Diced onions crackle in a frying pan, their odor wafting together with the smell of fresh cilantro and slow-cooked chicken. Someone is making tacos in an effort to make this dingy college apartment a home. Soon a gourmet meal graces a chipped dinner plate, pots and pans sit on the stove, pools of grease cooling, promising to be a nuisance later. But that’s not a problem yet. There are more pressing issues: devouring food and deciding what to wash the meal down with.
“I don’t put a lot of thought into it but sometimes, like tonight, when I make Mexican food or something, I like to have a beer that complements it,” recent University of Oregon graduate Andrew Holdun said as he cracked the tab on his Dos Equis tallboy.
“Sometimes, like tonight, there are certain beers that work well with certain food and make the meal better,” he said.
Perhaps it’s a bit extreme, (Hey, a beer’s a beer, right?) but food and beer pairing is a real thing. As we prepare to enter the “real world” these culture lessons take on exaggerated meaning.
Knowing whether the hoppy bitterness of an IPA complements a spicy dish or a decadent dessert could be the difference between getting that first big promotion or crashing on your parent’s couch while you update your LinkedIn account. Yes, food and beer pairing is important. Luckily we live in a perfect environment to take baby steps into refinement: Eugene has a wide variety of restaurants, an equally wide variety of local microbrews and a highly concentrated group of young people eager to share their beer and food habits.
“I like a lot of curries and similar type foods, and an India Pale Ale really works nicely with them,” UO senior Kelly Kirk said. “The hoppiness of an IPA kind of equalizes the bite of the spicy food. They complement each other.”
Eugene has plenty of restaurants. For example Sweet Basil or Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen and BBQ to name but a few, offer plenty of spicy food. Local breweries like Ninkasi, Oakshire and Falling Sky have prolific IPAs in their ranks.
“Porters and stouts are really rich and filling, and when you drink them with dinner they can overpower the food,” UO senior Kacy Neal said. “But they really work well with some foods like desserts.”
Who knew that beer and food could be so complicated? No one can fault someone if they want to drink a Rolling Rock and eat a bag of potato chips, but it doesn’t take a lot of effort to transform your beer and food palette.
“I mean it’s not a big deal, but drinking a hefeweizen and eating a salad together is great, or red ale and burger,” Kirk said. “It’s a pretty simple thing, but it makes eating and drinking more enjoyable.”
Beer and food offer a wealth of possibilities individually, and together they’re a complicated and rewarding tandem.
“Choosing the wrong kind of beer and food together can be disastrous,” Neal said. “But the right ones together can be great.”
This is food and beer for thought, but perhaps the only fool-proof method is trial and error.