Guacamole, salsa and a citrussy pale ale

Last Friday night Helen, our designer, and I had a bit of a works outing to our colleague Monica Shaw's who works on the nuts and bolts of the website. She cooked up an amazing Mexican feast of which this was just one element but it was striking how much better the whole meal went with beer than with wine.

It wasn’t that the wine was bad. We had a deliciously limey Peter Lehmann Wigan riesling which went extremely well with the guacamole too - as did a Sauvignon Blanc and a new English rosé from Dunleavy vineyards just outside Bristol.

But the beers we had - a selection from Helen’s other clients Wild Beer Co, Arbor Ales and the Bristol Beer Factory - were just so easy with the widely varied ingredients and dishes we threw at them.

I’m singling out the guacamole (which was properly chunky) with our first and second beers, Wild Beer Co’s intensely hopped Fresh and Madness IPA because they both had a citrussy edge that went brilliantly with the lime and coriander in the dip.

We also had roast squash-stuffed tamales with mole poblano, a big roast corn and avocado salad, refried beans, stuffed jalapenos, tomato salad and homemade pickles a punchy/spicy combination which went really well with an Arbor Yakima Valley American-style IPA. (A red wine big enough to handle all those powerful flavours wouldn’t have been as refreshing)

I can’t pretend we found a beer to go with the chilli-spiked mango fruit salad and ice-creams and sorbets but we finished with a flourish with some intensely chocolatey truffles with candied chillies and the Bristol Beer Factory’s raspberry stout - an unlikely but knockout combination.

It was the big flavours in the beers that carried the day too. Light lagers and more traditional ales wouldn't have worked as well.

Salmon ceviche and Soave

With its intense citrussy flavour ceviche - marinated raw fish - is a tricky dish to pair with wine.

One’s natural inclination might be to pick a white with a similar flavour profile such as a Sauvignon Blanc but the likelihood is that the more intense flavour of the marinade will strip the citrus flavours out of the wine.

At our local restaurant Culinaria at the weekend I picked a half bottle of Pieropan Soave to kick off our meal which held its own really well with a delicious starter of salmon marinated with lime served with guacamole (Mexican avocado dip). It didn’t interfere with the pure lime flavour but had enough personality to stand up to the zingy flavours of the dish. A decent Pinot Grigio, I suspect, would work equally well.

Image © karandaev - Fotolia