Girl Scout Cookie Pairing 2021

We're still here even though it's been quite some time since the last post. And even though the pandemic may have cancelled a lot of things, it didn't cancel Girl Scout cookie season and our annual beer pairing. Per usual, Chris sourced the cookies. Then he graciously divvied them up for a COVID-safe handoff/tasting last Saturday at The BeerMongers. We both started with a draft of StormBreaker Brewing Eagle Fang All-Valley style (shout out to SB for the awesome Cobra Kai reference). We agreed that the moderately hopped IPA was a nice pairing with Lemon Ups cookies that enhanced the hop flavor.

 

After the IPA, Chris took his Girl Scout cookie pairing down a dark, delicious alley with Oskar Blues Brewery 2019 Ten Fiddy. Here he found one of the new cookies for this year, French Toast, to be a great pairing. The cinnamon in the cookie was just the right amount, steering clear of being weird with the complexity of the beer. Also tasty were the chocolate and peanut butter Tagalongs. Last, and possibly best, were the S'mores. If you haven't had these sandwich cookies they provide a surprisingly facsimile of what actual s'mores taste like without the work of building a fire and toasting marshmallows.

 

Next up Chris went another completely different direction with Double Nickel Dot Matrix kettle sour blackberry and raspberry. He found it paired nicely with the gluten-free (not that there's anything wrong with that) Toffee-tastic and I enjoyed it with the new-this-year Toast-yay! French toast-inspired cookie as well as Lemon-ups. We both agreed that the standout pairing was the Thin Mints. One of the OG cookies, it was like putting mint and raspberry in lemonade.

 

The Girl Scout cookie pairing continued with Baerlic Brewing Co. Sundowner Black Lager. While it didn't work with the Thin Mints, it provided balance to: the Toast-yay! (offsetting the sweetness), the Samoas (especially for those who are not coconut fans) and the Lemon-up (dark to the citrus flavor).

 

Two beers that were more challenging to pair with the Girl Scout cookies were Little Beast Brewing Tiger Team IPA and Block 15 Brewing Co. Ridgeback Red. Not ones to back down from a challenge, Chris found a match for Tiger Team with Lemon-ups, the lemon really popping out. And I decided that the creamy peanut butter and chocolate flavors of the Tagalongs were copacetic with the Ridgeback Red. The abbreviated pairing, while maybe not ideal for "scientific" purposes certainly produced less of a sugar hangover than we've subjected ourselves to in previous years.