A Dynamic Duo of IPAs and More Roast Chicken

I roasted another chicken after brewing my tripel, because I was a little tight on time and prep and it’s an easy thing to do. I actually picked up a free range from Trader Joe’s as opposed to New Season’s, which is the natural food grocer I normally like to shop at. This bird ended up having better flavor and texture, which was pleasant surprise. My wife had gotten some Walla Walla sweet onions and more fennel from the local farmer’s market while I was brewing. We’ve been having a lot of raw fennel salads so we opted to actually grill he fennel this time. It ended up being an all grilled/roasted dinner. I did the chicken, sweet onions, and fennel on the grill and roasted more red potatoes in a cast iron skillet in the oven. It’s not the kind of meal I would probably plan for guests because with everything being roasted, there wasn’t a lot of contrast or variety. I should have made some pesto for the chicken or maybe a vinaigrette for the onions or fennel, but I was feeling a little lazy.
It made beer matching a little easier in some ways because all the components of the meal had a caramel sweetness from the grill and a trace of smokiness. Playing into that theme I actually opted for a non-Belgian beer (which I haven’t recently) and went with a couple of IPA’s. IPA works well with this for a few reasons. First it has some caramel malt sweetness that plays up to the fact that all those roasted flavors, but at the same time, it also has enough hop bite to cut through all of the sweetness of the other dishes and actually make them all taste a little less sweet. In fact, using IPA for a meal like this actually makes it the contrasting sensation in the meal. I tried a bottle of Fish Tales Organic IPA, which is brewed with New Zealand Pacific Gem hops. It has moderate body (6.5% alcohol and 1.060 starting gravity, according to their website) but has enough hops on the palate to cut the sweetness of the malt and consequently the sweet, roasted flavors of everything else. It also has an amazing hop nose that is particularly inviting. It‘s a beer I’ve had before but one that I’ve never enjoyed as much before. It was remarkably refreshing with this many roasted foods.

The other IPA I tried with it is one of my reliable standbys: Broken Halo from Widmer Brothers Brewing. I’m a huge fan of Widmer, and not just because they’ve brewed some of my beers commercially as part of the Collaborator project. Rob and Kurt Widmer are both incredibly nice guys, they brew great beer, and run a great brewpub with consistently good food at reasonable prices. Some of their best beers are only available on draft at the Gasthaus, so if you don’t think much of Widmer, you need to get to the Gasthaus and try their other beers. Their Broken Halo IPA is 6% alcohol and comes in at 45 IBUs, so it’s not an incredibly bitter IPA. It’s brewed with a huge amount of hops at the finish of the boil which makes the beer remarkably aromatic, but not that bitter. As Rob once told me “No one ever complained that a beer had too much hop aroma.” The beer is copper colored and definitely seem to fall at the lighter end of bitterness and alcohol for many NW IPAs. But I think that’s why it works well with food. 45 IBUs is still enough to cut through food, but isn’t so high that it overpowers food. Broken Halo is an incredibly refreshing beer partly because of the big fresh hops aromas and flavors, and, as a result, was equally as good with the food.

While I was cooking, I actually had a bottle of Anchor Liberty Ale, which I hadn’t had in quite some time. I’m a big fan of Anchor’s beers as well, but they can be less than stellar in the Portland market because they don’t always move that quickly. (In Oregon, 11% of all of the beer sold is brewed in state, and craft beer accounts for 14% of all beer sales. We drink a lot of our own beer and out of state beers don’t always move that quickly off the shelf.) Liberty Ale is one of the early craft beers and is still true to that tradition. It was first brewed in 1975 when a lot of ingredients that we take for granted now weren’t available, including most of the high-alpha, more refined aroma hops like Columbus, Amarillo, Summit, etc. Liberty Ale has that old school citrusy American hop profile, but stands up well to the more refined hop quality of many newer beers. This was a fairly fresh bottle and was a great beer. If you haven’t had one recently, go and try one to get a taste of where American craft beer came from. It’s an old school style beer that still delivers great complexity and enjoyment. I’m glad I thought to pick one up.