem either. And good old English fish and chips works a treat too.

Punk is also great as an ingredient. Make a chicken and mango salad (Punk and mango is very good) and prepare a dressing of oil, vinegar, chili, garlic, honey and Punk (you can spare a little from the bottle, but make sure it's not cold or fizzy when doing the dressing). Serve the rest of the beer with the dish. Or try Thai-style mussels: fry onion, garlic and chili, add fresh mussels, a glug of light stock or something sweet like pineapple juice (this counters the hop bitterness), then add Punk, steam for a few minutes and finish with lime, coriander and basil. Like moules mariniere, but with Bite.

Stay tuned for the next installment. In the meantime be sure and check out Mark's super cool blog!

www.pencilandspoon.blogspot.com