If you want to get your Ph.D. in cheese and beer pairing, join me at Thirsty Bear, the San Francisco brewpub, for the ninth annual Cask & Queso on February 16. This is a marathon: Seventeen craft beers paired with seventeen cheeses. Good thing I’ve been in training. Even if you can’t go, you might be intrigued by some of the matches [link to post] from previous years. The Thirsty Bear team really gets it. No wonder this event, part of San Francisco Beer Week, always sells out.
Read moreMy home library is stuffed with cheese books. (You’re surprised?) I have cheese books that make me hungry and dry dairy-science textbooks that don’t. I have cheese cookbooks, encyclopedias, compendiums and memoirs. I have cheese books in four languages. But I don’t have any cheese books as smart, provocative and well written as the new Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbe, and the Fight for Real Cheese by Bronwen Percival and Francis Percival.
Read moreIf your notion of British cheese begins with Cheddar and ends with Stilton, you have some catching up to do. The diversity and quality of wheels coming into the U.S. from the British Isles has been nothing short of remarkable in recent years, reflecting a renaissance of artisan cheese making there. But American consumers don’t seem up to speed on this—perhaps because they have low esteem for British food in general. Wake up, people.
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