Let’s Get Lit: A Beer, Food and Cigar Pairing Recap

I have always been fascinated with cigars. There’s just something about them that I find sophisticated and cool, old school yet timeless. And, if you haven’t noticed by now, I am a big fan of beers. After one night of drinking and smoking cigars at Rocco’s, I finally was able to get Joe to agree to a time and a date for a beer, food and cigar pairing event. Once he said “yes”, I was super excited as I could now try and marry a bunch of things I was interested into one event.

“But can you really pair beers with cigars? Won’t the cigar’s aroma overpower the beer?”

Short answer: yes and yes.

I wasn’t sure of the answer myself but after going through a dry run with Joe, I was convinced that it is possible to pair cigars with beer. And yes, the smoke does overpower the aromas of beer. But you know what? Cigars will overpower the aroma of just about everything, including wine, brandies and cognacs. What I tell people that smoking cigars isn’t so much about the aroma as it is about the taste. Cigar smoke is inhaled and held in the mouth, so it stands to reason that we’re not smelling the smoke as we are tasting it on our tongues. Knowing that, you could pair beers with cigars, you just need to follow similar guidelines when pairing anything with anything.

By enlarge, these are the principles I use when pairing beer and food:

• Harmonize – Find beers and foods where the flavors mirror, or echo each other.
• Complimentary – Finding beers and foods where the flavors are different but supportive of each other.
• Contrasting – Pairing beers and foods where the flavors are opposite of each other.
• Intensity – Pairing beers and foods of similar impact so neither overpowers the other.

You could use these same guiding principles for pairing wines, distilled spirits and liquors, sodas and even cigars. The most important of these guidelines for pairing beers and cigars is the intensity. The last thing you would want to do is pair a rich, dark, aggressively strong and full-flavored cigar with an American light lager. That won’t do. You might as well as put a fire out with a squirt gun. Take the same cigar and pair it with a Russian Imperial Stout or a malty barleywine and I think you might have something worth writing home about.

With that in mind, here’s the menu and cigar recap

Course 1
Beer: Lagunitas Sirius High-Gravity Cream Ale
Culinary Pairing: Chicken tortilla soup

Tasting Notes: This was surprisingly one of the better pairings. The Lagunitas Sirius is an ale version of the lager. With up to 20% of the malt bill being corn, we decided to harmonize with that flavor and do a chicken and corn tortilla soup. We had chunks of fresh corn in the soup, chicken and fried corn tortillas. The soup had some heat (spice) to it as well. The Sirius, with it’s sweet malt flavors with hints of corn in the background, was a pretty big beer at 7.0%. We found the flavors harmonized well and the higher gravity seemed to play with the spiciness of the heat.

Course 2
Beer: Alaskan Smoked Porter
Culinary Pairing: Smoked salmon “cigars” with soy vinaigrette

Tasting Notes: When your beer is smoked with the same wood (alder wood) as your salmons, this is one of those “no-brainer” pairings. So we paired the beer with smoked salmons. Instead of presenting the smoked salmons on a cracker or on toasted bread, we wrapped them in nori (same “seaweed” you would use in sushi), wrapped that in eggroll wrappers and then deep-fried them. Surprisingly, this was one of the “least” favorite dishes of the night. From feedback we got, it wasn’t a bad dish or even a bad pairing, the other pairings were just better. This is a good problem to have.

Cigar: Punch Imported Sun Growns

Tasting Notes: I will be the first to say when I don’t do a good job. I didn’t do a good job taking notes on the cigars. I will be visiting Rocco’s today and I’ll come back with the exact cigars and flavor profiles. We were originally supposed to smoke Rocky Patel Sun Growns but the delivery didn’t come in time and Joe substituted those with Punch Imported Sun Growns. I can’t tell you anything about this cigar outside of what I experienced. What I can tell you is that how you smoke a cigar is a HUGE determinant to how it will taste. When smoking the Punch slowly, about a drag every 45 to 65 seconds, the cigar is sweet tasting. This went very well with the Sirius. Some guests even noticed on how the cigar changed the flavor of the beer entirely. I think this had to do with the aroma of the beer being taken away by the cigar and resulting in tasting only the 5 basic flavors of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Then, when you smoke the cigar at a faster clip of about a drag every 30 seconds, the flavor really changes to something more spicy and woodsy complimenting the flavor of the smoked porter more. The best thing about this was how Joe paired the intensity of the cigars with that of the beer. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the pairings and were as surprised by at how well they went together.

