A NogneO FABPOW

@beersiveknown FABPOW stands for "Food and Beer Pairing of the Week", a term coined by Mark Dredge of the excellent Pencil and Spoon blog.

I'm a big fan of soup. Its pretty easy to make, filling and gives me an excuse to fire up the breadmaker (not that I need one). For Christmas I got Madhur Jaffrey's excellent Curry Easy book, which to my delight has a number of Indian soup recipes within its 70s wallpaper inspired covers. I decided to make the tomato and lentil  soup (I'm not sure I can reproduce it here, due to copyright issues, but its similar to this one). Its pretty spicy; so decided to try it out with some IPAs. Double IPAs in fact.

Two boozy bottles 10% ABV each.

 What could be better than a 10% double IPA? That's right two of them! Brewed by Nogne O for the 100th and 500th brews respectively they proved popular enough to remain staples of the range. As you can see from the picture above, both #100 and #500 are very dark for IIPAs.

Mmmmm Tasty soup

#100 had a strange nose of soapy coconut and the body was just too much sticky caramel and little malt, with a bitter finish. Paired with the soup however the sweet tomatoes and fragrant corriander combined to coax out some previously unseen hidden flavours of chocolate and citrus. I'd class this beer as an American style barley wine rather than double IPA.

#500 on the other hand worked quite well on its own. It was very mameladey on the nose (think good quality spicy seville orange) with dark burnt sugar and candied orange peel in the taste and a treacley finish. When tried with the soup it picked up an unpleasant earthy hop/metallic flavour which jarred with the tomatoes.

Of the two I marginally preferred the #500, being closer to an IPA, though conversely #100 paired better with the soup. They're very boozy though so I'd like to see them in a 330ml bottle, though probably wouldn't buy either again.

Does anyone else have beer and (veggie) soup pairing suggestions? 

You can see my other NogneO reviews here and here.