Yes, I missed out on the seventh edition of The Session last month, something to do with being in Victoria for the Great Canadian Beer Festival and lacking time. A sad excuse, I know, but at the same time, I wasn’t exactly inspired by the choice of themes — the Brew Zoo. With all due respect to Mr. Lyke, who chose the topic, selecting a beer to review by virtue of the fact that it has an animal in its name seemed, well, a bit lame.
Now, beer and food pairing, on the other hand, is a totally different matter. This subject was gifted to us by Captain Hops over at Beer Haiku Daily, although it could just as easily have been picked by yours truly. As anyone who has followed my work for any length of time will know, pairing beer and food (and wine and food and spirits and food and even cocktails and food) is more than a passion for me; it’s something which borders on obsession.
So there are any number of directions in which I could take this one: Recipes (like Stan Hieronymus), a day of dining with beer (like Mr. Bryson) or a beer and cheese pairing (as did Kieran over at Beer from the Motherland). Indeed, I’m having such a hard time decided which road to take that I’m going to point myself backward rather than forward and revisit my recent trip to Munich for a few days of Oktoberfest.
Ah yes, Munich, land of glorious lagers, massive steins and some of the best sausages know to humankind. Including one which pairs with a specific variety of beer better than perhaps any other two such comestibles, and in so doing forms one of my Hall of Fame beer and food pairings: Weissbier and Weisswurst.
For the uninitiated, weissbier, or German-style wheat beer or weizen or hefeweizen or hefeweissbier, is a Bavarian form of wheat beer generally brewed from a generous proportion of malted wheat – up to 80% wheat, in some cases, with the remainder of the grain being barley malt – and fermented with yeast from a specific family. The involvement of said family of yeasts is of particular importance, since they characteristically impart to the beer a spiciness often perceived as clove and a fruitiness even more often smelled and tasted as banana. These two traits are critical to a beer so described, although some American brewers chose to ignore this fact and label their ordinary American wheat ales with the Germanic nomenclature.
The more obscure, at least in these parts, weisswurst is a veal sausage flavored with parsley and lemon, and packed in a thick casing not intended to be eaten. The taste is light, delicate and ever-so-faintly spicy, and with its lemony flavor makes a perfect companion to a healthy half-litre of weizen. (Wheat beer is, for some reason, the only beer the Bavarians refuse to serve in their trademark, one litre Mass steins.) To enjoy the combination at its most ideal, you must stand in Munich’s Viktualienmarkt with a glass of weissbier in one hand and a weisswurst in the other, alternately sipping your beer and squeezing the sausage out of its casing and into your mouth like a Freezee pop.
Or, if you’re lucky enough to be at Oktoberfest on this, its final weekend, seated at a table in the Hippodrom (the only Oktoberfest tent that serves weissbier) with a steaming bowl of weisswursts in water and a knife and fork at your side. Sip, slice the sausage down the middle, scoop out the filling and enjoy.
