Liz Dueland
Spirit Flight from Yahara Bay Distillery.
In any good marriage, both halves of the pairing don’t just get along, they also bring out the best in each other.
So it is with spirits and cheese, a less common combination than cheese with beer or wine, but one Madison-area drinkers and nibblers might try. Local cheeses play a big role in the food options at Yahara Bay Distillery, which relocated from Madison to Fitchburg in 2015 and in 2017 expanded the public space to include a tasting and eating area.
“What I like about pairing cheeses with spirits is the cheese allows the spirit to really open up,” says Liz Dueland, Yahara Bay’s marketing manager. “I love to find the little nugget of flavor that you can coax out with food.”
It’s an unfamiliar pairing to many who come in to the tasting room, Dueland says, but they enthusiastically give it a try — sometimes too enthusiastically. “I think they need some guidance to go through how to taste it because you have a small glass,” Dueland says. “You certainly don’t want to take a shot of it.”
Dueland came to Yahara Bay after working for four years as a cheesemonger at Metro Market. Prior to that she worked in marketing and event planning in the wine industry in California’s Napa Valley, including creating pairings.
At Yahara Bay, local cheese plays a starring role on the menu. Beyond a flight that pairs five cheeses and five spirits ($16), there is a cheese plate without the spirit samples ($10) and flatbread pizzas ($8) made with local cheeses. Dueland will also create cheese plates inspired by the art on opening nights for the distillery’s gallery shows.
While pairings with spirits was new territory for Dueland, she was eager to create the combinations with Yahara Bay’s gin, whiskey and rum when she joined the staff.
“When I first came here, I had this little Rolodex in my head flipping through the flavors of the rum and whiskey and pairing them in my head,” she says. “So I’d order the cheeses and sure enough, they paired well.”
One combination Dueland really likes is Mad Bird Rum with Marieke Gouda Foenegreek, a pairing that brings together the sweet, buttery flavors of both. Dueland says blue cheese pairs particularly well with spirits, and the Yahara Bay menu offers its Extra Dry Gin with Carr Valley’s Glacier Penta Crème.
“Blue cheese is not the most versatile eating cheese, but it lends itself to light and dark spirits, including port and Scotch,” she says. “I don’t know a blue cheese that doesn’t match with a spirit.”
There are no hard and fast rules with pairing cheese with spirits, Dueland says, so anyone who wants to try at home should just start with what they like and go from there.
“Just experiment,” she says, “and remember that as many times as you might get it wrong, that means you’re closer to getting it right.”