A long night of research

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.