Beer, cider and mead: We have your perfect Thanksgiving pairings

From burlingtonfreepress.com

Thanksgiving dinner is probably the largest meal that many of us will eat all year, and it can be one of the most complex in terms of flavours and dishes served. Hours upon hours are dedicated to the preparation of a perfect meal, but it seems that when it comes to picking out the perfect beverages for the dinner table, sometimes the energy runs out.

Most sources will direct you to the wine section of the grocery store. While wine is fine for some, not everyone can dig it. So after you grab a bottle of pinot noir and rosé, head over to the beer, cider and mead section for some excellent Thanksgiving pairings.

Before we get started, a few general guidelines. First, think about the main dish. Are you having turkey, ham, or maybe you’re preparing a vegetarian or vegan meal this year. Whichever way you go, start your pairing work from the main dish and work your way out from there.

Second, consider the sauces and any other strong flavours that may play a large part in the complete meal. Salty gravy can swing a pairing away from beverages with bitterness or high tannins, as these both intensify saltiness. Sour or sweeter pairings will help off-set salty dishes. And herbs like rosemary and spices like clove can completely transform the flavour of a dish. Look for complementary pairings to enhance these flavours.

Lastly, consider how heavy and filling your meal will be. In general, for Thanksgiving meals, I recommend picking lighter-bodied styles of beer with high carbonation levels, drier meads and ciders with crisp acidity to help clear your palate and refresh you for another bite.

Jeff Baker's Thanskgiving pairing mantra is "Belgian-style saisons are superb with the bird!" But he also has beer, cider and mead for each dish. (Photo: Getty Images)

Salads

The main things to consider are how bitter your greens are and what flavours are in your salad dressing. In general, blonde ales and tart saisons work well here. But I tend to enjoy semi-dry ciders better with salads, especially if you incorporate apples into the dish and use a tangy vinaigrette. Try Champlain Orchards (Shoreham) Original Cider. If honey or maple are involved in the dressing, check out Artesano (Groton) Traditional Mead.

Turkey

I can’t say this enough: Belgian-style saisons are superb with the bird! Saison Dupont (Belgium), which is generally agreed to be the benchmark of the style, will offer spicy notes of white pepper, citrus and herbs, and a high carbonation level which will refresh your palate with each sip. Malty amber lagers like Jack’s Abby (Massachusetts) Red Tape Amber Lager and von Trapp (Stowe) Vienna-style Lager will bring out the savory notes in the turkey.

Baked ham

Here’s where you can really play with sweetness, especially if you’re involving a glaze or fruit in the recipe. Groennfell (Colchester) Wayfarer Mead, an oak-aged amber mead, has a lush palate with warm oaky flavors somewhere between a barrel-aged Chardonnay and a malty German Kölsch, but a dry finish to cut through any fat or sweetness.

If you’re going with a savoury ham preparation, consider a slightly less-dry cider to offset the saltiness. Check  bottle shops for Farnum Hill (New Hampshire) Semi-Dry Cider or Eden Specialty Ciders (Newport) Semi-Dry Cider, both of which will be robust enough to complement the sweet and salty flavours in the ham, and still crisp and light-bodied enough to refresh you between bites.

Brown ales and are right at home with pork, too. With honey-baked ham, you might try a Belgian Tripel, such as Unibroue (Quebec) “La Fin Du Monde,” which has notes of stone fruit and fresh flowers to complement the honey, and snappy carbonation which balances out the sweetness.

Stuffing and mashed potatoes

Don't neglect the side dishes. Classic stuffing and mashed potatoes need a beer that is crisp enough to cut through their heft and also adds a little spice to the pairing. Try a German-style wheat beer like Weihenstephaner (Germany) Hefe-Weissbier, or if IPA is more your thing, try Sierra Nevada (California and North Carolina) “Celebration Ale,” a fresh hop IPA.

Sweet potatoes

The caramel-y goodness of sweet potatoes will find a friend in a smokey, but not overly bitter, Scotch ale. Consider adding a few ounces of Founders (Michigan) Backwoods Bastard, a Bourbon barrel-aged Scotch ale, into the glaze for yams or sweet potatoes, and then pairing the dish with the same. If maple is involved, try to get your hands on some bottles of Dieu du Ciel! (Quebec) Équinoxe du Printemps, a Scotch ale brewed with maple syrup for spring time, but which ages gracefully into fall.

