Cahill’s Irish porter cheddar has beer visibly marbling the cheese, while Sartori’s Raspberry BellaVitano in subtly soaked in ale from New Glarus Brewing.
As origin stories go, you probably could make up a good one about beer in cheese. Maybe drunken Uncle Wally tripped on a throw rug and spilled his beer all over the snack tray at a Super Bowl party. Maybe a Wisconsin beer maker and a Wisconsin cheese maker fell in love and invented a new product instead of having children.
Alas, the product is the result of something much more prosaic, the same kind of basic process that brings other cheeses to market — testing, sampling, tweaking and marketing.
“Beer and cheese have been paired for quite a while,” says Andy Johnson of the UW-Madison’s Center for Dairy Research, which has helped producers develop cheeses with beer in them. “Then people thought, ‘You might as well put it in the cheese.’”
It’s more of a novelty than a trend, one seen most commonly in spreads — popular cheese spread brands including Pine River and Merkts have beer-cheese products.
But there are a few cheeses flavored with beer, too, sold in the Madison area. Sartori’s Raspberry BellaVitano is a parmesan-style cheese soaked in New Glarus Brewing’s Raspberry Tart ale. A beer cheddar sold at Ehlenbach’s Cheese Chalet in DeForest and the Mousehouse Cheesehaus in DeForest is a mild cheddar with the beer visibly working its way through the curds.
Two international brands also have beer cheddars available in the area: Cahill’s Irish porter cheddar with its visible caramel-colored marbling, and Dubliner with Irish stout, with its distinctive green rind.
Carr Valley Cheese has a beer cheddar that the company has sold for more than a decade, as well as three beer-cheese spreads.
“A lot of our customers drink beer, it pairs well with cheese and it’s just seemed like a natural thing,” says Sid Cook, Carr Valley’s owner and master cheese maker. “And you can taste it.”
One of Carr Valley’s newest products takes that combo into consideration. Last year, Carr Valley released Budweiser Pub Spread, which sprang from a partnership between the cheese company and Anheuser-Busch. At first only available in in the baseball parks where Anheuser-Busch beers are sold, it is now on sale in Carr Valley stores and through its website.
For Anheuser-Busch, it was a cross-marketing opportunity for the company’s beer. For Carr Valley, it was a new product that would have appeal no matter what its customers’ favorite beer might be.
“When you’re using beer as a flavor, it’s a little hard to tell what beer it is,” Cook says.
The spread uses cheddar aged for nine months with both liquid beer and a powder of dehydrated beer to enhance the flavor. Carr Valley makes its other beer-cheese products with beer powder, not beer itself.
The methods vary for making a beer cheese, says the UW’s Johnson. Some rinds are washed with beer, particularly cheeses inspired by the monks who used to make both beer and cheese. Curds or entire wheels are soaked in beer, too.
“When we judge those types of cheeses in contests, we want the flavor to be all the way through the cheese,” Johnson says. “If it’s done correctly, it should penetrate all the way in.”
Beer is an ingredient like any other flavoring, Johnson says, in that the cheese is the star and the flavor should enhance but not overpower. There are neither chemical nor food safety issues with adding beer, Johnson says, though people with gluten issues should pay heed.
