It’s not a copy of any particular sour beer that I’ve had, which means I only screw it up if I don’t like it.  I’m using the cherry nut-brown I made last summer as a base and Wyeast’s seasonal Roeselare blend of beasties as my grand priests of funk.

I remarked at the time that the cherry nut-brown would work well as a sour beer. It being cherry season and one of the plastic buckets I use for primary fermentation starting to wear out, I decided that now was definitely the time to give it a try.

As I started my boil, some friends who share my love of food and drink dropped by. We talked about our favourite subject and pretty soon were thoroughly salivating. They quickly ran home to pick up a few goodies and the party started.

With the wort boiling in the background we laid out our entirely impromptu and home-made spread:

• porter
• rye/multi-grain bread
• duck-breast prosciutto
• goat labneh
• 3 chutneys

I’ve remarked on porter’s affinity with duck-breast prosciutto before and rye bread slips in nicely between those two.

The unique mix of musty goat-milk flavours and yoghurt sourness from the labneh balanced well with the other treats and gave a kind of funky milk-stout effect to the porter.

The revelation was chutney with duck-breast prosciutto. The powerfully sweet and spicy chutneys worked really well with the concentrated game flavours of the duck. Porter is not the ideal complement to chutney, but the chutney, duck and porter combination wasn’t bad.

Great company, great food, great drink: an excellent way to make a 3 hour boil evaporate into the warm summer evening.

Chutney is now on the menu and with a significant peach and plum crop on the way expect to see some ideas here soon.

The beer is now safely in the fermenter while my post-brew mess remains. Before I start cleaning up, I have a bunch question for anyone who has used any of Wyeasts bacteria and yeast blends to ferment a fruit beer.

If I remember correctly, Cantillion beers spend their entire lives in one fermenter. Isn’t this a recipe for the yeast autolysis? or does the bacteria inhibit autolysis in some way?

Fruit normally gets added to 6-month old beer. I presume this is because they can only make these beers in the colder months and only get fruit in the hotter months. Does the timing of fruit additions affect the final beer?

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Sour Company

Dungeness Crab

Dungeness crab season goes from April to July. You can catch crab any time of the year, but if, like me, you only go after crab when they are spawning in shallow waters, then crab season is April to July.

Waiting for the crabs to move to shallow waters means crabbing involves wading in shallow waters looking to scoop up any legal-sized crab. It’s a lot more enjoyable when compared to periodically checking traps dropped in deep water.

Crab season may last up to 4 months, but, most of the time, you’re not going to find more than a couple of legal-size crabs.

This past weekend was not most of the time. After 2 days of catching my limit, throwing back tons of otherwise legal crab, I found myself with a lot of crab that needed to be eaten soon. Time to make something special.

Dungeness Crab Linguine

Just saying it makes my mouth water, mmm Dungeness crab linguine. I don’t measure when I cook so all quantities are rough estimates

Ingredients

• 2 Dungeness Crabs
• 1 tsp Fennel Seed
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1/2 tsp Paprika
• 1 pinch Ground Chili Pepper (or anything else that adds a tiny bit of heat)
• 1 small bunch of Chive (or shalott or onion)
• 1 tsp Fresh Thyme
• 3 cloves Garlic (or more if you’re like me)
• Olive Oil
• 375 mg Linguine

Instructions

1. Crush or grind fennel seed.
2. Pre-heat olive oil and add fennel seed.
3. After about a minute, add crab meat, salt, paprika, chili pepper and enough oil to lightly coat all of the ingredients.
4. Just before the pasta is ready, add thyme, chive and garlic. Cook until you start to smell the garlic (30 sec to 1 min) and remove from heat.
5. Serve over pasta.

Beer Pairing Recommendations

Dungeness crab goes well with herbs and citrus fruit so British and American IPA are both on the menu.

Wheat beers go with pretty much any food, but anise that sometimes gets added to Belgian Wit beers will get you bonus points with the licorice-flavoured fennel seed.

Strong Belgian Amber beers will also do a nice job balancing all the strong flavours in the recipe. The extra sweetness in a strong beer is a nice counterpoint to a recipe that otherwise lacks sugar.

On this particular day, I had a home-brewed ESB. The ESB was less hoppy than typical American ESBs, but was more caramelised than British ESBs. It was quite nice, if not sublime. The caramelisation wasn’t ideal, but the malt sweetness and hop aroma and bitterness blended nicely.

Photo Credit: Will Scullin

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Dungeness Crab Linguine Recipe

Tasting Labneh

Labneh tastes like cream cheese with a little yoghurt sourness. I expected it to be very sour, but a lot of the sourness drains off with the whey.

