Ah, Valentine’s Day. Macaroni glued to construction paper hearts. Shiny red foil encasing waxy milk chocolates. Prix fixe menus at every restaurant in town. Aren’t you glad it’s all over with for the year? Whether you spent Hallmark’s favorite holiday gazing tenderly at your lover over oysters and champagne or tearfully power-watching One Tree Hill on Netflix with your cat, chances are you overindulged on sparkly pink things last week and could use a little RnR. And what do the Bedford Cheese Shop mongers do to truly relax? Eat whole quarts of blue cheese ice cream in our sweatpants? No. I mean, maybe. But probably.

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It’s beer time, you turkeys! Let’s pick something out of the ever-expanding pantheon of the world of malt, hops and yeast and see how it gets down with another one of my favorite fermented products- cheese.  If my insides would support it, and my gut would just go away, I could exist solely on beer, cheese, and bread. At the end of a long day, a simple meal of cheese, bread, maybe some cured meats or pickled products can be the most satisfying. Maybe throw in some sweatpants and house shoes, just for circulation purposes.

My mind is usually all over the place, so the goal here is to exercise a focus in pairings. My idea is to take three beers of a specific style and pair them with three different cheeses. For a bonus, there will be one accoutrement to rule them all, to tie the whole thing together, if you will.  So maybe this is really just an accoutrement challenge…and relish is an accoutrement…and hot dogs go good with relish…and baseball season is coming! And…back to the beer, right.

When I’m choosing a beer to drink, 9 times out of 10 my pick is going to be driven by the weather.   Since we’re in the middle of this fabulous winter-spring mix, what sounds good today could sound ridiculous tomorrow.  So for arguments sake, let’s go with a cold weather favorite – Stout.   Stout is fantastic- it’s dirty, roasted bitterness makes me want to roll around in damp top soil wearing nothing but a loincloth and goggles.  But the world of stout is, like most styles of beer these days, wide and varied…best to hone it in a bit.  We’re going to take a look at three different domestic stouts, all of the imperial range, meaning higher ABV, bolder flavors, heavier body, and more smiles from ol’ Naters.

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Recently, as I was polishing off my sixth Krunchy-covered Klondike Bar and watching a little show called “Toddlers & Tiaras,” I lovingly glanced down at the milky white sandwich that I was holding between two sticky paws that had attracted a blend of cat hair, lint, and Wheat Thins crumbs, and thought “I think I’m going to throw up.”

It had been decided. I was CLEARLY lactose intolerant. I shoved my last cow’s milk based treat down my throat and tried to enjoy my final moments as one of the blissfully easy breezy lactose tolerant. I quickly jumped to and in a flash was at my third most visited website (after this and this one), the all knowing WebMD. Many a late night had been dedicated to researching grave medical disorders that I was positive I had contracted while hustling cheese on the streets of Williamsburg. Face Blindness. Moebius Syndrome. Progeria. Gout. Irritability.  This began my grand journey into the world of dairy intolerance, and the subject of this week’s blog post!