Whodunnit Dinners Podcast 12 Season 2 #2 G K Chesterton: perceptive priests, choice cheese and partaking podmongers
Welcome to our latest blog post, tossed together to be served alongside the second season of the Whodunnit Dinners podcast. The chat on episode 2 in the second season of the podcast is all about the G K Chesterton murder mystery story collection ‘The Wisdom of Father Brown’ and then turns to food inspired by Chesterton’s series. In this blog post we will share suggestions for how to pair English beer and cheese in the style of the eponymous catholic priest of the early twentieth century.
The Wisdom of Father Brown
In the podcast, Katie introduces us to a collection of short stories, first published in 1914 and brought to our TVs with Mark Williams in the starring role. G K Chesterton first introduced the short, plain Roman Catholic priest known as Father Brown in 1910 in The Blue Cross and he featured in 53 of his short stories between 1910 and 1936. Father Brown - priest and amateur detective - uses his intuition and knowledge of human nature to solve crimes.
The corresponding challenge set by Katie at the end of the previous episode was to suggest how some English beer and cheese might be served together. Helen stepped up to that mission with an unholy enthusiasm…
On the hunt for beer and cheese
Fortunately, there is an excellent cheese shop near Helen called The Bristol Cheesemonger, which turned out - who knew? - to be the ideal place to go to get cheese to go with beer. And for the beer, she just had to stagger 100 metres down the road and all her beer needs were met at the brilliant local wine merchants The Grape and Grind.
Three ways to pair beer and cheese
According to the experts at the Grape and Grind, here are three possible ways to approach beer and cheese pairs.
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By balancing. This means that if it’s a mild cheese you would simply go for a mild beer so one doesn’t outdo the other.
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Go for contrast. In this case you would get a mild cheese and take a very punchy beer, or vice versa.
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Go for provenance. This means that the beer and cheese come from the same farm or region, thereby having the same underlying characteristics.
So in the interests of research, Helen set out to try each of these methods and picked out four cheeses from the cheesemonger to pair.
The first was from the county of Herefordshire, a mild but tart goat's cheese called Dorstone. It has a light mousse-like texture, a bright lemony flavour and a thin edible grey rind. Delicious. She paired it first with a mild, lighter beer, following rule one above, which was a weiss beer (wheat beer) called Weiss Versa, made by Good Chemistry, a Bristol brewing company just down the road in St Phillips. It cut through the goat's cheese nicely and her tasting panel agreed that the combination was ‘very tasty’.
She also combined the cheese with a strong flavoured beer - a Baltic Porter - called ‘Running with Spectres’, from another Bristol brewery Lost and Grounded. By contrast to the mild weiss beer, it has a smooth rich, dark brown hoppy flavour. Porter is a type of beer that is very similar to stout and is definitely more of an acquired taste. At 6.8% alcohol this one packs quite a punch but is brewed a bit lighter than other porters so isn’t too overbearing. Because the rind of the cheese was slightly mushroomy in flavour, the two chimed together quite well, but the panel couldn’t drink a lot of the porter. The verdict was that strong and mild worked well but mild beer was better if eating or drinking a larger quantity.
Next up were two cheeses from Westcombe Dairy in nearby Somerset. First was a local artisan Cheddar paired with By Furrow, a golden pale ale from Woodshedding Brewery brewed on the same farm as the cheese. This was swiftly followed by Duckets Caerphilly from Somerset. This cheese was Helen’s personal favourite. It has a crumbly inside and a softer area under the rind, with a clean tang and some mushroomy, savoury flavours, which was paired with No Dig, an IPA also from Woodshedding Brewery on the Westcombe Farm.
The tasting panel can personally vouch for all the cheese and beers consumed above, with the final local pairing, coming from the same provenance, winning out by a cheesy slither.
Listen to the podcast
If you’ve found these pairing ideas suitably tantalising, you should take a listen to the full Whodunnit Dinners podcast, which will take you through the plot and themes of the Father Brown canon, explain the reference to podmongers in the title of the blog and give you more background on the beers mentioned.. To hear the full Whodunnit Dinners podcast, go here.