A liquid lunch with Melissa Cole

When the late Inspector Morse was chastised for having liquid lunches he would reply “Beer is food”. But while beer is nourishing and full of protein and vitamins, having some solids alongside is recommended as part of a balanced diet.

Just as important, beer is a fine companion at the dining table and is the equal of wine when it comes to matching food with alcohol.

The revival of interest in good beer has brought with it a greater appreciation of its deserved place at the table. Many pubs now stage beer-and-food matching events and the habit has spread to some upmarket restaurants. I have conducted such events at the Park Lane Hilton in London and Raymond Blanc’s renowned Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire.

In St Albans I helped devise a beer list for Lussmanns restaurant. It’s run – with two other branches in Harpenden and Hertford -- by Andrei Lussmann who has won many awards for his cooking and his insistence on using the finest food sourced wherever possible from local suppliers. He has just won, for the second year running, the top award in the small restaurant category of the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s awards.

When I first sat down with Andrei and his team of chefs and waiters, many of them were sceptical about offering beer to their customers. But the penny has dropped. We held a successful beer-and-cheese evening in St Albans and I was impressed to see how many diners were choosing beer with their meals when I visited the Harpenden restaurant.

I was keen to see if fellow beer writers shared my belief that beer should not play second fiddle to wine. I was pushing at an open door when I invited Melissa Cole to have lunch at Lussmanns. As well as writing extensively about beer, including her book and blog Let Me Tell You About Beer, she has studied food and cooking and knows as much about soups and sauces as she does malts and hops.

We started with an aperitif beer, in Melissa’s case a British-brewed Freedom Pilsner while I chose 3 Brewers’ Classic English Ale from a two-year-old and highly successful local brewery. Taste buds tingling, we turned out attention to the food. For starters, Melissa picked sprats while I went for a Stilton, poached pear and walnut salad. Her beer companion was Grain Brewery’s Wheat Beer, which she said was based more on the Belgian than the German style and offered citrus fruit and spice notes that blended well with the sprats.

My choice was another Pilsner beer, in this case Meantime’s Greenwich Pilsner with creamy malt and peppery hops meeting the challenge of tangy cheese, sweet fruit and nuts in my starter.

Our main courses were, for Melissa, venison casserole with cabbage while I chose a spiced tomato and chick pea hotpot with cumin and seasonal vegetables. I plumped for another Meantime brew, Porter, while Melissa also chose a dark beer, Grain’s Blackwood Stout.

I found the porter, with its rich malt, espresso coffee and peppery hops, cut through the spiciness of the hotpot while Melissa judged the acidity of the roasted malts in the stout to perfectly balance the richness and juiciness of the meat.

While we were tempted by the desserts on the menu we decided to share the English cheese board, aware from long experience that beer and cheese are perfect companions. The cheeses were a superb offering of Lincolnshire Poacher, Bosworth Ash, Cotswold White, Shropshire Blue and Coastal Cheddar.

While I was pondering the beer list to see which brew to choose, Melissa pulled a rabbit from her hat or, to be more, precise, an imperial stout from her bag. The beer in question is Fuller’s Imperial Stout, a 10.7% bottle-fermented beer, based on the London stouts brewed in the 18^th and 19^th century for export to Russia and the Baltic States.

It’s a beer of extraordinary complexity that Melissa had brewed in collaboration with Fuller’s brewster Georgina Young. Pale malt is augmented by imperial, brown and chocolate malts, brewing sugar and treacle, and hopped with Centennial, Sovereign and Goldings varieties. The finished beer is then aged for three months with the addition of rosebuds.

This joyous mouthful, with roasted grain, earthy rosebuds, marshmallow, chocolate, coffee, liquorice and peppery hops, created a symphony of delight as it blended with and cut the richness of tangy, creamy and acidic cheeses.

We sank back in our seats, replete, and convinced as never before that beer and food were a marriage made in heaven. We were treading a long path. The Ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles, asked to recommend the perfect diet, replied: “bread, meat, vegetables and beer”. We were in good company, Melissa and me.

*Print version Publican’s Morning Advertiser, 12 March 2015. Fuller’s Imperial Stout: see Beer of the Month on this site. Below: Andrei Lussmann (right) with other winners in the Sustainable Restaurant Awards with Raymond Blanc (centre)