Here’s the thing about dessert. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather end a meal with small selection of truly excellent cheese. If I have to have something sweet though I’d rather it was with beer than wine. Pairing with dessert is a role beer enjoys as long as you give a bit of thought to the proper casting.

As usual, it’s important to match intensities between food and drink. The last thing you want is a big bruiser of a beer to blow a delicate, subtly-flavoured dessert out of the water. Equally, a lightly flavoured beer won’t stand up to a rich, intense chocolate cake.

Roll Out the High-Alcohol Beers

Alcohol is the easiest intensity variable to deal with, so we’ll handle it first. If you’re drinking beer with dessert I’m going to go ahead and guess that it’s not your first glass. Presumably, for earlier courses you have followed the rule of starting with low ABV and increasing with each round. Dessert is the time to roll out the big guns. Anything with “Imperial” or “double” in the name as well as stronger Abbey ales, barley wines, and old ales might be good candidates to go with dessert. In Tasting Beer, Randy Mosher puts 6% ABV as the floor to start at when choosing a dessert beer.

Consider Sweetness

Things get slightly more complicated when we start to think about the sweet-with-bitter relationship. The proverbial experts are divided. On one hand, some beer authors including Garrett Oliver in Brewmaster’s Table and Mirella Amato in Beerology lean toward the rule that a beer should always be as sweet, if not sweeter, then the desert it is paired with. Conversely, Randy Mosher (again in Tasting Beer) gives us license to serve really bitter beers with some of the sweetest dessert options.

I’m also split. Carrot cake with American-style IPA almost always falls flat to me. It’s supposed to be one of those perfect sweet-bitter balances, but never seems to work just right. On the other hand, I really dig the idea of an ice cream based on hoppy beer and included a recipe for one in my cookbook that strikes a balance between the IBUs and sweet, toffee-like pralines. Bottom line, test the match out to see if you like it.

Fruit for Dessert

Dessert presents a (somewhat) rare opportunity to put the labels at the sweeter end of the fruit beer scale to good use. Aim for flavours that will contrast rather than compete – think raspberry flavoured beer with a cherry tart or a cherry beer with strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Stronger Belgian ales, triples in particular, with their abundant yeast-driven flavour will pair nicely with these fruit desserts. A simple combination of in-season berries, lightly sweetened meringues, and a glass of a stronger Abbey offering is one of the pinnacles for beer and dessert.

Carrot cake, check. Ice cream, check. Fruit-based tarts, check. Obviously, we haven’t dealt with one of the biggest slices of the dessert pie (or cake). Chocolate, the king of dessert. There are natural flavor affinities here – if you’ve read more than a couple tasting notes for stout, you’ve seen the word used to describe beer – but there are enough potential pitfalls, as well as diverse opportunities for excellent pairings that we’re going to have to leave beer and chocolate to its own post.

Hopefully this guide has familiarized you with some of the basic ideas for dessert and beer pairings. It does take a bit of care, but there are many excellent opportunities and guests will surely be impressed by the idea of ending a meal with a glass of beer.

Hands up if you’ve had this experience: you’re at a party with an impressive cheese board or you order the cheese course in a restaurant and feel socially obligated to spread that well-ripened brie on an artisanal, nuts-and-fruit-filled cracker or (even worse) a toasted slice of baguette. Just about everyone? I thought so. One bite and there’s nothing but regret for saddling the pinnacle of dairy-based perfection with bread at its most bland and desiccated. Usually by the second bite, I’m searching for a scrap from an un-toasted loaf or just popping unadulterated cheese straight into my mouth.

Bread or crackers aren’t entirely without charm or positive contributions as a cheese-and-whatever match. (After all, a world without grilled cheese sandwiches would be a sad place indeed.) But, what if we could get our bread in liquid form? All of the roasted and toasty flavors of grains and yeast in a glass. Wherever could we find such a marvelous invention?

Semi-sarcastic joking aside some truly sophisticated writing has been devoted to the excellence of this pairing. If beer writers were a basketball team, Randy Mosher and Garrett Oliver would both be on the court for the opening tipoff, so I paid attention when the former quoted the latter in his best-selling book, Tasting Beer. Here’s the excerpt: “cheese is grass processed through a cow and modified by microbes. Beer is also grass processed through a microbe – yeast. So it is not surprising to find a wide range of common flavours from which to draw when seeking pairing possibilities.”

The craft modifier for the beer is in this story’s title and even in the URL. The quality of the cheese is just as important. If you’re unwrapping a cheese slice in a moment of guilty, midnight hunger I think you understand that the best pairing for that is whatever is open.

The rules that apply generally to matching food with beer also hold for cheese: Try to match partners with like intensities; cut saltiness with bitterness; and don’t forget about wildcards like the integrated herbs or smoke flavour.

Here are a few more specific signposts that should lead you to delicious beer and cheese adventures.

