Bier Essentials – Beer and pizza, a match made in heaven

Food and drink have been going well together ever since the first primitive land-dwelling animals ate something and felt thirsty. Since then countless generations have enjoyed pairing good food with good drink, eventually resulting in the pinnacle of culinary matching – beer and pizza. It is undisputed fact that there is no better combination of food and drink – that fantastic mixture of starch and grease that is pizza making you thirst for the refreshing beer accompaniment, whilst also moderating the uptake of alcohol into your body.

Sometimes I ponder just why beer and pizza go so well together. It could be the cheese. Cheese and beer go very well together, with the acidity and bitterness of the beer cutting through the layer of cheese that forms in your mouth allowing you to repeatedly enjoy the combination of flavours. However there is such a thing as cheese free pizza (yes, pizza can still taste good without cheese) and experience tells me that it also goes well with beer. The match of beer and pizza can’t be put down to any single ingredient, but should be celebrated for its outstanding harmony of flavour and satisfaction that transcends human knowledge of culinary matching.

I guess the question that begs to be asked is this: is there such a thing as a pizza that doesn’t go well with beer? A good test for this would be the relatively rare (but highly delicious) dessert pizza. Many people would shy away from the idea of beer with their sweet foods, but it does not have to be so. In fact, beer and chocolate can melt together in your mouth to create some amazing flavours that are so good I simply can’t express how much I think you need to try them. Some beers (most notably porters) are actually quite sweet themselves, and really do lend themselves to accompanying dessert. A general rule of thumb is that if you keep the flavour of the beer sweeter than the flavour of the dessert it’ll work well, so provided the pizza isn’t composed entirely of sugar then you should be able to find an appropriate beer to compliment the flavour nicely.

This brings us to an interesting point. Whilst others before me have claimed that all pizza goes with all beer, I’m of the mind that some beer goes better with some pizzas. Just as you’d want a sweet beer with a dessert pizza, there are some beer styles that go better with your more general pizza offerings. For your generic takeaway pizza you want a fairly bitter beer like a pilsner or an IPA (Indian Pale Ale) to cut through the grease. For a gourmet wood-fired pizza topped with wild game you might want an ale with more complex flavour like an ESB (Extra Special Bitter). However, when it boils down to it it’s about the beer you like with the pizza you like, no matter what I suggest. I’m sure that you’ll all find your own preferences, and enjoy them whole heartedly.

Bon Appétit!