Beer and food matching: Seafood, Sharp's & Stein
As many brewers and beer enthusiasts have found, it's hard to convince the sceptics that matching beer with food is worth even considering.
With so little media interest in beer, the concept simply lacks credibility. To gain it, the beer camp needs allies from outside the beer-tent.
Famous chefs such as Michel Roux Jr have helped enormously, but most of the population never get to eat in Michelin-starred restaurants.
For many, our taste buds are stimulated instead by chefs we recognise from TV and bookshops. If one of these was to nail his apron to the beer and food mast, it could normalise the idea for millions of people.
Happily, one of them now has. In the firmament of celebrity chefs, Rick Stein has always seemed like the sort of bloke you could have a beer with. And in mid-January, a delegation from the British Guild of Beer Writers did just that.
Stein's seafood empire is synonymous with the Cornish village of Padstow, which sits a little way inside the beautiful Camel estuary. At low tide, you can walk across the sands from Padstow to Rock on the other side, a town sometimes dubbed 'Chelsea on Sea'.
This is where Stein came when he decided to put his name on a product for the first time. Because here, amid the Volvos and rugby shirts, was a brewer he recognised as a kindred spirit.
Sharp's Brewery began as a homebrew operation in 1994, grew bigger and faster than anyone anticipated, and upgraded to a 50-barrel brewery in 2002. The following year two colleagues, Joe Keohane and Nick Baker, bought out the founder. Since then they've turned flagship beer Doom Bar into a nationally recognised brand, and last year installed a 100-barrel brewery to cope with demand. This is a small(ish) brewer with very big ideas.
Head brewer Stuart Howe has been around since 2002. His philosophy on mainstream beers such as Doom Bar is that they should be exceedingly drinkable, but he's also fascinated by Belgian beer styles, and uses herbs and spices such as coriander, cinnamon, orange peel and lemon thyme to flavour a range of limited edition, specialist beers.
The new brewery may look like a factory, but it smells like a delicatessen. Stein had found his perfect partner, a short stroll across the bay.
"The idea was to champion local producers and launch something with a real Cornish feel," says Stein. "Beer is our national drink, and while I love a good pint, I wanted a beer that would match with seafood and use local ingredients.
"Stuart came up with this idea of brewing a beer using wild fennel, which just grows in the hedgerows around here.
"So we created Chalky's Bite - it's 6.7 per cent and it really stands up well to seafood, and there's the hint of fennel just in the background. It's perfect with moules marinière - Stuart's a genius in the brewing world."
But there's just one problem with a heady, Belgian-style beer like Chalky's Bite for a beer lover like Stein: "I love it, but you can't drink a lot of it at that strength, so we wanted a lower strength session beer."
The result is Chalky's Bark, brewed with what Stein calls a "charming back note" of ginger. "It's different, it has a bit of finesse," he says. "And it's really not difficult to match with a rugged fish, and proper chips fried in beef dripping."