Brie and Brown Ale

Soft cheese with a rind on the outside is one of the most troublesome types for wine. By contrast, the toasty malt notes of a brown ale will do an excellent job of backstopping the creaminess and rounding the edges off the funky bloom. Match pungent Camembert-type cheese with American brown ale that has the hops to balance the increased intensity.

Saisons Paired with Nutty Italians

With their nutty flavour and standout texture, good quality, hard Italian cheese (Parmigiano reggiano is the best known of a much larger family) deserves more frequent airtime on cheese boards. Belgian farmhouse ales have the right floral, malty notes to complete the flavour picture and just the right amount of acidity to lift milk fat and refresh the palate.

Big Guns with Aged Blue

Often, both parts of the best pairings come from the same place. English-style barley wines and crumbly, salty blue cheese like Stilton are an excellent example. All of the alcohol and nutty richness in the beer will counter and also highlight the saline funkiness of the cheese.

Take these pairings as starting points and build your own favourite matches. The essential appeal of hosting a party with several open bottles and a variety of cheese is that everyone gets to create their own preferred pairing.

For a variety of social and historical reasons wine is the king of the food pairing castle. In some rare cases – think Thai takeout and sushi – beer has been allowed in as a sometimes alternate by relatively open-minded pairing guides. As the author of a craft beer cookbook, changing that default setting is one of my primary goals. Those who enjoy drinking well-made beer shouldn’t feel that mealtime means they have to switch to another beverage. Because of its variety and special characteristics – bitterness and carbonation to name two – beer can do many things for food that wine could never manage. Here are five pairings to get you started down the path to expertly pairing beer and food together.

Beer and Sausage

If you’ve made your own sausages you’ll know that most recipes can be summarized as a lot of pork with a handful of salt and a few pinches of really flavorful other ingredients. For the lightly flavored, usually pale, German sausages like bratwurst, coriander and citrus zest are often in the list of ingredients. Naturally, these pair well with Belgian and especially Bavarian wheat beers that echo the same flavours. The alcohol in one and salt in the other act as seasoning for its partner. The beer’s carbonation cleans the extra grease from the palate.

Oysters and Stout

Stout looks black, substantial and has a name that suggests cannons and the men who fired them. With their jagged shells raw oysters have a sort of primordial, of-another-world appearance to them. When you get beyond the first impression both are actually quite subtle – dry stouts are often low in alcohol, get a softer edge from their nitrogen, and contribute a faint malt-driven bitterness to a meal. Depending on variety and origin, oysters have a subtle to moderate brininess that picks out the elements in stout and a clean leanness that could not stand up to sharper, more hop-focused beers.

Spicy Curry and IPA

At least on paper we’d like to pair Indian food with Indian beer. The problem is that all of the Indian beer we have access to in Canada are fizzy, industrial lagers. It’s debatable how much IPAs really have to do with India (as opposed to the trend towards bitter beer at home in England during the early nineteenth century), but they make a great partner for spicy Indian curries.

Hop bitterness cleans the palate and prepares it for the next bite of tandoori chicken or lamb rogan josh. Best of all, the relationship runs both ways: complexly flavored curries have a way of highlighting the usually more sedate malt background flavors in an IPA.

One caution: alcohol can spread and amplify the heat from chillies, so it’s best to pair a lower-alcohol American pale ale or session IPA with the truly eye-watering vindaloos.

Ham and Czech Pilsner

Pilsner gets an unfair reputation for being a mild-mannered beer pushover. This likely comes from it’s unfortunate (and distant) association with the bland international lagers that dominate the market. Traditional Czech and southern German pilsner strikes a remarkable balance between clean, somewhat honey-like malt flavor and a surprising amount of hop bitterness. The deep meaty salinity of high-quality ham is the ideal counterpoint that helps emphasize these two main features. The pairing works even better when the ham comes in sandwich format with a gruyere style cheese and moderately sharp mustard.

Steak and Brown Ale

With this duo we’ll stretch more into the intermediate category. Outside of their home in the north of England, brown ales are generally thought of as straightforward and to the point, if not a bit boring. Equally, the fans of big Californian and Tuscan red wines feel like they have the steak category locked down. I think the combination of brown ale and steak does a good job of challenging both of those preconceived notions. A well-made brown ale has just the right amount of roasted malt flavor to complement the same flavours in the crust of the grilled or pan-seared steak. As well, the salt that is requisite for a well-made steak will help to pick out the varied and interesting flavors in the beer.

For the occasions when you want to double down on the luxury and serve your steak with a compound butter or blue cheese sauce go with an American-style brown ale. The added hops will cut through the richness.

Even without discussing some of beer’s greatest specialties like cheese and chocolate (stay tuned for future episodes, Junior Rangers) I think we’ve made a pretty good case that beer and food belong together. For your own experiments be adventurous, keep track of what you like and work in the suggestions from more advanced resources like the Brewers Association’s Craft Beer and Food Pairing Chart.