Cravings are an interesting thing. While I’m sure there are scientific reasons behind them, they can seemingly creep up out of the blue, no matter how dicey the situation or inappropriate the circumstance.
Example: I’m putting my 16-month-old daughter to bed, and while I’m laying there reading her Goodnight Moon, my brain is telling me, “drop all your shit and get a Costco hot dog, NOW.” It didn’t matter that it was 9:30 at night and I’d already scarfed down a gaggle of chili dogs for dinner—I needed it, and my body yearned for it.
That’s essentially how this pairing came about. I’d like to say that I put some thought into this one in order to create a truly insightful, uncommon pairing, but nope—I was merely dicking around, playing Nekoatsume on my phone, when I suddenly thought, “hey, I could use a burger, and a complex beer sounds nice with that too!”
The Beer: Adam
Hair of the Dog, Portland, OR
The storied beer Adam, from Portland mainstay Hair of the Dog, is dubbed a “Hearty Old World Ale” on the label, but it’s more reminiscent of a Belgian Dark Ale than anything. The aroma is precisely what you’d expect from a dark ale from the other side of the Atlantic: dark stone fruits, cloves, dry tobacco, and a smidgen of soy sauce at the end for good measure.
Despite the fruity nose, the taste is considerably drier, with a profile that transitions from bitter dark chocolate to burned grain (think an over-baked chocolate chunk cookie) into almost-overwhelming notes of tobacco and oak, topped off with slight hints of fusel. The tobacco transitions into a bitter, smoky finish that wrecks the palate—my mouth tastes like I’ve just smoked a cigarette after a swig of this beer. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but previous experiences with Adam were a tad more balanced, which leads me to think this was an off bottle, possibly over-attenuated.
Even taking that into consideration, this is a solid beer, and a great, easily accessible example of a style that is almost criminally overlooked and underappreciated these days.
The Food: Double-Double cheeseburger
In-N-Out Burger, Heaven
As a born-and-bred Southern California resident, I’m intimately familiar with this legendary West Coast institution of meat-and-cheese-on-a-bun. You may think them overrated, a false idol in a region full of deluded, tasteless douchebags, but I couldn’t care less—In-N-Out Burger is fucking delicious, no matter what you say.