Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #300490 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
He Said Beer, She Said Wine is the first fully illustrated book on the market to give in-depth instruction on how to successfully pair both beer and wine with a wide variety of foods. Co-authored by Marnie Old, an esteemed sommelier, and Sam Calagione, a successful brewmaster, He Said Beer, She Said Wine teaches you everything you need to know to get the best out of your beverages, with food or without. Each author divulges the secrets of their respective trades, using clear, easy-to-understand language and, of course, a little good-natured banter to keep things lively. The book is full of fantastic tips and tricks, specific beer and wine recommendations, and interactive elements to help you identify your preferences along the way. So, from cheese to dessert, you'll always know what drinks to serve for sublime flavor combinations.

Conversation with Sam Calagione & Marnie Old
Authors of He Said Beer, She Said Wine

In your book, it seems like this beer vs. wine battle has been going on between you for quite some time. How did it all begin?

MARNIE: Sam and I first met when we were doing trade tastings. We got to talking and found we didn’t quite see eye-to-eye about which beverage was the best choice to partner with great food. We started playing around with arguing about which was better, and at a certain point decided we needed to take it to the public to settle the question. We began a series of dinners where our guests would enjoy a wine and a beer with the same course and cast a ballot to decide which partnered better. We called these dinners "Beer is from Mars, Wine is from Venus," and they were tremendously popular.

SAM: I think it’s indicative of how close the worlds of beer and wine really are in the context of food, because every single night the winner was decided by a single course. And in every situation we had beer people voting for wine, and wine people voting for beer. We’re passionate about championing our respective beverage of choice, but one of our main goals is to make beer people more comfortable choosing wines, and wine people more comfortable understanding beer. And, to get both sides more comfortable understanding the breadth of choices within the two worlds.

In He Said Beer, She Said Wine, you give great tips for making beer and wine choices to go with everything from pizza to crème brulee. Can you offer some foolproof advice for choosing a bottle at our next meal?

MARNIE: The first tip is that if you’re enjoying it, it’s good. There’s a lot of discomfort, especially with wine, about ordering the "right" thing. That’s really not so important. It’s about doing what you enjoy. I couldn’t tell you whether you prefer key lime pie over chocolate cake, and yet people think that there’s a right choice and a wrong choice with wine. It’s more about what’s happening that day. What’s your mood? Is it summer or winter? Is it a special occasion, or is it a relaxed barbeque in the back yard? It’s better to think about wine as sauce on the side. We’d never put the same sauce on everything we eat, everyday. The same is true with beverages.

Sam, you mentioned that at the outset you were surprised to discover how much beer and wine actually have in common. How does beer compare to wine?

SAM: The major difference, of course, is that beer is better than wine. But, the simplest comparison would be to say that lagers are more like white wines, in that they’re more mellow and refined, and ales are more like red wines, in that they’re more robust and intense.

Does the rule of drinking white wine with seafood and red wine with red meat still apply?

MARNIE: Something we all have tremendously good instincts for is the idea of putting lighter, more delicate and more subtly flavored beverages with lighter, more delicate food. It’s also the first decision that any sommelier makes in pairing for a particular dinner. To say that as a hard and fast rule white wine should be paired with white meat and red wine with red meats is something that I think needs to be revisited. It’s a sound guideline, based in science and experience; however, it is possible to drink very well pairing white wines with red meats and red wines with fish. That said, there is a fundamental difference in the fermentation process that leads this pattern to be more or less true most of the time. Tannin, a property found in red wine, is something we feel on the palate as a tacky, drying sensation. That can lead to a bit of a challenge when pairing with low-fat dishes and seafood.

What makes cheese such a great beverage partner?

MARNIE: Most wines aren’t designed to impress you on the first sip. They’re designed to be food partners, to have their acidity softened by salt, and to have their intensity and tannin softened by fat. Cheese is dominated flavor-wise by fat and salt, the exact two properties that are needed to balance out wine.

SAM: As Marnie said, many wines weren’t designed to taste good on their first sip. On the other hand, beer is meant to taste great on the first sip, the second sip and the third pint. But, that doesn’t mean that it’s any less food-friendly. And, cheese is a great place to start. The carbonation in beer acts as an exfoliant. It clears the palate between bites, whereas wine without carbonation tends to bounce off the cheese and go down your throat without intermingling. The overlap in the world of cheese and beer is also really obvious. Wonderful beer producers like Chimay in Belgium make their own in-house cheese, and Maytag blue cheese is made by the Maytag family, who own the pioneering microbrewery Anchor in San Francisco.

Are there any foods that are notoriously difficult to pair with beverages?

MARNIE: Artichokes are challenging vegetables for the sommelier to work with. They’re also the darling of every chef from here to Hawaii. There’s a compound in artichokes that confuses taste buds into perceiving all flavor sensations as sweet. After you eat them, everything else tastes saccharine. There’s no question that wines don’t taste true to their real flavors when dealing with artichokes in high quantities. Certain wine styles can handle this better than others, though. Light-bodied, un-oaked white wines like Grüner Veltliner from Austria work particularly well.

SAM: I think it’s ironic that wine has all these Achilles heels, like artichokes and asparagus. There’s really no problem with these foods when it comes to beer. I’d pair artichokes with a dark, malt beer like a milk stout or porter. While artichokes don’t tend to work very well with the vegetal components of hoppy beers like pilsners or I.P.A.s, those beers would work well with asparagus.

