Gin n' Cheese

In Ireland we get dairy and we get alcohol. 

borrowed-pic includes Bertha (see note at end)

We have an understanding with it and of it.... Not to say that we are mad alcoholics and herders, though maybe some are, but the drinking culture is lively and the love of butter endemic.

by Eoin Holland...really do the coincidences stop?

In late 2019, which feels world away, I was asked to help at a gin n’ cheese tasting. I’ve done wine and cheese, beer and cheese, sherry and cheese, even whiskey and cheese, and been delighted with some of the discoveries. However I was resistant to gin and cheese. Why does everything have to follow fashion? When I started drinking gin & tonics, thanks to afternoons with my father, it was considered a grandmother’s drink. Some marketing genius introduced a fish goblet and flowers, they even made a gin for the sweet toothed, and suddenly the whole island raises a toast.

However I do love a gin. I love cheese. I enjoy a good adventure, so I said okay. The gin, Bonac 24, was provided by a delightful father and son operation. Their pink gin was an authentic-ish pink gin in that the pinking was through natural products. While the gin was floral it was not sweetened (which I was horrified to realise what the current main models of pink gin are). No longer angostura bitters just bitterly poor taste.

Preparation for the evening proved fun, fascinating, nearly inebriating and there were some immensely interesting parallel – particularly easy to grasp after you’ve attempted several pairings.

Gin and (sheep and goat) cheese can trace their origins back to the area of the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of life and many of its essentials. It was there that sheep and goats were first domesticated over 10,000 years ago. While China of course independently discovery the art of distillation, it also began in Mesopotamia & Egypt where they distilled to make perfumes and balms (for embalming), and medicine – records can be traced as far back at 1800 BC. I cannot help but wonder if there was a little partaking on the side.

A French born Irish man, Aneas Coffer,
 invented an improved version of the still
 which refined the gin making process.

Ireland takes up the vat and then the still.

Just as Ireland had to relearn farmhouse cheese making they are also had to figure out the mastery of the gin still, though again the curd had the advance on the gin. In Ireland in the 1990’s one could get Gordon's Gin, Cork Gin, or if you were very cheap – nameless supermarket Gin. Gin making came along when whiskey makers discovered that they could make a little cash crop with a quick gin while they waited for their whiskey to mature. Even beyond that, it offered entrepreneurs, often in rural areas or villages, a way of diversifying their income through the production of an excellent gin. I like anything that allows the people who love the country and its villages to continue to make living in the country and those villages viable and vibrant.  We have the excellent Dingle Gin, Bertha’s Revenge, Bonac Gin, etc. I am sure that some will jostle their way in while others are jostled out but it is one hell of a party.

Cheese in Ireland reminds me a little of gins beginning. Before the late 1970’s much of the cheese in Ireland was industrial or very very cheap imports, gurriers of gruyere and the (in)famous Calveeta. It was the free spirits moving to the country side and the farmers wondering how to get value for their milk who realised that cheese making might be a possibility.

Furthermore with the Irish traveling abroad and increasing attention to food (fashion has its uses) we saw a rise in demand and an increasing interest in cheese….. similarly with gin.

Ah the Dutch….

Gin has a rather fun history. It was when English soldiers, stationed in Antwerp during the Eighty Years War, encountered and likely imbibed ‘Dutch Courage’ or ‘genever’ that it began it's way west 'Genever' was a distillation of malt wine, wheat or corn etc, infused with juniper. Gin made it back with the English but got into a little trouble when William of Orange III in 1688 banned the import of French wine and brandy, and simultaneously loosened the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers by lowering the taxes on distilling and removing the need for a license. Yes suree, it was a free for all. Water was dangerous to drink and a pint of beer was more expensive than a pint of gin. It was a dark time for Gin, also known as the Gin Craze.

Some dirty tricks were played during the Gin craze. Distillers grabbed whatever was about to flavour

their gin, turpentine (for woody notes), saw dust, and sulphuric acid (which gave it a sweetness amongst other things). This reminds me of some slight of hands played by cheese makers and dairy suppliers. Some would colour their cheese to disguise the poor quality of the milk (though other did that to distinguish it). In the booming US in the 1900’s there were some horror stories of what milk suppliers would dilute the milk with. Sometimes I am rather grateful for health inspectors and tests.

