An Argument for Why Beer Is Better Than Wine for Food Pairings

With all due respect to wine, I firmly believe that no alcoholic beverage pairs better with food than beer. Beer’s ingredients, versatility, and the creativity that brewers put into beer’s range of styles can create experiences that evoke uniquely sensory memories of food and inspire innovative pairings. 

Let’s pull back a bit to discuss beer’s four main ingredients. Each has its own character, aromas, and flavors, and each is experienced in non-beer ways almost every day of our lives, most often through food. 

The culinary components of beer

Water

The four main ingredients in beer are water, malt, hops, and yeast. Layered on top of those is an endless buffet of ingredients that intrepid brewers can add to their recipes. 

Water can be hard or soft, refreshingly neutral, brackish, or teeming with salt. There’s also certainly a difference between treated city water and water drawn from a country well. Water tastes differently depending on where it comes from, and many of beer’s earliest established recipes were derived from the salt or mineral content of the cities where the beer was brewed. 

Grains

When steeped in water during the brewing process, grains create sugars that will later be converted to alcohol and help to give beer its color. These grains are typically roasted before being added to beer. 

At the start, grain, or malt can have a slight toasted aspect, like Cheerios, before getting darker and taking on flavors of Grape Nuts, white bread toast, caramel, chocolate, coffee, and toffee. Wheat adds an earthy fullness to beer, like country bread. Rye brings a spicy character to a recipe. 

From here, the possibilities run deep. Some brewers utilize smoked malts that impart aromas and flavors of campfire or barbecue. In recent years maltsters have taken to adding outside ingredients into their malt during processing. One notable example is to add cinnamon and sugar to create a gingerbread-like flavor. 

Hops

Hops are part of the cannabis family, and have often been described as dank, earthy, sticky, or even skunky. Hops have also been indelibly associated with the word “bitter,” which can often be a difficult flavor profile to work with in food. But with a little practice, it’s easy to get past the upfront bitter elements and to focus on the flavors that are truly present like citrus, pine, herbal, and vegetal notes. Depending on the hop variety, these flavors can come through in a variety of ways, evoking orange peel, lemon pith, lime zest, or tangerine flesh. 

Newer hop varieties bring fresh, dynamic flavors to the glass, and it’s now possible to get flavors and aromas of pineapple, mango, blueberry, peach, strawberry, cedar, gooseberry, and more from beer hops. 

Additionally, modern brewers are taking the old familiar India pale ale (IPA) to new places. There are milkshake IPAs brewed with peanut butter and chocolate, or fruit purees dosed with lactose to give the beers a creamy, dessert-like feel. The hops you may recall with bitterness have been improved upon, experimented with, and that experimentation means more options for you, the drinker and for pairing with a meal. 

Yeast

Yeast is arguably the most important ingredient since it’s the microbe that converts the sugar in beer into alcohol. Depending on the strain, yeast can bring flavors and aromas of honey, flowers, bubble gum, banana, clove, spice, leather, tobacco, and more. It’s also abundant in nature, so while many brewers will get their samples from a lab, others pluck them out of the air and allow it to inoculate a brew, creating a sense of place. 

Finally, there’s the endless array of additional ingredients that brewers may add to beer. Commonly included are food-specific herbs and spices from mint to pink peppercorn. From there, things can get a little wacky with brewers utilizing everything from Skittles to marshmallows, Swedish fish, and even white truffle. Brewers can then take their beers and age them in bourbon or wine barrels for extra flavor.

Unlike wine or other drinks with stringent rules surrounding their ingredients and production, beer is a blank canvas that can be used to indulge a range of whims and flavors. There’s really nothing that’s off limits. 

Finding the perfect beer and food pairing for you

With the food-forward flavors of beer in mind, it’s easy to start building flavor bridges from what is in the glass to what is on the plate. There are things to consider. Similar flavors can be complimentary, so a chocolate forward stout will often pair well with desserts from cherry pie to vanilla ice cream. Lemony citrus forward beers will pair well with shellfish. Sweet, honey-like, beers can pair well with savory meats like ham. 

There’s no simple rule to the perfect pairing, but the versatility of beer and food cannot be understated. One great example is the IPA. It’s a lovely pairing with spicy Thai or Mexican dishes. But it also pairs really well with assertive funky cheeses like gorgonzola and is just delightful with a slice of carrot cake. 

It’s hard to find another alcoholic drink that can do all that. And with so many beer choices available these days, it’s worth getting a few different styles, opening them with dinner and see what really pops. Because when it comes to food and drink pairings, most of the fun comes from the game of figuring out why.