Beer and food pairing - Don't bother

I've tried, I really have. At least once a year I go to a beer and food pairing event, and I try to take it in. I can even remember cut, complement and contrast, the three ways beer is meant to interact with food. But the latest event I went to sent me right back to my long held view that food should be got in at sensible hour before you get to the pub, and the drinking done without any distractions.

I was up at the Florence pub, home of Head in a Hat brewery. Unlike Mordue brewery this one has the more typical everything crammed in as small a space as possible look.

A wide range of beers are produced, in part using recipes inherited when it was taken over and in part drawing on the work of Ron Pattinson. I don't think I'd describe any of them as delicious, but several were interesting. A wheat beer made with Whitbread B yeast was pleasantly drinkable but unsurprisingly lacking in flavour. A sour beer made by inoculating lactobacillus into the wort before boiling went down well with the sour beer fan at my table but wasn't to my taste. Though this method definitely gets the acidity level up the beer lacked the complexity you get from long mixed lambic fermentations. How it would compare to a Berline weiss I couldn't really say as my experience of them was, and will remain, limited.

Of the beers based on historic recipes the 1805 porter was the one I was most pleased to see, and being made with 40% brown malt had a distinctive taste reminiscent of a beer I made using 100% diastatic brown malt.

As to the food we were given a range of courses to share between three of us. Some were good, some were not so good. And none of them went with any of the beers.