The caramel-y goodness of sweet potatoes will find a friend in a smokey, but not overly bitter, Scotch ale. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Cranberry sauce

Belgian-style wheat beers are spiced with orange peel and coriander seeds which really sing next to cranberry sauces. Try Allagash (Maine) White, Hoegaarden (Belgium) Witbier or Unibroue (Quebec) Blanche de Chambly.

If you are forgoing the cranberry sauce, but would like a little pucker on the dinner table, break out your Great Aunt’s cordial glasses and pour each of your dinner guests a few ounces of any one of these options during dinner: Downeast Cider (Massachusetts) Cranberry Blend; Citizen Cider (Burlington) Companion Sour Cherry Cider; or Havoc Mead (Colchester) Psychopomp Sour Cherry Mead (the name is fitting for some family meals, no?). These can serve as a nice intermezzo in lieu of sorbet between courses. And who has time to make sorbet, am I right?

Pies

Thanksgiving isn't really complete without pies. I used to pose that as a question, but at this stage in my life, I know that pies at Thanksgiving are fait accompli. For pumpkin pie, turn up the spices with some Shacksbury Cider (Vergennes) Ginger Spritz, a low alcohol session cider spritzer spiked with a tincture of ginger, galangal and bitter orange prepared by Alice & the Magician (Burlington). With berry pies, try a sweet-and-tart ciders like Boyden Valley (Cambridge) Cran-Bog cranberry cider. Pecan pie is right at home with a roasty-and-rich stouts like Long Trail (Bridgewater Corners) Unearthed. Apple pie and porter pair nicely - look for Queen City (Burlington) Yorkshire Porter or Ballast Point (California) “Victory At Sea,” an Imperial porter brewed with vanilla and coffee. For cream pies maybe just stick with a cup of black coffee, but spike it with a dose of Vermont Ice (Cambridge) Maple Cream Liqueur.

Jeff Baker has recommendations for beer, cider and mead for each Thanksgiving dish, plus some drinks that can be served between courses. (Photo: JEFF BAKER/for the FREE PRESS)

Gluten free

Enjoying a gluten-free Thanksgiving meal doesn't mean you have to skip the beer. Green's (Belgium) “Discovery” Amber Ale and Glutenberg (Quebec) Red Ale are both super versatile at the table. Ciders, meads and some ginger beers are also naturally gluten free. In addition to the ones mentioned above, look for products from Stormalong Cider (Massachusetts) and Moonlight Meadery (New Hampshire). For a spicy addition check out Halyard Brewing Co.’s (South Burlington) alcoholic ginger beers. Or if you’re looking for a funkier flavor profile, turn to Fable Farm Fermentory (Barnard) ciders.

Non-alcoholic

No alcohol? No problem! There are lots of craft no alcohol options available in Vermont which will work perfectly at the Thanksgiving table. Look for All Times Sparkling Cider (Burlington), Barritt’s (Bermuda) Ginger Beer, and Fentimans Botanically Brewed (England) Curiosity Cola.

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/life/food/2017/11/16/beer-cider-and-mead-we-have-your-perfect-thanksgiving-pairings/870666001/

Sipping on Moonshine

From thehindu.com

As India’s first meadery opens, we find out why mead isn’t just fermented honey and water, and how the country got a new liquor category

For those of us who have heard of mead, it has always been that elusive drink we’ve read about in the pages of Beowulf or imagined being toasted in the halls of Valhalla. Ambrosia, Heaven’s Dew or the Drink of the Gods, or by any other name, it was a thing of lore forgotten by time. Well, almost.
The last decade has seen the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage stage a comeback. In the US, mead is currently the fastest-growing alcoholic category, a statistic that seems to have ruffled a few feathers, including that of big bird, Budweiser, which mocked it in one of its recent advertisements. In 2003, the US had about 30 commercial meaderies; today, there are more than 350! 2017 mead reports estimate that in the States a new meadery opens every three days. When it comes to the rest of the world, that figure changes to one every seven days.
On home turf, we have Rohan Rehani and Nitin V to thank for drawing this honey ferment out of the make-believe world of dungeons and dragons, and bringing it to our neighbourhood bars. That is, if your neighbourhood happens to be Mumbai or Pune.

