Country Boy beer and sushi pairing a big hit
April 6, 2018
Due to sushi’s Japanese origins, the typical beer pairing in sushi restaurants belongs to clean, if bland, rice-laden lagers from the likes of Kirin, Sapporo, or Asahi. On Thursday night in Charleston, WV, Country Boy Brewing and Ichiban restaurant threw tradition out the window and dared pair sushi items with flavorful craft ales. The results blew us away.
“For a long, long time I’ve been wanting to do a sushi and beer pairing,” said Josh Holland, WV sales representative for Kentucky’s Country Boy Brewing Company.
He explained that following Todd Moore’s takeover of the Ichiban/Bar 101 complex, he thought it was the perfect venue to do it. The beer and sushi pairing event took place on the Bar 101 side of the restaurant.
“It’s the best sushi restaurant in town, and Todd knows beer,” Holland said. “It felt like a natural fit for everyone. We started working together about a month ago.”
Proprietor Todd Moore agreed, explaining, “It’s an interesting idea, and I thought it would work well. They do good beer; we do good sushi.”
Sashimi, sushi, shumai and flavorful ales
Ichiban head chef Evan Wilson took the lead in putting the menu together: four sushi items, each paired with specific Country Boy beers. Each food item was offered with your choice of one of two different beers with taste profiles that offered either complimentary or contrasting flavors.
Featured were two hoppy beers, two sour beers, two roasty beers, and two blonde ales — one plain and one lightly flavored with habanero pepper. the menu included:
- Cougar Bait or Nacho Bait blonde ales paired with a sashimi nacho
- Living Proof Wild Ale or Ghost Gose paired with Albacore sashimi
- Stampin’ Ground Stout or Amos Moses Brown Ale paired with one gyoza and one wasabi shumai
- Alpha Experiment IPA or Halfway Home Pale Ale paired with spicy tuna and an Almost Heaven roll.
We asked Chef Wilson what he tried to do in the pairing design.
“A little bit of both complement and contrast,” he answered.
“The best paring for me is the sours with the Albacore sashimi and miso ponzu. The miso and ponzu mixed together will give a little bit of sweetness that will balance the sours perfectly. The Nacho Bait with the sashimi nacho pair really good together because you’ve already got the spiciness added to the Nacho Bait, and then you’re coming with a spicy dish with the Sashimi Nacho.”
Distributor likes beer and sushi too
It’s always good to see Country Boy’s beer distributor out supporting these kind of events. Michael “Smitty” Smith, on-premise supervisor for Spriggs Distributing, said he had never seen anything like this pairing before.
“I was excited about this event from the moment we started talking about it,” Smith said. “We love the ideas our craft brewery partners come up with, and we’re happy to support it fully.”
Holland summed up the event saying, “Beer has a wide variety of flavors; sushi has a wide variety of flavors. It intrigued me. I’ve never been to a sushi and beer pairing, and I wanted to see what we could do with it.”
From the positive response of the many customers there that evening, it was a definite hit. Let’s hope we see more creative craft beer pairings pop up at Ichiban and other restaurants in town.
Update on Country Boy’s Georgetown taproom
On the topic of Country Boy Brewing, we got an opportunity to talk with Brenda Kullander, taproom logistics coordinator for Country Boy Brewing in Georgetown, Kentucky, while she was in town helping out with the pairing event. She gave us some details about Country Boy’s new brewery and taproom.
She said it is the first brewery in Kentucky to be built from the ground up as a brewery. All the other breweries have gone into existing structures.
“It sits on 9 acres of land,” Kullander said. “It’s gorgeous. The taproom is so much larger than our old taproom (in Lexington). The whole brewery building in Lexington can fit into our taproom in Georgetown. And when it’s nice out, we have a huge partly-covered patio that’s just as large as the inside taproom.
“We moved from a 10-barrel system to a 50-barrel system. So if you want to see an all-American-made stainless steel brewery with the only 200-barrel tank in Kentucky, come on over.”
Inside the taproom they have a main horseshoe bar made in part with barn wood from co-founder D.H. Harrison’s farm. Another bar services the patio. They keep 24 of their own beers on tap, including rotating seasonals and some small-batch stuff. The taproom also includes a retail area with logo merchandise and six-packs and bottles to-go.
Some newer brews there include a newly released Oyster Stout. Coming up this spring are a Mexican amber lager, Grapefruit Cliff Jumper IPA, and Key Lime Cougar Bait (released for Memorial Day).
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