Some of you may remember the first time we worked with B. Good in our article, “Burgers and Beers, Need We Say More?” where we paired B. Good burgers with craft beer. Well fast forward a couple years, and we’re still in love with their food. Since we last wrote about their burgers, they’ve gone even more local and expanded their menu to include a lot more vegetables. They work to source whatever food then can from local sources when it’s in season. They’ve even gone as far as growing a small amount of their own vegetables atop a parking garage in downtown Boston to supply some of their stores for a couple of days...as Jeff is a former rooftop gardener, we love it!

“But it’s not summer burger season anymore...” you may say. Well, we say burgers aren’t just for summer! A great burger is a delicious thing year round, so we should celebrate them year round. And, also, B. Good is more than just burgers now, so we’re looking at more than just burgers...So read on and see how we pair their Local Strawberry Goat Cheese Salad, their year round El Guapo burger and their seasonal Autumn Sal Bacado burger! (For behind the scenes pictures of us putting these pairings together with Jon from B. Good, check our Facebook page here!)

Local Strawberry Goat Cheese Salad & Dogfish Head Festina Peche

B. Good’s strawberry goat cheese salad is a plate full of deliciousness with local strawberries, baby spinach, locally-made goat cheese, candied walnuts, caramelized onions and balsamic vinaigrette. With this much going on, it’s tough to find a beer to pair! We think, however, that you’ll find that the Dogfish Head Festina Peche nails it on the head. The beer is modeled after a German style of beer called berliner weisse, which is a tart and acidic, lower alcohol wheat beer. Dogfish Head has added some peaches to this one to make it their own.

The most obvious flavors are the fruit in the beer and in the salad. These two go together nicely to get you started on the right foot with this combo. It goes much deeper, though. The beer itself, aside from being tart, is rather dry so the candied walnuts and caramelized onions really serve to bring a bit of sweetness and earthiness to balance that and round out the flavors. Meanwhile, the acidity of the brew cuts right through the super creamy goat cheese, while the cheese tempers the acidic bite...you get delicious and creamy goat cheese with a great blend of peaches and a mellow, dampened tingling from the beer. The balsamic vinaigrette manages to play nicely with everything and do what a salad dressing should: not get in the way, just enhance the experience!

Our favorite thing about this pairing has to be how the goat cheese and acid in the beer interact in this one...it’s just crazy good!

El Guapo & Notch Session Pils

The El Guapo is a beef burger (in this case) with bacon, homemade jalapeno ranch, lettuce, tomato, onion and, which we got optionally, jalapeno slices and cheddar cheese. It’s spicy and tasty! The Notch Session Pils is an unfiltered Czech-style Pilsner, which means it’s a littler maltier than the pilsners that Americans are used to. This one has a decent bit of hops in it, though, which lowers any apparent sweetness. Plus, it comes in right below 4% abv, meaning you can drink it all night long!

With so much going on with this burger and so much heat, you can’t have much alcohol. That’s just a recipe for burning! Check, this pairing is set on that. Also, you need to cut through that creamy, spicy ranch sauce. Check, crisp pils cuts right through it AND the grease and salt from the bacon! Lastly, you need something simple enough that it won’t get in the way of everything going on with the burger. Done! Sometimes a great burger just calls for a delicious, yet subtle, beer and that’s what the Notch Session Pils is.

Our favorite thing about this pairing is how the Pils just comes in and cleans your tongue of the salt from the bacon, really letting you taste everything else even better.

Sal Bacado & Jolly Pumpkin Weizen Bam

Lastly, we have the Sal Bacado burger, a beef burger (as we asked for it) with local corn salsa, bacon and avocado. We’ve paired it with Jolly Pumpkin’s Weizen Bam, their take of a Saison/Hefeweizen blend barrel aged with wild yeast. It’s a tad funky, with the yeast characteristics you’d expect from BOTH a Hefeweizen and a Saison. It’s dry, effervescent and super bubbly!

