Here are some favorite common beers, with some food pairing and serving suggestions:
Some other tips:
Beer is a delicious aperitif. Choose a light beer to serve before a meal.
Serve pale beers with light soups and heavy, malty beers with stews.
Light beers are delicious with green salads and vegetable courses.
Serving a chocolate dessert? A rich, sweet, dark beer is the perfect match. Fruitier beers work well with fruit desserts.
A strong sweet beer is a nice digestif, with or without a separate dessert.
Newcastle Brown Ale is a brown ale, originally brewed in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Launched in 1927 by Colonel Jim Porter after three years of development, the 1960 merger of Newcastle Breweries with Scottish Brewers afforded the beer national distribution and sales peaked in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. The beer underwent a resurgence in the late 1980s and early 1990s with student unions selling it. By the late 1990s, the beer was the most widely distributed alcoholic product in the UK. By the 2000s, the majority of sales were in the United States, although it still sells 100 million bottles annually in the UK. Brewing moved in 2005 from Newcastle to Dunston, Tyne and Wear, and in 2010 to Tadcaster. In 2017, the Heineken Brewery in Zoeterwoude, the Netherlands, also began production. As of 2019, it is brewed as well by Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California, and Chicago, Illinois, for the American market.
Newcastle Brown Ale is perceived in the UK as a working-man's beer, with a long association with heavy industry, the traditional economic staple of the North East of England. In export markets, it is seen as a trendy, premium import and is predominantly drunk by the young. It was one of the first beers to be distributed in a clear glass bottle and is most readily associated with this form of dispense in the UK.
Samuel Adams (often shortened to Sam Adams) is the flagship brand of the Boston Beer Company. It is named after US Founding Father Samuel Adams, who inherited his father's brewery on Boston's King Street (modern day State Street) and worked as a brewer or maltster. Samuel Adams beer is brewed by the Boston Beer Company, which was founded by Jim Koch in Cambridge, MA, where he started the micro-brewery in his home. Koch comes from a long line of Cincinnati brewers, and Samuel Adams beer was started using a recipe now known as Samuel Adams Boston Lager.