CityLife

Matching beer and cheese

White Shield 1 / 2 images

HOW many ploughmen do you know? And how likely are they to sit down after a long day ploughing a lone furrow and crack open a bottle of IPA and a truckle of cheddar for lunch?

‘Pickles, Gromit?’ I asked Dr George Philliskirk and the editor of the embryo Oxford Companion To Beer looked bitterly affronted. Keep the palate clean!

Matching cheese with individual bottled beers is a serious business but not entirely unpleasurable. Quicke’s 30-month-old Vintage Cheddar and Worthington’s White Shield India Pale Ale is indeed a mating fit for a rural trencherman.

We are in Didsbury’s Cheese Hamlet – the best cheese shop for miles around and a former national deli of the year – sitting in a decidely spartan store-room.

Equally distinctive

Arthur Axon, who founded the shop 50 years ago (his son John now runs it), has chosen from the Hamlet’s succulent stock six unpasteurised cheeses to pair with six equally distinctive beers George has brought along.

Devotion to duty or what, his home base is Britain’s brewing capital Burton-upon-Trent. As a director of the Beer Academy in London, his mission is to raise awareness of our great national drink.

I am quite happy to have my awareness of White Shield raised. It must be 20 years since I’ve tasted it and it is a revelation.

Burton-brewed using the Derbyshire town’s famous soft water, it is bottle-conditioned. The small minus? It throws a yeast deposit. The big plus?

That sediment helps this 5.5 ABV beaut develop in bottle. In traditional IPA style, geared to surviving a three year-voyage out to our brave boys in Victorian India, it is extremely hoppy.

The complexity, from marmalade on the nose through to a long bittersweet finish, is matched by the nutty cheeses beguiling mix of acidity and sweetness.

Savoury and sweet

If that was a cheesy, beery epiphany, the other pairings all worked, matching like with like – delicate with delicate, spice with spice, pungent with pungent.

As George explained, both products share a great affinity. ‘‘Cheese provides a creamy, salty, aromatic experience, while beer supplies a range of savoury and sweet styles, with a fresh acidity, complexity of flavour, an undertone of alcohol and a slight fizz of C02 to freshen the mouth.’’

Alsace speciality Kasteel Cru, fermented with champagne yeast, is on the delicate side despite its 5.2 ABV. Appley with very low bitterness, reminiscent of a lightly sparkling cider it offered a fresh zing complementing mushroomy unpasteurised Camembert.

Two Grolsch beers from Holland next. The 5.3 ABV Weizen (a cloudy wheat beer in the Hoegaarden style but not as soapy) smelled disarmingly of bananas. A certain herbiness present gave it affinity with a Carre aux Herbes soft goat’s cheese covered in greenery.

Refreshingly tart

The more familiar Grolsch Premium Lager (ABV 5per cent), had bananas on the nose too but was spicier and full-bodied, able just to stand up to the nutty, buttery assault of Old Amsterdam 18-month old Gouda.

Next up, the beer/cheese equivalent of a scone with raspberry jam. The beer was a proper Frambozen, raspberry beer fermented with both wild and cultivated yeasts.

Bacchus Frambozen reeks of rasberries but the fruit on the palate is refreshingly tart. The soft, creamy St Felicien cheese match would be paired with Beaujolais in the region both come from, but this makes sense, too.

Colston Basset was our only pasteurised cheese (the Stilton producers panicked en masse and abandoned raw milk during the Eighties lysteria scare). Still, with its deep blue veins that become more pronounced as it matures, this is as good a Stilton as you can get, creamy/salty in one glorious package.

Triple hopped

A 7.2 ABV Old Ale was chosen to stand up to and enhance it . The rich, fruity sweetness of the triple-fermented, triple hopped Brakspear Triple from Oxfordshire is emphasised by the saltiness. Who needs port?

The BEERS are widely available – here is just a sample: Kasteel Cru (Booths, Waitrose and selected Morrisons and Sainsbury’s £1.99); Grolsch Weizen (Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, £1.99); Grolsch lager (Asda, Morrison, from £1.58); Bacchus Frambozen (Sainsbury’s £2.39), Worthington’s White Shield (Sainsbury’s £1.89); Brakspear Triple Old Ale (Sainsbury’s, £2.09).

The CHEESES are all from the Cheese Hamlet, 706 Wilmslow Road, Manchester, M20 2DW (0161 434 4781, cheesehamlet.com): Camembert de Nornmandie £4.5 250g; Quicke’s Vintage Cheddar £4.95 250g; Carre aux Herbes £5.99 each; Old Amsterdam, £4.95 250g; St Felicien, £4.49 each; Colston Bassett Stilton £4.95 250g.