Beer and Cheese Tasting at the Cricketer’s Arms

This piece was written by our good friend and beer festival bar manager, Mike, for the "Oxford Drinker". Unfortunately, it didn't make it into the magazine due to lack of space. We intend to hold another beer and food tasting session sometime soon as it was a very good evening and for a first event of this type, a reasonable turn-out, even if I had to split my time between this event and serving Christmas dinners!

Anyway, here's the article, complete and unabridged:

21st December 2010

I have always enjoyed a nice piece of cheese, and on special occasions I can even be persuaded to try a pint of beer, but I had never thought of putting the two together so the Christmas Beer and Cheese Tasting at the Cricketer’s Arms in Littleworth seemed like the ideal opportunity to give it a try.

Stuart (landlord at the Cricketer’s) had obviously put some thought into the matching process, and spent a few minutes explaining to us how he had tried to find cheeses that would both complement and contrast with the beers on the bar. We were given strict instructions on how to proceed (cheese to be followed by beer, and each beer/cheese combination to be taken in the listed order) and then armed with a piece of paper for making notes, we were let loose in the back room where a table had been piled with cheese and biscuits.

First on the list was Loddon Razzle Dazzle matched with greek feta cheese. Razzle Dazzle is a blonde beer with plenty of citrus hops and Feta is a sheeps milk cheese with a distinct sharpness to it, so this immediately picked up the citrus notes in the beer. After a couple of mouthfuls, though, the effect became slightly overpowering and the other thing about feta is that it is very salty, and this, for me, made it the least successful as a match for any of the beers.

Next up was an old favourite - Hook Norton bitter - but matched, unexpectedly, with a French brie. The brie was just as I like it (creamy without being runny) and the Hooky was on top form, so I suppose there wasn’t much to go wrong but the surprise was just how well the flavours went together, the well-roundedness of the Hooky somehow working together with the smoothness of the Brie and adding up to more than the sum of the parts.

The third option was good old English cheddar with Shotover Prospect. The cheddar was what you might call an ‘ordinary’ cheese from Stuart and Angie’s usual supplier but despite the ‘ordinariness’ it was a big hit. Proper cheese, like real ale, is a living product and the maturation process means that no two batches will ever be exactly the same. As Angie’s cheese-grater-in-chief, Stuart admitted that he’s come to know this particular cheddar better that he might like, but said that he thought it was a particularly fine batch. It was creamy, with a real depth of flavour but without being sharp or overpowering and as a cheese on its right was my favourite of the evening. With the Prospect, it seemed to enhance both the malt and the hop flavours, but with a slight taming effect on the bitterness.

Last, but not least, we had a Stilton matched with Hook Norton Twelve Days. Both of these are favourites of mine so I was expecting a bit of a treat and I wasn’t disappointed. The surprise here was that after the cheese, the beer came through with a strong smokiness which I have never particularly noticed before. Interestingly, though, on second and third attempts the smokiness faded into the background and more subtle and recognisable flavours started to come through.

Having been once through the list, I decided to throw caution to the winds and try some of my own combinations. The Prospect was probably the most interesting to do this with - as anyone who has tried it will know, it is a very flavourful beer and each cheese seemed to bring out different aspects of it. The Twelve Days turned out not to follow the cheddar particularly well, but in a happy accident I found that following the Twelve days with the cheddar added to the finish of the beer and brought out even more flavour from the cheese. This resulted in several contented minutes (and almost half a pint) chasing the Twelve Days with the cheddar, followed by the stilton and back to the Twelve Days again.

Finally, with plenty of cheese still on the table, myself and my companion had to tear ourselves away before we became too full to move, and we rounded the evening off with a last half. We agreed that the Prospect had probably been the most interesting to experiment with and that the cheddar was the cheese of the evening but the outstanding recommendation has to be the Hooky Bitter with brie - definitely something I will be trying again.

All-in-all it was a very pleasant way to spend an evening. The relaxed but busy atmosphere at the Cricketer’s was probably the ideal setting for something like this (I have always avoided similar tasting exercises in the past because of the formality) and at the introductory price of £3 for the cheese, it was extremely good value. Roll on the next one.