Sunday, October 7, 2012

We had our first session of Beer School this week and it went very well. Together with the cheese genius,  David Conway-Lama, at C'est Cheese in Port Jefferson we put together a real tasty pairing. He really helped me out by picking three perfect pairings to our Rochefort beers.



The Rochefort 6 was paired with one of my personal favorite cheeses, the Beemster. This Dutch cheese is aged for an astonishing 26 months. It develops little crunchy sugar crystals and very nice toffee flavors. This was a nice way to pair the light fruit, malt, and yeast flavors that characterize this classic beer.



With the Rochefort 8 we called upon the Comté, a French unpasteurized cow's milk cheese. The slick creamy mouth feel and spice characteristics of the 8 blended with the cheeses herb spice. It gets this quality from the cows grazing on wild herbs in the highlands of the Alps. It was a very interesting combination that had different flavors emerge depending on which you consumed first, the beer or the cheese.



Rochefort 10 is an absolute monster of a beer. David provided a great soft blue cheese, St. Agur, that was able to stand up to this legend. This was my favorite pairing for several reasons. I'm usually not at all a fan of blue cheeses with some of them making me feel like total crap. I'm looking at you Gorgonzola. However this cheese was incredible. Both the beer and cheese had an intense creamy mouth feel that coated the taste buds and didn't budge. Along with the fruity, malty, and dark sugar flavors the beer provided, the funkiness of the blue was undercut. By far David's best choice in my opinion. 

Keep your eyes peeled for new events we have coming up soon. There's a Spanish style pig roast on the 26th and an all Japanese craft beer dinner in December.




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