Labneh is used in all sorts of middle-eastern cuisine, but I wanted the labneh flavours featured against the beer. So I decided to serve the labneh with garlic and salt mixed in, sprinkled with cumin, oregano and marjoram, and served with tomatoes, Moroccan black olives, and freshly grilled flat bread.

Pairing Beer and Labneh

My choice of beers is Unibroue’s Maudite, a strong, red Belgian ale.

The match is excellent. The full-body and phenols balances the sourness of the labneh. The malt flavours blossom with the body, phenols, and sourness in balance only to be subplanted by the herb flavours from the labneh. Truly an excellent match.

The strong, full-bodied beer also holds its own against the Moroccan spiced olives. Maybe not perfect, but the beer withstands some very assertive flavours and almost complements them. A perfect match with the olives will probably not work with the labneh, so this is an excellent compromise.

Final Pairing Recommendations

I haven’t tried labneh with any other beers, but I expect it and olives to work well with tripels. A Belgian amber strong ale would also be a good match. I imagine the fruity-malt flavours of Duvel would work particularly well against the cream cheese and yoghurt flavours of Labneh and with the spicy Moroccan olives.

The labneh paired with any of these beers would make an excellent appetizer or snack for particularly honoured company.

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Labneh and Beer

The classic combination is prosciutto and melon. I don’t know of any beers with melon flavours, but a nice fruity wheat beer should probably do the trick. I chose my own Almost Heaven Belgian Wheat Beer.

Another combination is prosciutto with plain bread or crackers to cleanse the palate without interfering with the flavours of the prosciutto. The obvious pairing would be a good, bready pale ale, but I decided to try something a little different: the classic Czech pilsner Budvar which is a little more bitter than pale ale, but not nearly as bitter as the original Pilsner Urquell, and has all the bread-malt flavours of English pale ale.

In addition to the the pairings derived at from common food combinations, I tried R&B’s Hopgoblin IPA, and two Belgian-style tripels Unibroue’s Maudite and Brooklyn Brewery’s Local 1 reasoning that the duck breast prosciutto could stand up very well to these strongly flavoured beers.

Finally, after reading Garrett Oliver’s prosciutto recommendations from (drumroll for Amazon affiliate link please) The Brewmaster’s Table, I got some roastier or more caramelly beers to try with the duck breast prosciutto. My choices were Guinness, Fat Cat Brewing’s Pompous Pompadour Porter, and Aventinus’s Weizen-Eisbock (my first ever eisbock).

Tasting the Beer and Prosciutto

Just about any beer with duck breast prosciutto works acceptably well. The duck is quite fatty, but beer really cuts through the fat and salt quickly asserting its own characteristics. Having said that, there were some winners and losers.

The Winning Combinations

I’m quite gratified that my first choice was correct. The Almost Heaven Belgian Witbier was excellent. The fruit flavours and aroma really offset the saltiness of the duck prosciutto while the farmhouse flavours of the Witbier complemented the hints of game or duck from the prosciutto.

Probably the best combinations, though, were Porter and the Eisbock. In both cases the dark malt and caramel flavours complemented the cured duck, but I think it was the sweetness of the two beers that was the key to making the combinations work. Rather than cutting through the salty flavours of the duck, the sweetness balanced them giving the rich malts a chance to shine. The nutty caramelly flavours of the Eisbock in particular paired really well with the prosciutto. I imagine that a supremely expensive acorn-fed Jamon Iberico http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamón_ibérico must taste similar.

Finally, the Budvar was good. It didn’t complement the prosciutto the same way the other beers did. But it clearly cut through the salty cured meat flavours refreshing your palate without conflict.

The Losing Combinations

The astringent rubbing alcohol-like phenol flavours and spices of the full-bodied Belgian tripels, Maudite and Local 1, played dangerous game competing with the salt from the prosciutto. The Local 1 hit a bit of a sweet-spot and actually came out a little fruit-like which was quite pleasant, but mostly these two beers seemed in conflict with the prosciutto flavours.

The IPA also didn’t fare so well. It wasn’t horrible. It cut through the flavours of the prosciutto, but, like the Belgian tripels, the hop bitterness seemed in conflict with the stronger prosciutto flavours.

Final Pairing Recommendations

When pairing duck prosciutto with beer try one of the following recommendations:

• A sweet, dark, malty beer to balance the saltiness while bringing out the malt flavours. Try sweet stout, porter, nut-brown ale, any kind of bock, British mild.
• A fruity beer to complement the salty-cured meat flavours while refreshing the palate. Try any kind of European wheat beer, except possibly Berliner Weisse.
• A light-coloured bread-like beer to refresh your palate while letting the duck prosciutto shine. Try a good pale ale, blonde, or one of the less bitter pilsners.

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Pairing Duck Prosciutto and Beer