We sell wine and we are happy to pair it with anything in the case. We also stand in the middle of a brewery district, and that opens up a whole other set of answers. Urban Orchard is next door. Green Man is up on Buxton, Burial is over on Collier, and The Whale keeps a cooler around the corner with beers nobody has heard of.
Cheese is fat and salt. Two or three bites in, your mouth coats over and everything after that tastes muted. Carbonation strips the coating off. A beer with live bubbles clears your palate between bites, which is why a board holds its interest longer when there is beer sitting next to it.
Malt does the other half of the work. Toast a grain and you get caramel and something close to roasted nuts. Age a cheese long enough and it arrives at those same flavors from a completely different direction. When a pairing feels easy, malt is usually why.
Timing is on your side this month. The apples are coming down out of Henderson County, so the ciders pouring right now were fruit a few weeks ago. Märzen season lands around the same time.
Spinning Spider chèvre and a dry cider get along because both of them are bright and a little sharp, and apple has an affinity for fresh goat cheese that goes back a very long way. Urban Orchard is close enough that you can buy the cheese and be sitting down with a glass before it warms up.
Looking Glass makes an English style cheddar called Drovers Road, about forty minutes from where you are standing. Green Man was the first brewery on the South Slope and built its reputation on English ales. Put an ESB against a wedge of Drovers Road and the malt runs straight into those little crystals that form in cheddar as it ages.
Taleggio with a saison works on a different principle. The yeast in the beer and the cultures living on the rind of the cheese are close relatives, so the flavors have already met before anything reaches your tongue. Burial built a national name on farmhouse ales. Dry carbonation and a little pepper cut through how buttery Taleggio gets once it sits out. There is a seasonal wrinkle too. The cheese comes from a family named for cows walking down tired from summer pasture in autumn.
Here is where we watch people go wrong. The instinct is to grab the hoppiest IPA in the room and put it against the loudest cheese on the board, which is going to be a blue. Bitterness and salt push each other up. Against that much fat the beer thins out and goes metallic and the cheese turns harsh. Blue wants sugar and roast, so hand it a stout, or a barleywine if you want the whole thing to behave like dessert.
Come by before you head out for a pint. Tell us where you are going and what you plan to drink, and we will pick the cheese for you. If we name a style and nobody nearby has it on, The Whale can track down most things.
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