With a Great Salmon Recipe, Try a Scottish Ale Like Laughing Lab

There's a beer out there to go with every meal. Pairing beer with food has its guidelines; for example, matching comparable flavors, like a sweeter beer with a sweeter dish, or choosing a beer that has contrasting flavors to balance out the meal. Ultimately, there's a lot of room for creativity and experimentation to come up with a pairing that pleases your palate. A great food and beer pairing should enhance both parts of the dining experience, and my latest pairing experiment did just that. I paired Laughing Lab Scottish Ale with my wife's cedar plank salmon recipe, successfully complementing the wide array of flavors in the food and beer.

Laughing Lab is the flagship beer of Bristol Brewing Company in Colorado Springs. This year-round beer has been brewed since 1994, the year Mike and Amanda Bristol founded their brewery. Over the years, Laughing Lab has racked up numerous medals at the Great American Beer Festival. Its malty, balanced, and sessionable nature, in addition to fun and iconic label art, has helped make it a favorite among craft beer lovers all along the Colorado Front Range. These aspects also make it great to enjoy with food of all kinds.

Our meal included fresh wild-caught salmon with a dipping sauce and a sweet potato. The salmon was topped with a glaze of honey mustard, olive oil, dill, salt, and pepper, and the dipping sauce was made up of plain yogurt, dill, horseradish, scallions, salt, and pepper. Obviously, a lot of spicy, herbal flavors to go along with the light yet meaty richness of the salmon. The sweet potato was topped with butter and brown sugar to give it some sweetness. As a medium-bodied beer, Laughing Lab provided the right balance in terms of mouthfeel - sturdy enough to match the food, but not overpower it. The flavors were also the perfect answer to the complexities in the meal. The beer's maltier profile features nutty, biscuity flavors with a slight sweetness, followed by a hop crispness on the finish. These pleasant malt flavors matched the more rich aspects of the meal very well, and the hop presence was enough to complement the spicy flavors from the horseradish, dill and honey mustard.

This is definitely a pairing that's worth trying again. On the other hand, maybe I'll go in another direction with a beer pairing the next time I have this dish. The endless possibilities are a big part of what makes enjoying food and beer so much fun.