So, last Saturday was brew day, and that meant spending most of the afternoon and evening in a garage with my brew-brothers, Tony and Kyle, constructing a black IPA from barley, hops and Lake Michigan Crude. I brought along another friend named Winnimere. Winne is the odiferous cheese from Jasper Hill Farm that I’ve written about in this space a couple of times before. It’s a surface-ripened cheese washed with wild-fermented beer, and bundled with tree bark. Its unique flavors and textures make it one of my all-time faves.

It’s nearing the end of Winnimere season now, so I picked up a full wheel (1.3 lbs) at Marion Street Cheese Market a few days before brew day and stored it in the vegetable crisper with the spinach and carrots. After a day or two my wife asked about needing to clean out the fridge and I said “no that’s just the cheese.” I drove through a nearby forest preserve on my way to the brew session and stopped to text something. There was a dead animal smell wafting from the brush edging the road, and for just a second I glanced at the cooler to see if the lid had popped loose. (Okay; done with the stink jokes).

We usually have beer from a prior brew session on tap on brew days, and this week it was a lawnmower session pale brewed in early June with a salad of hops featuring Citra. It was drier and a bit simpler than I had hoped (back to the drawing board with the grain bill) but a nice quencher with just enough hop flavor and bitterness to be interesting.  I also brought along a bottle of Hot Rocks, the stein beer (boiled with the aid of scorching hot hunks of granite) from SoCal’s Port Brewing, thinking it might work with the Winnimere.

Despite its beer lineage, Winne (like all wash-rind stinkers), does not cuddle up with just any beer style. At Cheese and Cheers we have done panel tastings with multiple washed-rind cheeses and a variety of beer styles and the lovely matches did not come easily. We have found that malt-forward beers, with a moderate dose of caramelized sweetness seem to work. Beer author Randy Mosher joined one of our tastings in the spring and has since continued to work on stinky cheese pairings and has had success with moderately malty browns ales and Munich dunkels.  The toasty (but not roasty) and toffee flavors sing with the creaminess without clashing with the funk, Randy says.

Tony mashing in the black IPA

Back to the garage. After hand-grinding 24 lbs of grain, we were itching for some cheese, so I opened the paper to find a peach/coral-colored wrinkly disc with some light splotches. It was soft under the sticky rind, like a slightly squishy, over-ripe orange.  I cut into it and there was the perfect, shiny, off-ivory colored paste, oozing ever so slightly. With the rind broken up we spooned it onto hunks of bread and flatbread shingles. It was a delicious mouthful—slightly salty, some bitterness, vegetable complexity (one of my children calls it artichoke cheese), and sweet creaminess underneath it all. Bits of the rind provided a bite in the middle of all that lusciousness.  Like most washed-rinds, the flavor is surprisingly different from the smell, but you wouldn’t call Winnimere mild. And the funk sticks with you on the finish, especially if you have a beerd–you know, a beer-geek beard.

Since we were drinking from the keg, the first beer we tasted with the cheese was the lawnmower pale. This beer was my concept, but the brothers helped design the recipe. I was shooting for a bright, citrusy pale just under 5% ABV, similar in flavor to Goose Island Green Line or Lagunitas Pale, plus we wanted to highlight the new Citra variety. I had insisted on using no crystal or brown malts at all, which was kind of overkill, and led to the overly linear malt flavor.

You gotta expand this and take and wiff!

But the bitterness in the beer paired nicely with the bitterness in the Winne. The clean, almost lager-ish malt flavor also did nice things with the cheese’s creaminess. Not a great pair, but not bad either. Since the beer did come in at 4.9% and it was a hot summer night, we drank it by the bucket. Later we tried the Hot Rocks, and it too wasn’t exactly what I had expected. It was pretty big and fruity for a 6.2% beer, with layers of caramel and dark fruit flavors. It would be a very nice beer for a simpler triple crème but there were just too many complications in the beer and the cheese for this pairing to be anything more than a big jumble of flavors. If you like your ice cream flavors with six or seven inclusions, you might like this pairing, but for us it was decent but not world class.

Kyle’s wife helped us with the cheese a bit, but I am ashamed to say that we did NOT finish the whole thing. Our only excuse was that we wanted to leave room for a late-night gyros session from the local Chicago hot dog/burger/gyros place around the corner.