Estrella Damm Inedit

A couple weeks back I got a strange press release, and toward the issuing brewery--Barcelona's Estrella Damm--I directed some fairly tart criticism. Estrella Damm has been making a standard light lager for decades, but now it apparently wants to enter the craft world. The gambit? Inedit, "a beer specifically created to accompany food." This is roughly like announcing you intend to make bread that comes pre-sliced. Alert the media! To accomplish this feat, they brought in a raft of chefs, and the poor brewer went through 400 iterations of the beer before the final version.

But okay, enough of the taunting. I told the press-release-sender that I would happily try the beer and review it, and so she obliged by sending me a bottle. My lovely and talented wife helped out in the experiment by making a delicious meal, an appropriate trial for a beer the brewery says

"... is a unique coupage of barley malt and wheat with spices to provide an intense and complex aroma. It aims to complement food once thought to be a challenge in terms of culinary pairings, including salads, vinegar-based sauces, bitter notes such as asparagus and artichokes, fatty and oily fish, and citrus."

(The less we ponder the "once thought difficult" phrase, the easier this review becomes. So moving briskly along....)

Sally's meal was fairly designed for this beer: tandoori chicken, made on the grill, along with grilled asparagus, brushed with a vinegar sauce. On the side, a string bean salad with chopped hazelnuts. Good stuff.

The beer, it turns out, is a wit. A pretty traditional one, too--coriander, orange peel, wheat malt. The one innovation is licorice. (My guess is probably a strait addition of the root rather than a derivative; there's a nice, earthy quality to it.) As wits go, it's gentle and subtle. The spicing is soft and floral, the yeast benign and without much character. I give it pretty high marks for drinkability, if not originality.

It goes well with food--as of course many Belgian ales do and have done for centuries. It was a nice pairing with both the tangy tandoori chicken, which it complemented, and the bitter/sour asparagus, which it contrasted. The salad--eh, it was fine. But hey, two out of three's good.

Ultimately, this is a slight beer with a massive ad campaign. A bit of a shame, too. Anyone in town who shells out $10 for this supposedly transcendent beer will almost certainly feel let down. On the other hand, if I served you a glass--with or without food--you'd probably find it quite nice. It's even worth the ten bucks. It will not, however, revolutionize gastronomy.

There may ultimately be an up-side to this incident, however. I really should be writing more about food and beer pairings. Maybe this will serve as inspiration.

Strange Press Release

I attract a lot of press releases. About half relate to beer, and the balance come from random alcohol producers, food-related products, and some just random stuff. The hallmark of these latter, non-beer pitches (and some of the beer pitches, too) is that they've clearly never read my blog.

Every now and again, I get a weird release like one I got recently, from Estrella Damm, a Barcelona brewery. Here's the first line of the pitch:

Estrella Damm today announced the launch of Estrella Damm INEDIT, a beer specifically created to accompany food. INEDIT was crafted by world-renowned chef Ferran Adrià, Juli Soler, elBulli sommeliers and Estrella Damm, the leading brewer of Barcelona.

Now, I don't write about the pairing of food and beer very often, but I would hope that anyone who spent a few minutes on my blog would understand that I think it pairs very nicely with food--better, in many cases, than wine. So this line not only misunderstands my blog, but apparently misunderstands beer. Not a good start, and things turn south from there:

“INEDIT was developed from the belief that there was a need for a beer that could complement a dining experience," said Ferran Adrià, elBulli Executive Chef. “INEDIT is the fruit of more than a year and a half and 400 trial iterations between the master brewers of Estrella Damm and the team of sommeliers at elBulli.”

Hmmm. Hard to know what to make of a beer company that has just stumbled onto the idea that food can accompany food, that their product does not, and that it took them four hundred batches to get it right. That doesn't mean it will suck. In fact, it sounds tasty:

INEDIT is a unique coupage of barley malt and wheat with spices which provide an intense and complex aroma. It aims to complement food once thought to be a challenge in terms of culinary pairings, including salads, vinegar-based sauces, bitter notes such as asparagus and artichokes, fatty and oily fish, and citrus.

With its delicate carbonation, INEDIT adapts to acidic, sweet and sour flavors. Its appearance is slightly cloudy, and INEDIT has a yeasty sensation with sweet spices, causing a creamy and fresh texture, delicate carbonic long aftertaste, and pleasant memory. The rich and highly adaptable bouquet offers a unique personality with a smooth, yet complex taste.

The release didn't come along with a bottle, but I requested one. After this incredibly bizarre pitch, I'm not sure I expect one. I'll let you know...