Trial and error
Nitin and I first connected when a common craft-brewer friend put us in touch. We later met at a mall during one of his trips to Delhi — he’d carried a sample of his mead, which we sneakily tasted in a Starbucks takeaway cup. That was two years ago. Four weeks ago, Moonshine Meadery, based in Maharashtra, officially became India’s first meadery.
The two 33-year-olds, both mechanical engineers by education, have been close friends for over three decades. In 2014, Nitin had read about meads in an in-flight magazine while travelling from Brussels to Munich. “I took pictures of the article and sent them to Rohan as soon as I landed. Within two weeks, he had bought honey, a carbouy and wine yeast to begin fermentation,” he says. “We had no reference point; it was all about the concept and the excitement of tinkering with brewing. Our first batch was the absolute worst, as we didn’t know anything about temperature control.”
Batch by batch their meads got better as they figured out what they were doing wrong. They started to employ modern fermentation techniques and improve their equipment. Then they experimented with every fruit and spice they could get their hands on, including gooseberries, cloves, mulberries, cinnamon, apples, mangoes, etc. They also played with varieties of honey. “We used multiflora / wildflower honey for meads which have a strong fruit or spice character. For milder, traditional meads, the type of honey fermented imparts the character,” says Rehani, who, during this journey, pursued special courses on bee keeping (from the Central Bee Keeping and Training Institute, Pune) and later, interned with Colony Meadery in Pennsylvania. By late 2015, Rohan and Nitin knew they wanted to set up a meadery.

Millennial toast
The Moonshine duo was aware that obtaining licenses would be troublesome. It’s hard enough for a new player in an established space, but it’s another battle to get one for a category that isn’t recognised by Indian law. Beginning the process in January 2016, multiple rounds of research and bureaucratic back-and-forth finally got it included in the excise legislation. This June, Maharashtra became the first (and currently, only) state to formally recognise mead as a category under wine.
Internationally, the mead boom is largely credited to piqued interests among the Game of Thrones fandom. Ironic, considering the drink has never (yet) made an appearance on the show. While pop-culture references have made the term more common, the popularity of ‘craft beverages’, beer in particular, is what Moonshine Meadery is counting on to drive interest and sales. “Both craft beer and mead are about quality, innovation and small-batch productions. Meads are where craft beer was 20 years ago,” says Rehani. Also, as Nitin adds, “Millennials are experimenting more with their alcohol. This has resulted in a growth in cocktails and innovative alcohol beverages.”
Along with trying new recipes, provenance of raw materials is key. Being a homegrown product, they use all natural, locally-sourced ingredients. Their first bottled variants are an Apple Cyder Mead, which uses honey from Maharashtra’s Western Ghats with Kashmiri apple juice, and a Coffee Mead, with coffee from Chikmagalur.

Testing waters
Educating the market is one of the most important things Moonshine will have to tackle. Shailendra Bist, head brewer at Independence Brewing Company, says, “Drawing parallels to cider, a product that is currently much better known, is perhaps the best way to start.” One of the criticisms they are likely to come up against is that mead is a ‘sweet, woman’s drink’. “For us, it invokes the imagery of Vikings throwing back a drinking horn full of mead before charging into battle. That’s as manly as it can get! It’s up to meaderies like us to decide what the perception will be in five years,” Nitin adds.
So far Moonshine Meadery has done a few collaborative brews with breweries in Pune and Mumbai, which have found instant appeal even with first-timers. Most recently, at the Octobrew fest in Nashik — where the meads were exhibited alongside other craft brews — they managed to go through an impressive 217 litres in just six hours! “Everyone approaches it with curiosity. Once they try it, they are bowled over by how refreshing and balanced it is. We expected our Apple Cyder Mead to be popular, but we’ve been astonished by the love for our Coffee Mead,” says Nitin.
By mid-November, restaurants and a few select outlets will retail Moonshine Meadery’s bottles (at ₹180 for 330 ml). The plan is to expand to all major cities within the next two years. “We want to make this a national brand. We will have multiple variants and we will continue to experiment,” he concludes.

http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/food/sipping-on-moonshine/article20102883.ece