18 Sep What Goes Best with Indiana Craft Beer – Pizza or BBQ?
by Mark E. Lasbury for Indiana On Tap
There aren’t many kinds of food that don’t go well with craft beer. Classic combinations include pizza, BBQ, Buffalo wings, and burgers, but I defy you to name a food that wouldn’t be better with a properly considered beer. I suppose I could come up with some beer/food combinations that wouldn’t be appealing, but it’s not because a certain food won’t go well with any beer, you just need to consider the beer style when thinking about the food. For example, I probably wouldn’t drink a heavily smoked lager with lemon sherbet, but it would be great with oysters.
Considering how much the craft beer drinker now wants to have food available with his/her craft brewery visit experience, it isn’t surprising to see how many breweries are picking a food style to specialize in, both for good flavor, but also to best show off their beer. Some brewpubs have full menus and feature many kinds of foods, some stick to a straight pub menu, while others pick a single style and run with it. A quick survey of the the list of Indiana breweries with food indicates that two foods are by far the most popular – barbeque/smoked meats and pizza – and if you put barbeque on a pizza then you’ve hit the food/beer trifecta.
I went through my master list of Indiana breweries last night and tried to parse out how many feature pizza and how many feature BBQ. Pizza is well represented, with eight breweries serving it exclusively or featuring it much more than other foods. ZwanzigZ Pizza and Brewery is the prime example in the middle of the state, but perhaps the oldest representative would be Turoni’s Main Street Brewing in Evansville. As one of the very first craft breweries in the state, Turoni’s established the pattern of pizza and beer for Hoosiers. Likewise, New Albanian Pizzeria in New Albany has been doing pizza and beer for a long time, but several breweries are just now jumping on the pizza pie wagon. Bad Dad Brewery in Fairmount just installed a stone,wood fired pizza oven, as did Urban Brews in Westfield.
Iechyd Da Brewing in Elkhart was named best Indiana pizza place by Money Magazine for 2018 based on Yelp reviews. image credit: Iechyd Da Brewing
Add in the growing number of Greek’s Pizzerias that include taprooms and the Noble Romans Craft Beer Pizzeria rebrand and it becomes clear that pizza is a favorite thing to serve with craft beer. The acids in beer work well to cut the fats in the cheese of the pizza, and pair well with the acid and tang of the tomatoes. Even more, the yeast of the crust melds with the yeast of the beer and creates a very nicely blended set of flavors between the two. With the newer pizza styles that feature more herbs and exotic flavors, the trend of dry hopping and beers pairs perfectly, as many of the citrus and piney aromas and tastes of hops pair well with the herbs of the pizzas.
As good as all that sounds, another type of entree has taken over in recent years as a definite leader to pair with Indiana craft beer – BBQ. Last night I counted no fewer than a dozen breweries that have pit masters and do almost exclusively BBQ or smoked meats with their beer. Many of these are brewery/BBQ partnerships, leaving one company to do only beer and another to do the BBQ or smoking. Examples would include Oca at the various Sun King outlets, Scarlet Lane and the Traxx BBQ that is getting ready to open at their mothership location, and Bub’s BBQ inside the Old Lowell Watering Hole.
This division of labor between meat and beer works out well because both crafts require healthy amounts of time and a watchful eye, but that doesn’t mean that BBQ/smoked meat restaurants can’t work well within the business of a brewery. Just lately, Teays River in Lafayette, Ortho City in Warsaw, Moontown Brewing in Whitestown, and Rusted Silo Southern BBQ and Brew House (congrats on being named best local BBQ for Indy) have shown that with the right team, it’s possible to do both BBQ and beer well.
Pairing beer and smoked/flame cooked meats may be a bit harder than with pizza, just because there are so many styles of each. First of all, it is good to ask what’s the difference between BBQing and smoking. I asked Rob Ecker, the owner and pitmaster of Rusted Silo. He told me, “It is my opinion and practice that following the origins of the word barbecue, barbacoa, that true ‘que should not only involve smoke contact, but flame contact as well during the cooking of the meat over long periods of time. I feel that, as we ‘Mericans typically do, we at some point became somewhat lazy and just started smoking by means of indirect heat and wood chips to get a similar flavor into our final products. But there are those of us who still stoke the coals of hardwood under racks of steel to give each cut of meat a nice bark of flame kissed protein as well as that perfect amount of smoky love!”
LaOtto Brewing does a BBQ festival to pair with their beer. image credit: LaOtto Brewing
So smoking is indirect heat and smoke only, while true BBQ has direct flame along with the smoking. But it goes further, there are so many types of BBQ, from woods to sauces to types of meat, that saying one style of beer will work best for BBQ or smoked meats is just silly. Craftbeer.com did an article on it in 2015 (see here), talking about various styles that might fit well with various forms of BBQ. In general, sweet beers with vinegary BBQ and hoppy /bitter beers with sweet BBQ, and light/herby beers with big old Texas smoked brisket. It’s even a good marinate your pork and beef in beer before grilling, as it reduces the number of (perhaps) cancer-causing PAHs formed when the meat is then grilled. Beer doesn’t just pair well with meat, it can save your life.
However, just because the two most popular genres for food to pair with craft beer are pizzeria and BBQ pit, it doesn’t mean that other types of food are inferior or don’t go as well with beer. Ruhe@152 is getting closer to opening in Nappanee with both beer and food. Owner Scott Tuttle has been wanting a higher end establishment in town so he wouldn’t have to drive to Goshen or Warsaw for interesting food, so he decided to open one himself. David Michael will run Ruhe@152’s brew house, but Scott says that the beer will compliment the food, not dominate it. This is a good philosophy since they are planning on featuring sushi. That will be a first for Indiana, but if it catches on, look for more breweries to adopt the idea. And yes, cicerones have considered the issue of what beers go best with sushi, but like everything else, the opinions vary greatly.
In conclusion, if you go just by the numbers, it would seem that breweries are of the opinion that BBQ pairs better with craft beer than pizza, at least from the viewpoint of what might bring in the most money and show off their beer the best. Pizza is popular no doubt, and is probably cheaper to make than BBQ, so I don’t think we will see the demise of pizza with beer any time soon. Are you on team Pizza or Team BBQ? I love them both, so it’s no problem which way they choose to go. Walter has a wheat sensitivity, so she’s partial to the BBQ (not because she likes it more, but because it likes her more). In truth, burgers, wings, the occasional salad (very occasional), they all go well with craft beer, so I’m not going to get hung up on who makes what.
banner image credit: Big Red Liquors
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