What’s On Tap – The California Beer Newsletter

The group at my table at Bruce Paton’s Belgian Beer and Chocolate Dinner Friday night (Feb. 15, 2008) at the Cathedral Hill Hotel in San Francisco, left - right: Mike Agngelmann, Oakland, Leah Papandrea, Albany, NY, Jon and Cyndy Wolfenbarger, of San Francisco, and Andy Altman-Ohr. Cropped out of the photo by mistake, Mike Goodbar, Berkeley, and Danielle Schumacher, Oakland.
Photo: William Brand

IF YOU’VE NEVER ATTENDED one of Bruce Paton’s beer dinners at the Cathedral Hill Hotel, plan to do so soon. Over the past five years – he’s up to 60 dinners or so at the moment – dinners have gotten more and more sophisticated. You can sign up for the next dinner here.

Last night’s Belgian Beer and Chocolate Dinner was, well, very damn fine: About 150 diners at this sold-out, $90 a plate dinner, candlelit tables, quiet, efficient service, each beer served in its proper glass, along with some very fancy food.

The best part of these dinners is the people who attend. I went with a friend who’s a sportswriter at The Tribune; we wound up sitting with a table full of like-minded people. It’s fun swapping good beer places, beers to look for and trading opionions of the pairings.

There was ‘nary a discoutaging word last night. A four star evening.

Each course was paired with beers imported by Artisanal Imports, hors d’oeuvres, seved with Bosteels Tripel Karmeliet and Urthel Hop-It. I made a mistake and tried the Tripel first. Nice beeer: big, malty nose, full mouth feel, great follow. Tried it with a lobster-chocolate bisque served in a glass. Great.

Trouble was that made it difficult to even taste the Hop-It, which is a fairly hoppy Belgian beer, following a recipe devised by Hildegard van Ostaden, one of Belgium’s few female brewers (should I say “brewsters”). She got the idea for a hoppy beer, unusual in modern Belgium, after a tour of West Coast breweries a couple of years ago.

You can find the whole menu on line at Bruce Paton’s Web site. I’ll just hit the high points.

I give many points to the third course: Braised Creekstone Farms Angus Short Rib with sweet potato flan and dark chocolate ancho chile jus. The course was paired with De Koningshoeven Quadrupel***++, the powerful, xx percent ale from one of six Trappist abbeys that brew beer commercially and the only one in Holland.

The short rib braised with the chile-chocolate sauce was melt-in-the=mouth tender. What a pairing, the beer’s got a herbal nose, starts sweet and finishes with a warming hit of alcohol. The meat and the beer married perfectly, creating a magnificicent taste sensation. It was so good that I’m going to ask Bruce Paton for the recipe, buy some Quadrupel and try the pairing again some rainy night ahead. Talk about winter warmers. Wild.

The fourth course, or desert, was a quartette of different kinds of chocolate paired with Urthel Samaranth. This is an 11.5 percent, massive, Belgian also from Hildegard van Ostaden. When she was here last year Hildegard told us the beer’s made at Koningshoeven under contract. It’s the brewery where she worked when she met her husband, Bas, who handles the marketing end of their small, but mighty company.

It was a perfect beer to sip with an assortment of chocolates, providing a warming accent to the sweet chocolate. Another great Bruce Paton dinner.

Photo: Beer, above right, is Urthel Samaranth.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Belgian Beer, Food and Beer, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.