... and that is people writing about "pairing" beer and food. Normal folk eat food and drink beer along with it - but few who do that would recognize themselves in this description:
"...beer is also great as a cleanser in the middle of a meal." A meeting with the makers of his cleanser of choice — Red Hill's Golden Ale, which he served topped with a kaffir lime foam — at an earlier Taste event, led to a joint venture in which he created a degustation menu matched with their beers. Taking the flavours of the beers as his starting point, he came up with dishes a world away from the humble meat pie... Among the fare was the aforementioned smoked trout appetiser along with pairings of Red Hill's heavier Hop Harvest and Scotch ales with slow-cooked Sher wagyu, smoked ox tongue, skordalia and grains, a wheat beer with Locheilan brie, banana bread and plum jam, and a powerful Imperial Stout with a treacle tart served with an impossibly rich sticky toffee pudding ice-cream.
MY EYES! MY EYES!!!
Is there anything less appealing? Is there writing more unctuous? The sweaty anticipation that someone might feel waiting for the perfect moment when first facing "a wheat beer with Locheilan brie, banana bread and plum jam" is only made worse by recording the event for posterity through the written form. Look, people enjoy many things in private that we are too polite to share. Can't we admit that we would all be better off by keeping hypomanic food pairing tendencies to oneself? Can't we?
Hey - I never mentioned snobbery once.