Summary
Tonight, she's one of two taste meistere leading an eager group through the Vermont Pub & Brewery's second annual beer and cheese pairing. The other is Greg Noonan, the Pub's brewmaster and co-owner. Behind the scenes, his business partner, Steven Polewacyk, is making sure the heady stuff keeps flowing. And it's a good thing. In front of each guest is an individual plate of nine Vermont cheeses - a decadent spread ranging from Willow Hill's aromatic, washed-rind Paniolo to Jasper Hill's rich Bayley Hazen Blue. Throughout the evening, increasingly talkative participants will sample each selection with a different Green Mountain brew. While many of the beers are the Pub's own, there are also offerings from Trout River, Otter Creek and McNeill's.
That's a lot of choice curds to pair with the suds - as attendees of last year's conferenee discovered at a beer-and-cheese-pairing seminar. There Garrett Oliver, brewmaster at the Brooklyn Brewery and one of the world's foremost experts on pairing beer and food, stated in no uncertain terms that beer and cheese go better together than wine and cheese, a sentiment he echoes in his book The Brewmaster's Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. (See accompanying interview.) In a section on the "principles of matching beer with food," Oliver opines, "The dirty little secret of the wine world is that most wine, especially red wine, is a very poor match for cheese." Beer, on the other hand, "can do a lot better - it can find such harmony with cheese that you won't know where the beer ends and the cheese begins."D. J. D'Amico agrees; he's a UVM grad student and avid home brewer who worked with Oliver to create the pairings for the seminar. While the explosion of quality beers is exciting, D'Amico guesses it could make the pairing amateur feel overwhelmed. When D'Amico is planning a tasting for folks who aren't sensory experts, he aims to keep things simple by matching the "aspect of cheese that's most obvious and [the] aspect of beer that's the most obvious," he says. For example, a nutty, mountainstyle cheese like Gruyere goes well with a similarly nutty beer: an amber ale, perhaps. D'Amico also suggests that novice tasters try lots of different things and "take obsessive notes about what you like and what works for you.See the full content of this document
Extract
Made in Hop Heaven
"Before you bite into the cheese, observe the cheese," a woman wearing a microphone headset urges while she strolls among the tables at the crowded Vermont Pub & Brewery. "Touch the cheese with your fingers," she continues in Spanish-accented English. "When a cheese has high moisture, you can play with it like Play-Doh."
Around the room, people comply, holding chunks of Maplebrook Farms' fresh mozzarella to their noses and sniffing it or squishin...See the full content of this document
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