This week I am pairing saison beers from the U.S. and from Belgium with Alpine-style cheeses from the U.S. and France. You may have noticed a pattern here—yes saison is one of my three favorite beer styles, and Alpine cheeses might be among my favorite types of cheese. This seemed like a good way to look at a bunch of possibilities and keep the blog active. Watch for other series in the coming months.

The primary subject of Cheese and Cheers is the produce of American beer and cheese artisans. That said, now and then we will look at some nice Old World examples worthy of your time and consider. Comté and Belgian saison are two great examples of this. Comté is a cheese that is so loaded with tradition it is practically an industry unto itself. It is an AOC (Appellation d’origine controlee) made only in the Jura Massif, a region of medium-sized mountains that formed during the Jurassic period. Great plateaus at altitudes of between 500 and 1,500 meters provide lush pastures that are the foundation of Comté production. More than 3,000 tiny family farms move herds of Montbéliarde or French Simmental cows into these pastures seasonally.

The flora in the Jura Massif is very diverse and this is reflected in the milk and, ultimately, in the varying flavors of the cheese. For there to be enough forage to feed a herd, farmers must provide at least one hectare of grazing area for each dairy cow. The cows are milked mornings and evenings. The milk has to be brought every day to a fruitière, where the milk is transform into Comté. The fruitière is generally organized as a cooperative and is often situated at the heart of the village. There are 175 fruitières that make Comté. On average, each has 19 members, or local dairy farms, located within an eight-mile radius.
The milk is crafted into Comté within 24 hours maximum of milking. The resulting young cheese is aged for a few weeks on spruce boards in the fruitière’s small cellar, before being sent to one of the region’s affineur’s cellars or caves for maturing. Legally, Comté wheels must be aged for at least 4 months, but they are often aged for 6-18 months. Altogether, the 175 fruitières crafted 1,248,179 Comté wheels in 2006. The average weight was 88.46 lbs.

The Comté I buy at Marion Street Cheese Market comes from Essex Street Cheese Co. in New York. Essex Street’s Daphne Zepos, perhaps the foremost Comté  authority in the U.S., visits France to select cheeses for import. Mostly she chooses from the offerings of affineur Marcel Petite Fort St. Antoine which are aged more than a year in the Fort St. Antoine caves.

In kicking off this Saison-Alpenase series on Monday I included only the briefest of backgrounds on the farmhouse ales. Perhaps to complement the lesson on Comté, I should now say a bit more about this family of rustic beers.  Saison is the French word for season, and saisons were traditionally produced on farms in the southern region of Belgium bordering France, as a sustenance product for farm workers. They were brewed in the winter and laid down for the working season but they were probably brewed to be lighter, low alcohol refreshers and restoratives. Across the border in France a very similar beer was called Biere de Garde.

I first heard of saisons many years ago via the late, great beer scribe Michael Jackson. Here’s what he has had to say about them.

These beers are often presented in Champagne-style bottles, and were before the more widespread revival of this presentation. They often have an orangey colour, and usually a dense, rocky, head. Their aroma is often fruity and yeasty, perhaps even powdery. They have a refreshing carbonation and crispness (some are made with quite hard water) and a fruitiness, often with citric notes. They are usually well-hopped, typically with Belgian or British varieties. Traditionally, dry-hopping was common. Some are spiced.

In the piece from which this is excerpted, Jackson was visiting the Dupont brewery. In his books, Jackson depicted Saison Dupont as the world-class classic example for a style which is really more of a family of loosely related styles. So Dupont has been the benchmark for me since the first time I pulled a cork on one on a front porch in Peru, Ill., circa 1995. Jackson himself struggled to determine what the consumer should be looking for when approaching this style. He hints at the conundrum in this piece, first pubished nearly 20 years ago, as he describes a meeting with Dupont’s owner and operator Marc Rosier.

“In your view, just how should a Saison taste?” I would demand. “It must be a good, honest beer. It should have character. It is essential that it has soul,” he would reply, with Gallic imprecision. “Here … try this one.” In their house character, Dupont’s beers are full of life. with a rocky, creamy, head; a sharp, refreshing, attack; a restrained fruitiness; and a long, very dry,  finish.

