MATT ALLYN: Writer, Editor, Researcher
Earlier this summer I was invited by friends at the FCI to give a demonstration on beer and cheese pairing for their students. The only thing more fun than having a captive audience for 90 minutes as I went on about my two favorite food groups was the research. Many good cheeses were eaten and many fine beers consumed, but here’s the lineup I settled on.
The was no clear crowd favorite, but rather lots of mixed, strong opinions (a good thing I think). I thought cheddar and IPA were a natural match. Many agreed, but some folks just weren’t tasting it. My personal favorites though were the tripel with aged goat cheese and then the stilton and barleywine. The Belgian/goat pairing was a recent revelation for me, while the stinky blue and barleywine is a beer and cheese pairing classic.
Pairing 1: German Hefeweizen (Sierra Nevada Kellerweis) with Fresh Goat’s Milk Cheese (Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery Chevre)
Pairing 2: American Amber Lager (Brooklyn Lager) with aged Fontina (used a last-minute sub and I forgot the name)
Pairing 3: American IPA (Union Jack IPA) with Sharp Cheddar (Tillamook Extra Sharp Cheddar)
Pairing 4: Belgian Tripel (Allagash Tripel Reserve) with Ripened Goat’s Milk Cheese (Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog)
Pairing 5: American Brown Ale (Rogue Hazelnut Brown) with Manchego (El Trigal Aged Manchego)
Pairing 6: American Barleywine (Green Flash Barleywine) with Blue Stilton (Colston Bassett)
Give me a shout if you want to chat about beer and cheese. I’m more than happy to go on at length about it.
Check out my Portfolio page. I just added a clip from July’s Runner’s World. I’ve had a few projects with Runner’s World lately, but this was by far the most exciting. It was one of those articles where there were enough great side-stories that I could have gone on interviewing racers for months.
Every year about a thousand runner’s run, walk, and stumble 150 miles across Morocco’s Sahara Dessert. Amazingly, more than 90% of racers finish. They deal with everything from near-debilitating blisters to scorpion bites, but can’t seem to get enough of the race. Take a read for yourself.
Over the summer I joined the International Association of Culinary Professionals at the suggestion of cookbook writer Dave Joachim. And with his encouragement and help, I put together a conference session on beer using local ingredients for the IACP’s annual get together. With the conference being in Portland this spring, writing and talking about the beer comes naturally, and so in about a month, Jamie Emmerson of Full Sail Brewing and Brett Joyce of Rogue Ales will join me to talk about how they make amazing beer with Oregon’s own water, hops, barley and yeast. It should be fun.
To help promote my session, I wrote a piece on a couple of the other Portland breweries (Upright Brewing and Laurelwood) that also use Oregon ingredients to make awesome beer. You can check out the article here.
Never doubt for a second that Portland, Oregon is beer heaven. Any search for pure beer-vana can ignore Munich’s raucous beer halls, Belgium’s brewing monks and the U.K.‘s cozy pubs. When it comes to the number of breweries, diversity of styles, quality of brew and pure enthusiasm, there’s no better place in the world to raise a pint than Portland…
One of my semi-regular gigs that’s more about fun and less about money is the Gear of the Day section of Bicycling Magazine’s website. You don’t have to read much about me to quickly realize I love cycling in pretty much all forms, so getting to test gear and share my thoughts on the best of the best is something I look forward to every couple months.
Anyways, here’s my take on some cold-weather knickers from GORE I’ve been wearing (I did 41 miles in them today actually).I also wrote a review of a new pair of Sugoi’s high-end bib shorts that’s also a diatribe about how I pick out my bike shorts for the day — pretty interesting stuff.
Hi folks, I’ve relaunched MattAllyn.com. Check back soon for more blog entires and an updated portfolio. For a less aesthetically-pleasing view of what I do, here’s my LinkedIn profile.