Move Over, Merlot: Beer Is Here

An interesting thing is happening at some of the finer dining establishments across the country: Craft beers are showing up in places normally reserved for wine.

Often thought of as the not-so-polished cousin of wine, beer has been the pal you have over for the football game, a picnic or a weekend barbecue. Beer is fun and friendly. Beer might accompany you at a burger joint or a pizza place, but you wouldn't want beer to be your companion at a restaurant with a real tablecloth and fancy napkins, right?

Wrong.

Craft, or micro-brewed, beers are versatile enough to be there at a baseball game, and dress up for a four-course meal.

Just like wine, craft beers come in many different styles and flavors. Official beer style guides list 26 categories of beer styles, with a number of subcategories under those. Craft beers are varietal, seasonal and complex enough to hold their own alongside everything from soup to dessert.

Proof of this is in the numbers of brewer's dinners that are popping up across the country. At these dinners, a local microbrewer will pair up a series of different styles of beers with several of a restaurant's dishes. The results are not only tasty, but also educational.

Because there are so many varieties of beers -- everything from a light, crisp pilsner (think chardonnay) to a complex, chocolatey stout (similar to a merlot) -- there are a vast number of options for matching beer with food.

A Brew Master's dinner took place recently at the Heathman Restaurant, one of many fine-dining establishments in my hometown of Portland, Ore. The brewers of MacTarnahan's Brewing Co., paired up some of their brews with a four-course meal designed and prepared with the beer styles in mind by the restaurant's head chef -- who, by the way, is a homebrewer.

The results were outstanding for the 20 or so attendees who paid $35 each for the four-course meal. Not exactly chump change, but this was not your average pub fare, either.

The meal started with crispy Willapa Bay oysters with a Cajun remoulade and pemodoraccio compote paired with MacTarnahan's Amber ale, a medium-bodied beer with a nice balance of malty sweetness and hops for a slightly bitter bite. The beer was a fine accompaniment to the sweet oysters with the hoppy bitterness providing the perfect edge to keep the combination from being too cloying.

Diners then were treated to MacTarnahan's Black Watch Cream Porter with an entrée of Painted Hills blade-tip beef braised in a reduction of the Black Watch Porter, potato gnocchi and glazed vegetables. Diners seemed a little nervous at first when they were not given steak knives to use on their beef. They soon learned that having been braised in the porter, the beef was fork-tender. The robustly rich porter reduction married perfectly with the succulent beef, and created a stunning sauce for the gnocchi and vegetables.

Next up was crusty bread with artisan cheeses (mariolles, cantal and morbier) and a quince paste. Generous amounts of honey in the Honey Beer that accompanied the cheeses provided a sweet and simple backdrop -- a good choice after so much complexity with the previous beef-and-porter combination.

Finally, diners were treated to MacFrost, a robust and zesty winter warmer that is partially brewed with wheat. The MacFrost was paired with an apple beignet (sort of like a fritter) and cinnamon ice cream. Yes, beer and ice cream. The Bavarian yeast the brewers use for this particular beer lends a hint of spiciness (cloves, cinnamon) to MacFrost, making it a perfect dessert beer.

Dinners like these are proof that beer can more than hold its own at a fancy dinner event. I, for one, propose a toast to seeing beer lists that rival wine lists in fine dinner establishments across the country. Cheers to beers!