Beer fare goes upscale

Eight words you never thought you'd hear associated with the topic "beer": Maytag blue cheese with chili-infused Tupelo honey.

Sure, beer used to be a simple beverage. It went with a hot dog or a bag of chips and all was right with the world. Yet forewarned is forearmed: In today's discerning foodie subculture, a connoisseur understands that you pair either a bourbon-cask ale or a high-gravity bock with Maytag blue.

Bock beer and cheddar? Mon Dieu, non! Cheddar calls for a Belgian-style wheat and a dollop of pomegranate molasses!

Welcome to the Brave New World of the Charleston Food + Wine Brewmaster's Beer School, where good old blue-collar beer stomps all over territory that used to be the sole province of wine buffs.

"People don't put the two together, but I love seeing people's faces when they try some of these food and beer pairings," said Angelo Cayo, the head brewmaster at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Cartersville, Ga.

In Beer School, Cayo is the guy who spends the first half of the session talking about the technical stuff: Ingredients, microbiology, sparge water, trub, "hot wort receivers," etc. But Cayo is the warm-up act, supplanted midway through the event by Brent Wertz, "The Bud Chef," and a platoon of servers.

As "Chef Brent" speaks, tiny presentation plates of cheeses and chocolates arrive in a practiced flurry, suggesting the refined restraint of an excruciatingly proper wine tasting. But then the beer arrives — bottles and bottles of it — and the school slips quickly into recess mode. Bock beer, wheat beer, organic pale ale: You're supposed to swirl it and sniff it and swallow it, but the formality soon subsides beneath a steady stream of suds.

Chocolate beer? Heck, why not! "You can throw anything in beer," said Megan Faircloth of Daniel Island, who bought tickets to the event as a birthday present for her homebrewer husband, Rob Faircloth.

A complex chart of flavor pairings flashes across the screen, but the students are busy popping the tops on bottles of high gravity "Budweiser Brew Masters Private Reserve." The instructors hardly seem to mind. "Beer is more fun than wine," says a smiling Cayo. Behind him, someone proposes a toast.