What To Do About Thanksgiving

A veritable cornucopia of beer choices,
a horn of plenty if you will

The good thing about blog writing is that these pesky little posts of mine have dates on them, which means I get a weekly reminder of what the date is. Seriously, without them, I may never remember where on the calendar I am.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down this dreary Saturday morning to write and saw that the date is already November 16th! As in, Thanksgiving is a week and a half away! I don’t know if your family is like mine, but menu preparations are almost as big a deal as the meal itself. With particular attention paid to…

BEER PAIRING!!!

And since it is my yearly tradition and honored privilege to do so, I bring you my 2013 edition of what beers to pair with your traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Free of charge. Because I know how overwhelming menu planning can be from a food standpoint; at least the beer part should be easy. Let’s begin.

Wait, what?!

Ordinarily, beer pairing is accomplished by finding multiple beers that compliments each course individually – as in one different beer per course. The problem with Thanksgiving is, usually the courses are served simultaneously in the form of a literal ton of food placed on the table that we eat at the same time. You could pick a different beer for every food on your table, and bombard people with 6 or 7 glasses of beer in front of them, or you could find one beer that does a “pretty good” job of pairing with everything. But what beer should you pick?

You're welcome.

The Thanksgiving dinner plate typically has serious diversity in flavors, textures, temperatures and weights, making it problematic to pick a single beer to pair well with everything you consume. The key is to find the common characteristic across each menu item, and in this case, believe it or not, the common characteristic isn’t food at all, it’s your oven. All the best stuff on the Thanksgiving table comes from your oven: turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pies, etc.

Generally speaking, when food is cooked in the oven, it undergoes browning and caramelization—just like the darker malts used to create amber and brown-colored beers do when they are kilned and prepared for brewing. The similar flavors created by these shared processes offer a good balance between darker malty beer and oven-roasted food. Keeping this in mind will help you narrow the field to a few beer styles.

Bière de Garde:

Most beer experts recommend Bière de garde as the best versatile style for Thanksgiving. It’s a good call. BDGs, as I call them, are adequately forceful in alcohol and carbonation to stand up to richness but subtle enough in flavor to avoid dominating your delicate Thanksgiving dishes. In fact, the amber (or "ambrée") versions of the style have a more bready, toasty and caramelly malt flavor alongside fruity and spicy yeast character, which go quite well with the autumnal flavors of Thanksgiving. The only problem is availability, but if you have access to a specialty beer store in your neck of the woods, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Some examples of BDGs - so you know what to look for

Dubbel:

Belgian-style dubbels are more common than BDGs and make a statement at the dinner table. They are traditionally bottled in elegant cork-and-cage finished 750mL bottles and look like beers worthy of celebration. They drink pretty well too. Dubbels lift the mouth-coating richness of gravy and dairy-laden mashed potatoes from the palate due to high carbonation and pack a one-two punch of dense dark fruit and peppery, clove-like phenol character that complements sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce and the star-of-the-show turkey itself.

Some Belgian dubbel abbey ales to choose from

Märzen/Oktoberfest:

Characterized by toasty malt dominance, moderate in alcohol and low in bitterness, these beers are an ultra-safe but effective play for your Thanksgiving table. There's nothing here to throw your food out of balance, great examples can be had for cheap, and your guests will probably be at least somewhat familiar with beers of this style already. Dunkel lagers and drier doppelbocks feature a similarly malt-forward flavor and will behave the same way.

Absholutely.

Scotch Ale:

Scotch ales are all about smooth, caramelized malt character. Red grape, toffee, and peat smoke flavors are par for the course here, offering savory and sweet complements to your plate. These beers have some bollucks to them, weighing in with enough ABV to hang with the richer dishes. They can be great with dessert too, but reserve that for sweeter examples.

Brown Ale:

Brown ales have expanded far beyond the scope of one-dimensional Newcastle facsimiles. You'll find toasty, roasty, nutty and chocolatey flavors packed into your average brown ale and many examples (especially the American-brewed ones) feature a significant hop profile as well. Expect a balanced beverage that will fit in comfortably with everything on your dinner plate.

What about desert? Glad you asked. Pairing beer and dessert can be equally cumbersome to pairing beer with dinner, once again due to the diversity. Frequently encountered flavors like pecan, apple, and pumpkin all appear on your plate at once – bombarding your palate with sweet, spicy, tart, rich, bright and weighty, all at once!

Mmmm... pie and beer

The best solution to this great problem to have is a sweet-leaning English-style barleywine. These beers offer a deep malt complexity that works really well with pie. Expect a full range of caramel, toffee, and dark fruit character from these beers, all welcome complements to pecan, pumpkin, and apple pie.

A good milk stout (aka sweet stout) will offer an appropriately-sweet chocolatey counterpoint to your pecan and pumpkin pies as well. Depending on the stout, the sweet chocolate flavor may overwhelm on it’s own, but with pecan and pumpkin pies, it tastes more balanced, offering a satisfying back and forth between the sweets and the beer.

If you’re focusing on an apple pie only route and want to try something different, sweeter dunkelweizens are great with less-sweet apple pies. They are typically packed with banana, raisin and nut flavor, and a zippy clove-like yeast character. They pair brilliantly with the cinnamon-apple flavor of apple pie.

No Duff at the Thanksgiving dinner table

This concludes my 2013 edition of “what to drink at Thanksgiving.” You are now armed to the teeth with good advice on what beers go best with your meal, and really impress your guests with how beer-enlightened you are. In fact, if you memorize some of what I said here, you can serve your beer, and explain why it works, and then they’ll really be impressed with your ability to nerd out. And you’ll be the hero of the day.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!