The recipe
Black Bean Chili
This is a simple chili recipe from Bush’s Beans. It takes about an hour with prep to cook and serve. It can be a bit spicy with the 2 tablespoons of chili powder and ½ teaspoon of cayenne pepper. You can take some of the heat off just by cutting the cayenne or cutting back on the chili powder, but that’s why you serve it with sour cream. Here is the link to the complete recipe.
The beer
I look forward to the Fall and Winter because they are my favorite seasonal beer times of the year. All three of the seasonals I look forward to every year from Sierra Nevada, Celebration, Ruthless Rye, and Flipside, are Fall and Winter beers. This is the Flipside time of year, so I decided to see how this would pair with the chili. First, a little about Flipside.
As with every beer that Sierra Nevada puts out, it is very well done. Flipside pours a nice clear dark copper color. Piney and grassy hops aroma are evident immediately with a bit of a biscuity malt aroma in the background. The taste starts off with the grassy and citrusy notes of the hops with very little alcohol heat and little to no evidence of the caramel or chocolate malts included in the recipe. It is pretty light on the tongue and actually provides a kind of refreshing taste. It would be a pretty good sessionable beer if not for the 6.2% ABV.
The pairing
I have learned through strenuous testing that I prefer brown and amber ales with spicy food, especially Mexican and Mexican inspired food. I had hoped with the use of the darker malts, Flipside would go well with a chili. It went OK. My goal was for the caramel and chocolate malts would bring out the caramelized taste of the browned onions (I browned the onions longer than recipe instructs. Going for depths of flavor.). With little to no taste of the malts I was targeting, this did not work out as well as I had hoped. However, if your pallet does not lean towards the darker malts and caramelization tastes as mine does it, you will probably enjoy it a bit more.
An idea to make this recipe a little more beer friendly is simply to add beer to the recipe. I would probably use a more floral/citrusy hoppy pale ale to bring out more of the cumin flavors. If you look at the recipe the only liquid included in the ingredients comes from the liquid the canned corn comes with. You could drain the corn and instead use about a half to a full cup of room temperature beer in its stead. That would probably improve the flavor as well as eliminate some of the salt from the recipe.
The conclusion
In the end this is a good simple and quick recipe and a good high quality beer that just did not work together (Sounds like most of my dating relationships). This is a recipe that I would recommend pairing with Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Lonerider Peacemaker Pale Ale, or Foothills Brewing Pilot Mountain Pale Ale.
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