From Publishers Weekly
This cute exploration of food pairings screams that it wants to be a cable TV series. There are numerous photos of the authors gesticulating, and the writing itself is often bogged down with cooking show banter and platitudes (Poultry comes in all flavors and textures). The saving grace is that these two really know what they are talking about. Calagione is the founder of Dogfish Head, one of this country's finest microbreweries, and Old is a respected sommelier and wine educator. After an opening chapter in which the authors are introduced by first names as they opine over why their chosen potable is the greater contribution to humanity, the book is broken into numerous thematic sections. Wine is defined and the major reds and whites get their names in lights. Beer is then similarly dwelt upon. The heart of the book comes in a gambit entitled the Food Debate. Here various vinos and ales are matched with all types of edibles. For example, sandwich suggestions include either a Sauvignon Blanc or a Bitter Golden Ale to go with Tuna Salad. Pizza, shellfish, fruit desserts and seven other foodstuffs are additional fodder for point-counterpoint debates over which drink pairs the best. The final section provides tips and recipes for hosting a beer versus wine tasting dinner party and asks the age-old question: stout or Port with a Chocolate Pecan Upside-down Cake? (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Accessible and highly informative ... In terms of explaining beer and food pairings, this title surpasses What To Drink With What You Eat. -- Library Journal, May 1, 2008

Bold graphics and postcard-like text boxes make this a fast read and handy as a quick reference when you're off to the grocery store or the wine shop. -- Milwaulkee Journal Sentinel, March 30, 2008

Useful recipes, advice and interesting ideas. Especially in the beer-and-dessert area. -- San Francisco Chronicle, March 28, 2008

What's more important in this book than the he said, she said part is the wealth of information it provides for people who are interested in pairing … Sam raids the cutting edge beer bins of the world for his beverage choices while Marnie shows her expertise in finding affordable wine choices -- six each for each chapter. --Ale Street News

You could hardly go to two people more knowledgeable. -- Fort Worth Star-Telegram, April 2, 2008

Customer Reviews

This beer guys says "Good read"
Well, I'm a beer guy, and my girlfriend's a wine person, but we both appreciate the other person's beverage of choice. So I was intrigued by the premise of this book, sort of a good natured battle of the sexes over wine and beer.

The book starts off with a brief, accessible primer on beer and wine, and how to taste and appreciate the various qualities of each beverage. I found this section pretty helpful and informative, and never felt like I was reading something "dumbed down" for my benefit.

The main section of the book covers various food categories, like cheese, vegetables, fish, spicy foods, meats, and fruit desserts. Then for each food category, there's an intro on how to pair wine with this food item with specific wine pairings for food within the categroy. Then, there's an intro on beer pairings for the food category, with specific beer choices for the same food items within the category to contrast with the wine choices. Each food category ends with a wisecracking conclusion between Sam and Marnie about why they think either beer or wine is better for their particular pairings.

I found this format and the content worked well, and helped to define the various strengths and weaknesses of each beverage in pairing with foods. Paring wine, instead of beer, with spicy foods seems like a losing battle, and some of the beer pairings with food traditionally served with wine seemed to be an awful stretch. There's a lot here I could use next time at a restaurant or serving food at home. Sometimes the witty banter between Sam and Marnie was entertaining, sometimes it just cames across as a tired Venus and Mars act.

Part of the strength of the book is also a bit of its weakness. Sam and Marnie know so much about their respective beverages that some of their specific beverage choices are probably not going to be readily available for a lot of readers. I'd love to try lobster with Marnie Old's choice of Domaine Matrot Meursault, a white Burgandy from France, but I'm not sure I'm going to find that very easily. Her secondary choice for lobster, Tasmanian Sparkling Wine, hardly seems like something I could find at my local liquor store, either. Perhaps I shouldn't just pick on Marnie, since there were plenty of beer choices that I'm going to have a lot of difficulty finding. But I would have to say if Marnie is trying to make wine more accessible to beer people, she could start with making a few less exotic wine choices in her pairing recommendations. Most of Sam's first or second pairing choices seemed more readily available.

But the good news is that both authors give the reader plenty to work with, and indeed, they do seem to succeed in getting beer fans to appreciate wine more, and wine people to understand beer. Will I be hosting my own wine vs. beer party, as the authors are so helpful to describe at the end of the book? Well, maybe.

I'd give this 3 1/2 stars, which rounds up to four stars.

Love it! Informative And fun!!
I was surprised, at first, at the modern design of the book regarding mixed fonts and many pictures. It reminds me of how magazine and newspaper articles are formatted thought, so it feels very familiar and accessable to me. I like it.

This is a book that's full of information. It would be easy to overwhelm a reader with knowledge all at once. The light style and gentle banter encourages me to read further on than I might if it resembled an encyclopedia in style. I will be keeping it around as a reference book as well as skimming through it for fun.

Both Marnie and Sam really know their stuff!

A simple textbook for beer and wine
The concept is interesting. The idea of debating which beverage pairs better with different types of food is neat. However, some of the food chemistry is blatantly incorrect. Someone please tell Marnie that all salts are not bases and table salt NaCl is neutral. The "witty repartee" tends to be more entertainment than informative. I do believe Calagione states his arguments better and with less attitude. BTW: In my house, "She" drinks beer.