Course 3
Beer: Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA
Culinary Pairing: Tri-tip with mashed sweet potatoes and steamed vegetables

Tasting Notes: I really liked how the tri-tip paired well with the malt profile of the Racer 5 but what surprised everyone the most was how the mashed sweet potatos contrasted with the hoppiness of the IPA. In this instance, the sweet potatoes took the bitterness level of the IPA down a couple of notches but by comparison, the sweet potatoes seemed to be a little sweeter… if that makes any sense. Try it and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Course 4
Beer: Ommegang Three Philosophers Blended Belgian Ale
Culinary Pairing: Three-layer chocolate shooters garnished with cherries, chocolate mint, and cocoa shavings

Tasting Notes: Despite what was written on the menu, we didn’t find the cherries and opted out on the chocolate mint garnishes. In the end, no one really minded. Even though it was a triple chocolate shooter (dark chocolate cake, chocolate pudding and chocolate mousse) we consciously used dark chocolate and bittersweet chocolates to de-emphasize the sweetness and play up the chocolate flavors. In fact, the chocolate shavings were made from chocolate using 70% cocoa. The dark berry, slight sour cherry and rich, malt flavors of the Three Philosophers made a perfect pairing and was, by far, the most popular of the event. It’s a really a shame that people don’t try to pair desserts with beer as from our experience, you can have some really magical things go on. I was worried that the Three Philosophers wasn’t going to be well received because it was the most adventurous beer of the lot (being a blended Belgian ale) but I couldn’t have been more wrong! If anything, I should’ve bought more… which reminds me… I hope I bought an extra bottle for myself.

Cigar: Avo Classic

Tasting Notes: A heartier cigar than the Punch. Even smoking this one more slowly, it wasn’t as sweet at the first cigar. Definitely more peppery (as all cigars are) and flavorful but still mild in body. I would suppose you could pair the peppery intensity of a cigar with hoppiness in beer but that’s just a thought. The richer flavors of this cigar I felt went better with the Three Philosophers.

As good as the event was, there were a few things that didn’t go as well as hoped that we can learn from. We will always have the problems of last minute cancellations and no-shows. Short of asking for the money up front, there’s nothing we can do to really insure us from this. It’s all part of the territory. You invite a thousand and hope a hundred show up. Still, it’s wreaks havoc with our planning.

Rocco’s was a great place to have this event. It’s a nice change of pace from our modest backyard. The downside for us is that Rocco’s doesn’t have an area where we can prepare some of the dishes. It is a cigar shop so I don’t expect him to but it makes things that much more tricky and limiting when it comes to some of the food we can bring in. For those of you who haven’t been to Rocco’s before, it’s dimly lit. That’s great for setting a chill, cigar smoking atmosphere but hard to showcase a beer’s color. Nitpicking, I know but it’s all a part of getting to know your beer.

I also think we need to “hire” a photographer. Normally, I would chomp at the bit to take photos but it’s nearly impossible when I’m the host. Likewise, there’s only so many photos Sammy can take as she’s running around like a free safety. Granted our camera isn’t the greatest but it’s much better than advertised. It just needs to be coaxed a little more than other models.

It’s good to be honest about things. I’m not complaining by any means but making observations about what we can improve upon. I am constantly trying to project my voice better but I am not a loud person by nature and it’s difficult for me to do so. As a result, I am much more comfortable addressing a more intimate group of about 10-15 people than 20 – 30. This is especially problematic when the event is well on its way and the majority of the guests are tipsy and harder to wrangle back in.

As I’ve said before in past blog posts, the world of beer has given us the opportunity to meet new people. Even though I’ve hung out at Rocco’s once in a while, I’ve gotten to know Joe much better and I see that he’s a stand up kind of guy. He’s one of the good ones. I also finally got to meet Jason who’s an avid reader of the blog. The bulk of our guests were composed of his invites and they really made the event worthwhile with their comments and conversation. Even though Chris and Brandi showed up a little bit later, they got to experience the whole thing and Brandi walked away with a greater appreciation of beer and how versatile it is.

Thanks again to everyone who helped (Sammy, Joanna and Judy) and to everyone who attended. We look forward to hosting another even soon and to see new and familiar faces. If you attended this event, feel free to post a comment about a specific pairing, or about the cigars, or about the event in general. We love the constructive criticism.

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