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 Boulevard Pale Ale
by Brian Anderson
 I will be the first person to admit that I know next to nothing about pairing beer (or wine) with food. Somehow, everything beyond the traditional "white with fish, red with beef" blends together in my mind.
Nevertheless, I seem to remember in the back of my mind hearing that beers should contrast with foods rather than compliment them. Maybe I've got that completely wrong, but there's no teacher like experience, so tonight at dinner in a hotel restaurant in Kansas City, I decided to try something out.
Having noticed that my main course seemed to be on the sweet side, I decided to try this out. When the term "hoppy" earned me a blank look from the waiter, I switched to asking if they had a pale ale or an IPA. This got me a Boulevard Pale Ale (hey, look! That's the name of this column!), a local bottle-conditioned micro in what I assumed was the American tradition of lots o' hops, not so much malt.
And that's what I got, all right. And it sort of fit the bill. After a bite of my sauce-drenched fish or some sweet potato, I was severely missing the bitter part of my palate. And this certainly fit into "bitter." In fact, it struck me as very American, in its total emphasis on hops (which, of course, was what I asked for).
But it's not what I think of as the traditional Cascade-heavy hops. While the initial taste was actually rather light, with just a faint grassy taste, the main taste and aftertaste warmed to a bitter but not biting taste of citrus hops, but not as metallic as most beers of this style. This makes sense, because the brewery's Web page lists four different hops used. What malt there might have been was pretty unobtrusive.
To be honest, and I never thought I'd be the kind of person who'd say something like this, but it didn't marry as well as I'd like. The beer and the food were two completely different tastes, with no overlap that I could notice. If I were to do this again, I'd get something with a heavy hop edge but more of a malty foundation, though not overly so.
Still, it wasn't a complete failure: once I was done with my food and had beer left, the hoppiness became much, much more noticeable. Less so the malt; I wonder how bottle-conditioned it was. Certainly it cuts through a medium-heavy entree, and it's drinkable, but it's not my taste. An interesting example of a pale ale, but that's a style more appreciated by others.
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