Foodpairing – Bush Caractère

Bush Caractère is a very strong beer with an alcohol content of 12%. It is an amber-coloured beer with a mellow taste and wonderfully bitter. It has a fairly powerful sweet and sour taste. It develops rich aromas of nuts, caramel and bitter orange. Bush Caractère Refermentée is the conventional Bush Caractère refermented in 75 cl bottles, and this refermentation in the bottle provides a final blend of both the aromas, which are strengthened, and the flavours of the conventional Bush, which become fuller.

Bush Caractère in cooking

Bush Caractère is also suitable for use in cooking. However, because of its accentuated bitterness, Bush Caractère is suitable only for deglazing cooking juices or as a stock to keep red meat or powerful poultry dishes moist while they are cooking. In some cases, a little sugar may need to be used to counterbalance the residual bitterness.

One idea is to add a little Bush Caractère to some dark chocolate which you melt in, so as to aromatise the chocolate as it turns into liquid!

Beer and gastronomy

Starters :

• Beer soup, farmhouse soups (garbure, etc.)
• Poultry, meat or game foie gras pâtés
• Offal-based starters (kidneys and lardon salad, etc.)
• Flammekeuches.

Fish / Seafood : 

• Oily fish in a rich sauce, which can be livened up with Bush (monkfish bourride)
• Eels (matelote with Bush)

Meat / Poultry :

• Braised red meats, or in sauce (carbonnades, cutlet with shallot, etc.)
• Roast beef, lamb
• Powerful poultry (magret or confit of duck, goose, etc.)
• Ground or feathered game (hare, doe, venison / pheasant, partridge, etc.)
• Offal in sauce (beef or calf’s liver, calf’s or beef kidneys, calf’s sweetbreads, calf’s tongue, ox tongue)

Desserts / Cheeses :

• Dark chocolate-based dishes (fondant with dark chocolate, chocolate pudding, pralines with strong ganache)
• Pralines or caramel
• Coffee sorbet
• Cheeses with powerful flavours: Blue cheeses (Gorgonzola, Fourme d’Ambert, Roquefort), strong cheeses (Herve, Maroilles, Boulette d’Avesnes)
• Brebis d’Acremont cheese.