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Pair Holiday Cookies with Beer. Try Not to Hurt Yourself.

Festivities are winding down, but there’s a surplus of cookies winking at the motley collection of beers in your fridge. Our best advice: Look for comparable intensities of flavor (difficult), and don’t overdo it (impossible). Specific recommendations follow.

Joe Stange Dec 25, 2023 - 11 min read

Pair Holiday Cookies with Beer. Try Not to Hurt Yourself. Primary Image

Photo by Tori Allen

Trying to figure out which cookies taste good with which beers… Who does this? Only magazine editors, and publicists working for brewers and bakers, and whatever brewers or tasters who have been talked into playing along because it might grab likes on the socials. Special exceptions allowed for authors of food-beer pairing books (what a niche!), and brewery events people, and those who pay good money for tickets for the occasional tasting event—because, having been in pandemic mode for nine months, we have sepia-tinted fondness for all sorts of public events that aren’t happening right now.

But listen: Maybe more people should do this? You could do this. It’s fun. Why is it fun? Because beers, and because cookies.

Also: There is an unusual kind of mental exercise involved when you start trying to plug your brain’s attention into your physical senses—really trying to sort out all that data and figure out what it means. What am I tasting here, and what am I tasting there, and what am I tasting when it all comes together? Is it good—and most importantly, why is it good? What can I learn from this strange sugary bacchanal to increase the chances of future hedonistic pleasure?

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