Friday Froth: Beer Dinners at Little Pub- Featuring New England Brewing

Anyone who's ever hit happy hour and subsequently remembered they hadn't eaten dinner while staring into a beer at another location sometime around midnight can probably feel the pain of the next morning right now, as you're reading this. Remember that? Well, let's not let that happen again, or allow ourselves to slap late night drive-thru - the FlexTape of Shame - over the leaky bucket of our decisions.

What we need is food with our beers, whether we're adding plates to pitchers and pints at the taproom, or exploring flavor combinations at home. Inspiration struck while I was at my first beer pairing dinner in over two years at The Little Pub in Fairfield, hosted by Greg Radawich, director of brewing operations at New England Brewing Company in Woodbridge. I'll get into what you can have from the brewery and pub, plus a few more ideas to serve as springboards for your own dives into brews and foods.

And if you missed this beer dinner, Little Pub will be hosting another beer pairing dinner with Fat Orange Cat brewery at Little Pub, Fairfield on Tuesday, March 1.

First Course: Chicharrons + Witbier

Our first beer, Can I Get A Witness?, had never left the building at NEBCo before that night. A recipe of orange peel, coriander and a heavy hand with the wheat has resulted in a clean drinker, aromatic with grain and citrus. The chicharrons were served crispy fried, pork rind style, dusted with "Nashville" hot seasoning that didn’t overwhelm, and rounds of fried dill pickles with a malt vinegar aioli. The soft, wheaty beer combined with the roundness of the aioli to take a little edge off the spiced rinds and sharp vinegar, and balanced out the appetizers. 'Witness has just a tiny bit of additional citrusy hops from a dash of Amarillo, and stays very smooth drinking. I can’t wait to have more of it in the summer.

Wits and wheat beers in general play particularly well with creamy foods - think fruit topped cheesecake - or in more umami/herbal pairings, like my beloved moule frites. Their roundness can also help put the brakes on heavily spiced dishes like chili, or pepperoni hot oil pizza.

Second Course: Grilled Shishitos and Crostini with Hazy IPA

After crunching our way through the first course, Greg regained the room's full attention by announcing “the freshest Fuzzy Baby Ducks in town” as our second pour had just come off the brite tank the day before. This all-Citra IPA caused near bedlam when it launched circa 2016 and, though the UnTappd zombie horde has since moved on, it continues to be a deserved favorite among Connecticut hop heads.

Little Pub's shishitos were served with goat cheese crostini, a shoyu drizzle, and the flavors balanced like the top at the end of Inception. Perfectly salty, the peppers provided just a bit of heat smoothed over in following bites by the soft, slightly pungent cheese. The Pub appeared to be using better quality shoyu than might be expected, which soaked into the bread and made each chomp delectable.

As much as I like Fuzzy Baby Ducks (which is "a lot"), I was not in love with the pairing, and here's where I differ from most every beer pairing column you'll ever read...

The pie chart of each IPAs flavors encompasses a few general categories: malt (barley, rye, wheat, etc.), hops (on a scale of bitterness, plus citrus zest, earthy, or pine flavors in West Coast styles, or huge bombs of orange, mango, melon or other fruits in hazies), plus yeast, which we'll leave out for now.

Beer pairing events and recommendations love to match IPAs and Scoville-spicy foods. The pairing has become an automatic shortcut, reflexively accepted because... that's just the way it is. I've never thought it works and, in many cases, makes the pairing worse.

Here's why:

While West Coast IPAs have a thicker backbone of malted grain capable of standing up to the frontal assault of whole chili peppers or the Whompin' Hot wings at the local sportybar, they tend to also have higher IBUs. Butter and oils let a lot of the beer's flavor slide off your tongue, while the malt-shield is quickly eroded by hot sauce. The remaining flavor is bitterness, which, now stripped of the beer's other elements, rasps through as the only component left to taste.

If anything, hazy "New England" IPAs are worse in this regard, because they focus so much on "juicy" hops, they only have a sort of vestigial skeleton of malt to take the blow, leaving the bitterness, while heat effectively erases the sweeter flavor characteristics people go for in the first place.

Why do that? My suggestion for the pairing is a low IBU American lager like Narragansett/PBR/High Life, a märzen, or any of the great helles lagers being made in the U.S. lately, like NEBCo's Raising Helles, Von Trapp Helles or Two Roads Cruise Control.

Wings plus beer designed to be drunk by the pitcher remains an undefeated combination.

Third Course: Cochinita Pibil with Cask-Conditioned DIPA

The group was treated to another beer usually only available at the NEBCo taproom for this pairing: Stegosaurus double IPA, a unique, cask conditioned batch just for the event at Little Pub, triple hopped in the cask with additional Mosaic and Citra hops. Stego' is a smooth, tropical hazy IPA, and this batch became intense with orange and peachy stone fruit and raw, earthy hop flavors in a deeply yeasty suspension. The assertive IPA stood up well to a blend of flavors in the night's entree.

A combination of cochinita pibil pork over cilantro rice was a classic pairing done well at the 'Pub. The slow roasted meat, herbal rice, and sweet, acidic pickled onion provided a balance of flavors and a satisfying medley of protein and carbs. Smokey chipotle black beans were just the thing to bump up the dish's heat and mix in an additional variety of texture. A more modest spice level meant the sweeter fruit flavors of the IPA could still show up, but a dish like this could also work with a roastier black IPA, a porter, NEBCo's Gold Stock, which you should get right now, or a widely available beer like Negra Modelo.

Dessert

Stout is often served at the climax of a beer pairing event, and NEBCo didn't disappoint, bringing a 2018 (released for 2019) Imperial Stout Trooper, one of my all-time favorites in the category. Carmel, molasses, and coffee dance under the nose and practically set my feet tapping. Toffee and alcohol heat spread across the tongue on first sip of this beer, which still had plenty of oaky barrel to it, and finished slightly sharp and dry with the tannins still present, despite the four-year mellowing. Just an intensely pleasurable beer.

Little Pub's fried cheesecake, rolled and cut like a sort of crepe burrito, has huge cream notes with a cinnamon dusting, and is given just a bit of edge with powdered sugar playing off the tiniest sour notes from the cheese. The occasional bite into chunk of bacon in the cheesecake bursts with smoked flavor, but any weight from the dessert lifted cleanly off the palate with the beer's coffee essence and alcohol cutting through the cream. This was an excellent pairing, no notes, 10/10.
Like dessert but craving chocolate? Try pairing it with a fruited sour, like raspberry lambic, or lime gose.

For a taste of the above, Little Pub's food truck can be found at New England Brewing Company in Woodbridge this month.

Go by, mix and match to your mouth's content, and choose your own adventure.

See you out there.

Little Pub: Fairfield, Greenwich, Old Saybrook, Stratford, and Wilton locations.

www.littlepub.com/

New England Brewing Company

175 Amity Rd., Woodbridge

newenglandbrewing.com/