Beaufort, a dense, creamy Alpine cow’s cheese with a mix of umami and chocolate flavours, is perfectly complimented by the caramel malt flavour of the Southpaw, an amber ale brewery by Gipsy Hill Brewery.
I like to get my Beaufort from my friends at Mons Cheese. Mons only buy this cheese from one producer, Claude Mercier, or Monsieur Mercier to awed cheese fans like me, because he does it proper. Above you can see these noble cheese on their shelves stretching off into seeming infinity, a sight that made me well up a bit when I went to visit the farm dairy which is in the Savoie region of the French Alps.
Also Gipsy Hill tend to make lighter, lower alcohol beers, so you can drink as much as you want and not get silly. For given values of ‘much’ and ‘silly’.
Fun cheese fact: Beaufort comes in great big 45kg wheels, which now and again I get to turn in Mons’ maturing rooms, lucky me. The edges of the wheels are concave. This is because in the old days the cheeses were brought down on donkeyback from the mountain chalets where they were made. The sides were concave so that the ropes used to secure them to the donkeys didn’t slide off. I like to think that the donkeys got a nice piece of cheese for their troubles.
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