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The beers and cheeses at Godè
Just as I’ve recently looked at wines beyond Valencia, last Saturday I signed up to a cheese and craft beer tasting. It was held at Godè, a smart new place in Russafa that describes itself as a gastro-club. It looks like an interesting place and concept, run by Laura and Adam. The latter, though he announced himself as more of a wine man, took us magisterially through the beers. In charge of cheese was Bertrand, whom I’d first met when he worked at a wine bar, and later at occasional wine tastings tastings here and there.
One of the things that has always struck me about Bertrand, in addition to a zanily dandified dress sense (he is from Paris, after all), is how positive he always seems. Having not come across him for a good while, he popped up six months ago in Facebook as Bertrand Solo Queso. It turns out that for the last six months he’s been running a cheese stall in Russafa market, selling only Spanish cheeses made from unpasteurized milk. His loving descriptions of his new cheeses in Facebook have had me salivating longingly, but I’ve never actually made it to Russafa market. Though I hear very good things about it, I’m a loyal Mercado del Cabanyal and Mercado Central man. Sadly our nearest market. Mercado del Grao, has been pretty much shut down for years, with just a handful of heroic stalls hanging on, including the really excellent butcher Varea, whose meat is so good I put up with his shameless flirting with my wife.
Anyway, I digress, this is not about markets, but the craft beer and cheese tasting organised by and at Godè. I’ve noticed something of a boom in microbreweries and craft beer in Spain in the last two or three years, and quite a few have cropped up in Valencia. Maybe it’s a creative response to the ever-deepening economic crisis. Certainly, it’s a good thing.
Despite the Spanish saying “vino con queso sabe a beso” (wine with cheese tastes like a kiss), and the wine trade dictum “buy a wine over apples and sell it over cheese”, I think cheese and beer are a better match. No less an authority than Michael Broadbent has written “Unless the cheese is mild and the red wine reasonably robust and not of fine quality the cheese spoils the taste of the wine” (on page 12 of my 2003 edition of his excellent Wine Tasting).
Beer and beer drinkers are more robust. Adam was telling us how these beers need to be served warmer than the ubiquitous industrial tasteless fizz that passes for beer and hides its defects by being served palate-numbingly cold. I had to disagree with Adam when he said that these beers were less refreshing and to be savoured rather than being thirst-quenchers. First, there is nothing
like a cool (not cold) pint of good ale when you’ve worked up a thirst, and second it doesn’t help to sell it if it’s presented as a drink you only buy when you’re not thirsty, especially as it’s that bit more expensive than the usual muck. It actually leaves you more refreshed than ice-cold fizz, in my view.
The first three beers were all from the Valencia region. We kicked off with a Mons Rubia (from Massalavès) and a soft “queso fresco” from Cantagrullas made from sheep’s milk in the province of Valladolid, brought to us on a salt and oil-flavoured biscuit (Bertrand is very proud of his English cheese biscuits). This unfiltered beer was slightly turbid in the glass, in a good way (it’s rich in vitamin B among other things). The soft, tangy cheese, that reminded Russian Olga of her much-loved tvorog from home, had an acidity that contrasted well with the mild beer.
Next up was Lluna from the Vall d’Albaida, similar in style to the first beer, but with a touch more acidity, with hints of apple. It was served with a cow’s milk cheese from Puigpedròs in Cerdanya (Catalonia) on a fennel cracker. I got rid of the cracker. Though it was tasty, it rather overpowered the beer and cheese for me. It was widely thought that though this beer and cheese combination was good, the potent (in both olfactory and taste terms) cheese would have gone particularly well with the first beer, for future reference.
The third beer was Tyris, a Valencian beer that has among its other virtues that it is becoming increasingly available in bars and shops here. It went with the aptly and amusingly-named goat’s cheese Uff! (it’s the noise you make both when you smell it and when you taste it) from the Mas Alba cheesemakers near Girona (Catalonia). It was so powerful and delicious that I’ve even forgotten the flavour of the biscuit that it came on. It was clever to combine the mild wheat beer with the macho cheese. The beer cleaned the palate beautifully, allowing you to come back to the cheese with renewed vim.
The fourth beer was the only one not from the Comunidad Valenciana, DeDues from Girona, like the previous Mas Alba cheese and also the cheese that the DeDues was served with — a blue cheese made from sheep’s milk, Blau del Nét (Grandson’s Blue) on a celery cracker. Bertrand said that one of the things he loves about this cheese is that every time he opens a new one it’s different in colour and consistency, sometimes softer, sometimes bluer or whiter. The DeDues beer is made with highly mineral water from volcanic soil. It had a notable citric freshness along with a rich toastiness, a distinctive and interesting beer that stood its ground well against the cheese’s onslaught. This was an imaginative and successful matching of two very characterful flavours you might have thought wouldn’t gel, but they did.
Finally, and the twenty-or so strangers in the tasting group were becoming noticeably chattier by now, we had La Sotorraña, a cheese from the Picos de Europa mountains of Cantabria in the north of Spain. It is a cheese somewhere between white and blue, as it ripens next to the famous blue Picón cheeses in the cave that gives it its name (see the amazing photos at the bottom of this blogpost at El Mule Carajonero). This robust, sharp, delicious cheese came on a chile-flavoured biscuit, to the shock of some (the Spaniards generally have little tolerance for the slightest bit of “picante” in their food, despite their centuries of Latin American dominion). This needed a good, strong beer, and we had the excellent Tombatossals stout from the Montmirà brewery in Castellón (the northernmost province of the Comunitat Valenciana) . This was a vibrant rather than dense stout, perfect for a cool evening in these warmer climes. Another successful cheese and beer match.
The tasting left me more convinced than ever that cheese and beer are a far more harmonious combination than wine and beer. Until now, the probably has been finding good beers in Spain. I’m excited to see so many craft, bottle-conditioned beers spring up. I hope that they receive the supoort of beer drinkers, who have by and large little grounding in the subtleties of beer. Why bother with liquid junk food when beers like these are to hand?
