Strawberry Spinach Salad with Rogue Honey Kolsch

August 7th, 2013

The Beer: Rogue Farms Honey Kolsch

Type: Kolsch
Brewing Company: Rogue Ales

The Food: Strawberry Spinach Salad

Details: Strawberry spinach salad with sesame and poppy seed dressing.

Strawberry Spinach Salad with Rogue Honey Kolsch Review

The beer was good, the salad was good, the two together were bad.

The Rogue Honey Kolsch is brewed by Rogue Ales in Oregon. Believe it or not but Rogue Ales has their own bees at the Rogue Farm. There were 119 colonies of bees that helped create this refreshing beer.

If you are familiar with Rogue Ales you might already know that Rogue does an amazing job at balancing the flavor of the beer and not let any particular taste overpower the other. I’ve found this to be true in a number of Rogue Ales including the Rogue Farms Pumpkin Patch Ale and the Rogue Double Chocolate Stout. Some pumpkin ales seem to let the nutmeg and cinnamon spices take over the beer and some chocolate stouts just taste a bit too much like a liquid chocolate bar to me but Rogue created a well-rounded and balanced beer in both cases.

Based on the fact Rogue has their own bees and my previous positive experiences with the brewery I definitely had to try the Rogue Farms Honey Kolsch when I saw it. The beer was delicious and exceeded my expectations. It had both a beautiful honey color and flavor. The Honey Kolsch wasn’t too sweet at all, it was very well balanced and easy to drink.

The strawberry spinach salad we had also exceeded expectations. It was my first time trying this recipe and I found it both very simple to make and it tasted delicious. The dressing worked perfectly with the strawberries and spinach. It did have some sweetness to it but it was not overpowering. We will certainly be having this salad again.

The big question is: how was the beer with the food? The answer is: bad. The salad seemed to offset the balance of the beer. It was no longer as well rounded as it had first been. The salad also seemed to add a bit of a bitter alcohol flavor to the aftertaste.

The Honey Kolsch and the salad were both good, but these two items probably shouldn’t be paired together. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world but they certainly tasted better separately than they did together.

Tags: rogue ales, spinach, strawberry
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