I nearly chose Saison Dupont to pair with the Comté, and I would highly recommend that pairing as well. The bottle that would have been used for the purpose was instead enjoyed during a recent board meeting of the Chicago Beer Society and my fellow board members regarded it well.

The Saison from St. Feuillien has quite a different story than that of Dupont’s. St. Feuillien is a secular abbey brewery run for by the fourth generation of the Friart family. It is located near the grounds of the Feuillien Abbey near the town of Le Roeulx, province of Hainaut, which is indeed the very countryside from where the farmhouse ale traditions sprung. The brewery produces a standard line of abbey ales including a golden, a bruin and a triple. But the St. Feuillien Saison was introduced just last year, and specifically for export to the U.S. The beer has gotten mostly favorable reviews since its release, being described as a traditional, albeit somewhat hoppy interpretation of the style. It offers 6.5% alcohol by volume. So, all that said, here is how the pairing went.

First, the cheese: The Essex Comté was a nice 1/3 lb. slice when I bought it, but bit was sacrificed to a craving a couple days before the pairing. It had rind on three sides, and the paste was light yellow color like pale butter, with some small white spots. Their was a striation of the tone of the paste in the outer third of the slice and a dark tone at the rind. The rind was beige and a bit of the paper wrapper remained attached. The cheese had a sharp, spicy, tangy aroma—perhaps a hint of lemon, and a definite sweet cream and cultured milk aroma in the paste. There was a mild mushroom/damp basement aroma at the rind. The paste was fairly elastic, but not rubbery. It would bend but then snap between the fingers.

On the tongue it was amazingly rich and silky, and yet it never fully dissolved, but instead maintained a fudgy texture.  The flavors included butterscotch, butter, artichoke, and maybe some chocolate fudge. Salt was kept way in the background. The rind had a bitter nut flavor like freshly cracked walnuts. The Comte had a long creamy finish. Overall it was a very nice cheese, perhaps somewhat understated. While Comté is regarded as a complex cheese, in my very limited experience with them, I find them to be somewhat honest and simple in comparison to other Alpines. I would say the same for this one, and it should be noted, that there is the expectation and purpose that each wheel should express itself differently. There is also the distinct possibility that some of the subtleties are lost on me. I’ll just have to keep trying them.

The beer: The beer poured orange to light copper. There was a white head which dissipated to a think line rather quickly but held nicely and provided a lace. The beer was nicely carbonated and slightly hazy. The cork looked young and smelled like fresh beer. The aroma was a bit winy and earthy.  There was an earthy hop in the nose, a bit of dried fruit and pear, and perhaps just a bit of cardboard oxidation. A medium mouthfeel was nicely set off by a good prickly carbonation. The flavors included a good earthy hop attack, along with some alcohol esters. There was a suggesting of ripe pear and clove, along with some orange marmalade. I swear I can “taste cork” in many cork finished beers-to me it’s similar to the musty basement aromas found in many naturally aged cheeses. I got just a wiff from the St. Feuillien. I also found malted milk, and it finished with a nice balance of fruit and earthy bitterness.

Cheese + beer: The Comté caused the carbonation to really release from the beer, and a soft orange marmalade flavor emerged. They balanced nicely, but together they were just as milk mannered as they were apart. For accompaniment I had some fresh cherries. They brought out a hint of salt in the cheese. The snap of the cherries added a nice textural contrast to the creamy, fudgy cheese. The three together tasted bitter and then sweet-creamy.

I really wanted this to be a home run pairing, and to some it is. But I also felt it was holding back a bit. Maybe that’s okay. In my opinion, the old world cheese and beer imports are now easily matched and sometimes surpassed by what is produced by American artisans, but it will be decades if not centuries before we have the rich traditions and stories that are such nice accoutrement to the products. Most of our pioneers are still among us turning out product, and their stories are just now become legend. The fourth generation family story is still a ways off.

Comté aging in France

So, while I’ll give this pairing a 4 out of 5, its back story gets a 5.

Other Belgian saisons worth looking for, especially if you visit Belgium, are the Dupont line, including he delightful Avril; Saison dEpeautre; Saison de Pipaix (Vapeur); Silly Saison, and the line from the Fantome brewery.  Also, New York brewer Phil Markowski has written a book about the beers, their culture and how to brew them. Friday: The Bruery’s Saison De Lenten with Tarentaise, from Thistle Hill Farm.