Maybe it's Star-Ledger + beer = boring

Guess what? Beer and food pairings are boring.

Don't take our word for it, just follow the link and the comments.

Guess the folks at Boston Beer who have championed enjoying food with beer have been wrong all along. Food and beer pairings are boring. Not to mention Garrett Oliver from Brooklyn Brewery, who seems to have wasted a lot of time on The Brewmaster's Table. Alas.

Guess the folks at the Brewers Association have been on a misguided mission for the past three years with SAVOR because food and beer pairings are boring. Ditto for CraftBeer.com. Sigh.

Guess White Dog Foundation and in Philadelphia and Victory Brewing in Downington, Pa., have been barking up the wrong tree with the Brewer's Plate for six years, uniting great regional cuisine with beers made within a 150-mile radius. Beer and food pairings are boring. Zounds! Flying Fish, River Horse, Triumph, Climax, Boaks and Iron Hill must have all got suckered on that one.

Speaking of Iron Hill they must have been led astray, coaching their staff to know about food and beer, and how they complement each other. Damn it all! Food and beer pairings are boring!

OK, enough sarcasm.

Craft beer enthusiasts, and not just the geeks, know food and beer go better together than wine and food, and let's hand it to wine, because it does an admirable job with food. It's just that beer, in its creation, welcomes more ingredients – hops for starters – into the fold than wine, resulting in a more expansive gamut of flavors that fit with more kinds of cuisine than its fermented cousin wine.

Beer and food pairings boring? Hardly. It's very much where beer, namely craft beer, belongs, especially right now, amid an era of wonderful beer choices. Otherwise, we might as well settle for Pringles and a Coors, or Bud and Doritos, instead of crab bisque made with a bourbon reduction complemented by a pint of Climax ESB; pork loin with a dunkel from Triumph; jambalaya with Flying Fish Farmhouse ale.

Yes, Virginia, better beer deserves better food.

Perhaps what the Star-Ledger thinks is, writing about beer and food together is boring, overdone. As if taking the days from Thanksgiving to Christmas and playing beer advent calendar is a fresh peach at the top of the tree, not easy, low-hanging fruit.

But that's not an entirely fair comment, because suggesting beers for the yule season has been done well many times in the past. Just like suggesting great beer for great food.

The fact is, beer and food always fit comfortably side by side, can seamlessly exist in the same breath. Because they can go in the same mouthful.

Sláinte. And bon appétit.

Beer Here? Where have you been, SL?

Not to go too far with this, because having more voices in the village square that is craft beer is a great thing.

And that's a sincere comment.

But The Star-Ledger of Newark and its online entity nj.com do deserve a thumbs down for their sudden interest in the craft beer scene with the column Beer Here and for not knowing that Port 44 Brew Pub in Newark is New Jersey's newest brewery.

SL says New Jersey Beer Company is the newest. The North Bergen brewery fired up the kettle this past spring. Port 44 began brewing its lineup of ales in August. It's a quibble yes, but isn't SL a Newark newspaper?

A couple more quibbles: The recycled use of "New Brewski" as a nickname for the state. That moniker was tossed out in 2008 when SL launched its monthly magazine, Inside Jersey, which featured a column that pretty much slammed the state's brewpubs. (Afterward the magazine seemed to care more about wine than beer, save an article by Jersey Brew author Mike Pellegrino about Jersey's beer past, and a back-page item about the Krueger brewery and canned beer being born in the Garden State.)

And didn't SL sponsor the beer festival at Monmouth Park over Labor Day weekend? (That was a festival, that while it had contract-brewed beers with state ties, none of the craft brands actually brewed at home were represented; yet Beer on the Pier last week in Belmar had five Jersey-based brewers there.)

Sadly, this seems more like a dash for advertising dollars (look for the SL hotdog mobile to show up at every festival on the calendar) than genuine interest and a keen read of the marketplace, since New Jersey has had a viable (and yes, now growing stronger) craft beer industry for 15 years.

But newspapers are slow to react (which is why they're dying, and this newfound love of beer sort of reminds us of how the Asbury Park Press newspaper cold-shouldered Bruce Springsteen until he was obviously too big to ignore. However, it's not always the case: Eric Asimov and The New York Times didn't wait until the Brewers Association announced that craft beer was a $7 billion a year industry).

In all fairness, this is the early goings for SL's effort. Stay tuned.

FOOTNOTE: Yes SL did do that silly beer-tie in to the NCAA tournament (March 2oo9 comes to mind), and Climax Brewing owner Dave Hoffmann's Helles got a nice bounce from it. But we seem to recall that tasting panel put styles like IPAs, pale ales and imperial stouts side by side in the same judging session. Make no mistake, Dave's beers are solid and he deserves props, but folks who are seriously into beer would call a foul for the mashup.

What's old is new?

Another nod to PubScout Kurt Epps, who points out the Star-Ledger is recycling features, only this time using a video camera to do it.

The Ledger descended upon The Brewer's Apprentice in Freehold to pick some low-hanging fruit. Kurt points out he did this story 11 years ago, and the Asbury Park Press (our alma mater) did it back in the 1990s, too.

What's different now? YouTube's ascension, from 2005 forward.

Some folks fancy calling this new media, which is accurate enough if you're in the industry or academics and need a term to wrap your mind around. But you can also take it as a euphemism for how the Internet has upended newspapers and eaten their lunch.

The Ledger and some others have inanely called it video journalism. Accurate again. But we can't help but remember that at the time of JFK's assassination 46 years ago, folks in television news were witnessing their slice of the broadcast journalism pie grow exponentially. (You can almost hear the broadcast veterans grinding their teeth at the phrase video journalism; what were they making from Dallas, slides? Animations? Cave paintings? Never mind the news reel footage shown in movie theaters back during World War II and before.)

Whatever. The nomenclature evolved because of short memories and tunnel vision. We're taking a swipe at the Ledger for a few other reasons, too.

One, Kurt's right. And two, the Ledger's production (and it must be stressed, we're not picking on Brewer's Apprentice) is just gathering apples from the ground, no ladder in the tree. All it does is talk about going to make beer outside the traditional brewery setting, i.e. homebrewing by proxy. There are plenty of homebrew clubs – folks who actually brew at home – in New Jersey with some seriously talented and innovative brewers, including one who was a national finalist in the 2007 Samuel Adams LongShot homebrew contest (something we pointed out, to no avail, to an editor at the Ledger back then).

Also, making beer – whether at home or in Butler, Roselle Park, Cherry Hill or Lambertville – is no mystery. There are boatloads of how-brewing-is-done videos on YouTube, and some are from New Jersey. If the Ledger were looking to do some real video journalism, it could have focused on the fact that New Jersey requires homebrewers to get an onerous annual permit, which practically no one does (except Brewer's Apprentice won't make your beer without it), and which practically no other state requires (according to the American Homebrewers Association in Boulder, Colorado). The permit is 15 bucks; it used to be 3, and requires your homebrew to not leave your home, something else that doesn't happen.

Sigh.

But we're not just griping for gripe's sake. We've shot plenty of newsy video about New Jersey beer. So here's where we blow our own horn:

• A look at how hop prices spiked.
• New Jersey's first brewery/brewpub in 10 years.
• And Big Brew 2008.