In Ireland the cheese industry owes a great deal to our Dutch gone native. They have brought their expertise, their energy and their generosity to Ireland: the Willems family from Rotterdam established Coolea, Marion Roeleveld and Haske are Killeen Farmhouse, Geurt van Dikkenburg is master cheese maker at Cashel Blue, the Van Kampan’s who made a gorgeous goat cheese, Mine Gabhar, in the 1990’s, the list, the gifts and the goudas go on.

Don’t touch a man’s faith or his gin.

Could we say gin and cheese helped in the War efforts? The French soldiers in WWI were rationed with 1 Camembert and 25 centilitres of wine per day. In WWIi, when the Germans bombed Plymouth, home of the English Devonport Naval Base, and their beloved Plymouth Gin, it was said, ‘that’s it, now Hitler’s lost the war’. 

I enjoyed researching into what gin was and where it came from, thinking of the parallels and making very loose connection with cheese. It was however when I started thinking about what and how to pair gin and cheese that I was really won over.

Gin is made with infusions of spices and herbs (and fruit occasionally). The alcohol is either distilled and passes through a basket of infusions or the infusions are actually marinated in the alcohol. Cheese also gains many of its flavours from the outside. The milk and its future flavours are affected by the land that the animals or graze on and what they eat. Further more people like to add herbs and spices to cheese, fenugreek, chives, cumin etc (again often in Dutch Gouda style cheese). Some cheese makers will wash a cheese in a spice bath giving it interesting aromatics, Appenzeller etc, or cultures from the outside, like washed rinds. Cheese can be quite fatty and rich, the spirit of the gin can cut through that and clean the palate. I was ready.

I hope that I have persuaded you to try gin with cheese, or cheese with gin or to at least no put up your nose at it (like I did at first). Have a sniff, have a sip, have a taste.

• Sometimes you can try to create ‘a bridge’ or a ‘caress’ between gin and cheese. Pair an accompaniment with either the gin or the cheese to help bring them together. I think of it as cooking in your mouth. I tried a blackcurrant and sloe gin jam (just a little), with a lactic milky cheese and the pink (not sweet) Bonac 24.
• Just because a cheese or a gin did not go together doesn’t mean that the gin or the cheese will not work with another one. Tinder dates.
• Washed rinds might be better left with beer and wine. It may hark back to the monkish history of washed rinds and the fallen nature of gin, but a few of the combinations I tried really did not work.
• Herbaceous sheep cheese, like local Italian Pecorinos, manchego, are often recommended. The herbal background of the cheeses echoing the herbal background of the gin.
• Blue sheep cheese, Cool Mary, did not go well with the ordinary Bonac 24 but it was delightful with the pink Bonac 24 (again not sweet). Blue cheeses pair very nicely with fruit rich jams and I think that the fruitiness of pink gins could be similar - worth a shot?
• Youngish goat cheeses with fudgy textures and strong herbal notes are interesting companions. The gin balanced nicely with the rich paste and the herbal notes harmonized. St. Tola Log was what we tried with the regular Bonac 24.
• Lastly and rather importantly, on the night of the tasting they drowned the gin with so much tonic you could not taste the gin, or the pairing. It was like eating fine cheese with a tipsy soda pop. While you may not want to go as far as I did – gin with a dash of soda water or the tiniest tipple of tonic, please don’t dilute the gin so much that cannot taste it. It is like drowning a good cheese is chutney.

The perfect cocktail. Gin made a return to grace with… the colonies, okay maybe not quite. It was noticed that gin was easier to ship and transport whereas beer was inclined to spoil. Many of the

colonists in warmer countries had to take quinine, which is quite bitter, against malaria. They mixed it with sweet tonic. 
Fancy a tipple Charlie? Gin slipped very nicely into the mix. The final slice of lemon or lime came from the ships. Sailors or limeys as they were known, kept limes on board for their vitamin C to prevent scurvy.

Bertha’s Revenge, an Irish gin made at Ballyvolane, is made from a distillation of Milk whey (don’t ask me how) and named after Ireland’s oldest cow – Bertha, of the native Dromieann breed. It is

lovely with just a little tonic and a slice of orange. I am not sure what cheese I would try it with - perhaps Valdeon or St. Tola.

1. The picture at the top is Bertha in a pub receiving a congratulatory drink with the farmer who kept good care of her.