Between the bacon and the salsa, this burger is fairly salty. The first thing the Weizen Bam does is help to manage that, which allows other flavors to shine. Also, the guacamole is super creamy and this lower alcohol, effervescent brew slices through that and really releases the flavors which would otherwise just coat your tongue. The funk and yeast of the beer also play a great antagonistic role against the earthier flavors of the roasted corn salsa and char on the burger...they’re not flavors you’d think would go together, but somehow they work fantastically! Honestly, this is one of those pairings that was either going to sing or flop, and it’s hitting the high note spot on!

Our favorite thing about this one? How unexpectedly well the roast/char and the yeast came together. Without that, this would have just been a bit average.

What do you think? Do you have a great restaurant we should try to work with for food pairings? Do you have a B. Good burger and beer pairing you like? Let us know your thoughts on Twitter, Facebook or in the comments below! Cheers!

Seasonal beers are one of the best parts of being a craft beer fan! Variety is one of the major benefits of being a fan of better brew and seasonals give you that variety and also help to make certain beers more special (it always tastes better when you have to wait for it). Every year we wait eagerly for the stouts of winter, the assortment of styles that spring brings, the lighter and refreshing brews of summer and the Oktoberfests and pumpkin beers of fall. For many breweries seasonals are their best sellers, and with good reason. Somehow few things are more delicious than one of your favorite beers that you’ve had to wait nine months.

Over the past few years, though, we’ve been seeing seasonal beers released earlier and earlier. It used to be that the first summer brews arrived in May. Now, we expect them in March. Spring beers...well we’re pretty sure we saw some as early as February this year (sick, we know). But brewers pushed us over the edge when we started seeing pumpkin ales in early August. AUGUST! That is literally the middle of summer. We don’t know about you, but when it’s 90°+ and humid as hell, the last thing we want is anything involving pumpkin! Plus, this means there’s never any left for Thanksgiving, when we all want it most! In our poll about seasonal beer, a full 68% of you even said that seasonal craft beers are coming out too early!

From hanging around the industry as long as we have, we know why this is (but we still don’t like it). All the brewers want to be first to market. The first beer of the season you try is the one you’re going to stick with most likely and has switched your taste-season to the next season. The craft beer diehards (like us) may disagree and say that you try them all and will switch back to the current season, but 90% of the craft beer market is the casual drinker...and THAT person will usually stick to their first and move to the next season. Plus nobody wants to have extra inventory on the shelves come the end of the season (do you ever drink Spiced Christmas Ale after Christmas? Neither do we.). So it’s a race. And every year that race starts earlier.

Now that we’ve identified the problem, what’s our solution? Simple: don’t buy seasonal craft beer until YOU think it’s appropriate. Don’t want pumpkin beer in August? Don’t buy it. Wait until Thanksgiving...or at least Autumn. Spiced Christmas Ale? Let’s stall until after Thanksgiving. We don’t want to hurt craft brewery’s sales, we just want to shift the seasons back to normal. So once that season hits, as Jim Cramer might say, “Buy buy buy!” Let’s show brewers that they don’t need to launch pumpkin beer in August to sell it all in time for Thanksgiving.

Also, we’ve launched the Campaign For Seasonal Beer. So what do you think? Want to discuss this with us on Twitter or tell brewers to hold off on how early they launch these, use #CampaignForSeasonalBeer. Or hit us up on Facebook. Or, you could always just leave us a comment below. Either way, let us know your thoughts! Cheers!

The other day we went on a mini-rant about pumpkin beers being available in August, which expanded into a discussion with our followers on Twitter and Facebook about how early seasonal beers are being released lately.

If you've been paying attention to this type of thing in craft beer, you'll notice that pumpkin beers are available in the middle of summer, spring beers are sometimes released as early as January and that's just the tip of the iceberg! What this means is all the summer brew is gone while it's still 90°+ in August and you've got to grab a fall seasonal like pumpkin beer. Once you really want it in late October or, God forbid, Thanksgiving, that pumpkin beer is nowhere to be found and you're stuck with spiced Christmas beer. What gives?

So we want to know! What do you think? Are seasonal craft beers being released too early lately? As usual, vote below, then let us know why you made that choice on Twitter (if you think they're released too early, use the hashtag: #CampaignForSeasonalBeer), on Facebook or in the comments below the poll. Cheers!