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As long as people have been scooting into bar seats and demolishing baskets of wings, beer has been a trusted pairing. The lower alcohol level, taste-bud tickling carbonation, and malty flavor complement wings like a dream. Our fingers may be sticky with sauce, but we’ll still palm a cold pint to our burning lips. Whether it’s a cheap light beer that goes down like water, a bottle of Bud for nostalgia’s sake, or a rare craft beer with a German name we can’t pronounce, it’s hard to have a bad time when you have wings and beer in front of you.
That said, the properties of different beer types create different pairing experiences — the bitterness in IPAs, the fruity flavors of some hops — so we dared to ask the experts: which beer really is best to drink with wings?
Easy Wins
Julia Herz wrote the literal book on beer and food pairings: “Beer Pairing: The Essential Guide from the Pairing Pros.” She’s the executive director of the American Homebrewers Association, so not only is she tasting new beers constantly, she’s brewing them, too. In her book, Hertz declares American pale ales and pilsners the best beers to pair with classic Buffalo-style wings. A pale ale will “cut through the heat and emphasize the sweet,” she writes, while a Bohemian-style pilsner will also cut through the heat but leave a “crisp, clean finish.”
From her home in Boulder, CO, she added: “Pale ale is the great, easy place to start because there’s synergy between the malted barley in the beer and the breading in the Buffalo wings.” Pale ales and pilsners also have some residual sugars, and sugar helps calm spiciness.
Then there’s the matter of ABV. The higher the alcohol content a drink has, the more it amplifies the burn triggered by capsaicin (the irritant in chiles). Pale ales and pilsners run in the 4-6% ABV range, so they play nice with heat. Higher alcohol also mutes flavors on our taste buds, so while it often seems like wine gets all the glory with food pairings, beer’s low alcohol level makes it easy to pair with foods in so many instances. Especially wings.
But Herz doesn’t want to prescribe you a pale ale every time you sit down at the bar. “At the end of the day, experiment,” she said, sending me a link of beer styles to peruse. “You love American IPAs, or West Coast IPAs, hazy IPAs, go ahead and give it a try, and if it's not working, either change the type of food you’re pairing it with, or then change out the beer style.”
Herz works for a national organization, so “we don’t play favorites” with specific beer brands, she said. But some of us writers do, and our favorite pale ales right now are Half Acre’s Daisy Cutter, Odd Side’s Citra Pale Ale, or tried-and-true Sierra Nevada.
Go Ahead, Have an IPA
The year is 2024 and we are still living in the bitter reign of the IPA. Greg Engert, the beverage director of Washington D.C.’s Neighborhood Restaurant Group (which owns many local favorites like Caruso’s Grocery), said it is still by far the most-ordered type of beer at all of their over 20 restaurants.
“The only thing I would stress,” he said, “is that the bitterness that you get from most IPAs can turn the heat up a little bit and make the spice level of the Buffalo wings a little hotter. But it's still a nice pairing because you get some malt sweetness, some fruity flavors on the hops. It works.”
It’s just a little obvious, he said. So why not try something new? He suggested trying a dark lager with Buffalo wings, “because you get that low-alcohol, crisp, refreshing character, along with these nutty, toasty, sometimes caramelized, sweeter flavors that are a really nice contrast to the spicy heat of the buffalo wing sauce.”
We skimmed the extensive menu at the beer temple ChurchKey in D.C., and he pointed to the German-style Dunkel lagers, Schwarzbiers, Czech-style Tmavé lagers, Oktoberfest lagers, Vienna lagers, and then a recent favorite: Mahrs Ungespundet Naturtrüb. It’s a “rustic, unfiltered Amber lager with a nice hop kick to it, and it goes incredibly well with wings, but it also drinks nice and easy,” says Engert.
Beer Pairings to Avoid
Wings are flavorful, intense, and spicy, so both Herz and Engert said they’d avoid lighter beer styles, like industrial light beers and wheat beers, like Hefeweizen.
“You don’t get a lot of pleasure crushing wings with light beer,” said Engert, “except for the fact that it might quench some of the heat on the palate and wash it down, and provide a mild buzz at some point along the way.”
He pointed out that when wings became popular in the 1980s, so did industrial beers that were “deliberately crafted to be relatively tasteless, extremely chuggable blank slates upon which marketing can do its work.”
But as more full-flavored craft beer has been on the rise, “I think it makes a lot of sense to pair them with wings,” he said, because you’ll actually taste the beer through the strong flavor of wing sauce.
What About Non-Alcoholic (N/A) Beers?
We’re inching into a golden age of N/A craft beers, which can be great to drink with chicken wings because not only will you retain that pleasant hoppiness and refreshing carbonation that pairs so well with Buffalo sauce, but the lack of alcohol means “you don’t have the ethanol emphasizing the capsaicin [spice],” said Herz, “so you have a little more room to work with, right out of the gates.”
Our favorite non-alcoholic beer and chicken wing pairings lately? Blue Moon Non-Alcoholic (which has a subtle orange sweetness that would play nice with spice), Athletic Brewing Upside Dawn Golden Ale (good maltiness), and Guinness 0 (shockingly true to the original).
PHOTO CREDIT:
Photographer: Paul Quitoriano
Food Stylist: Mieko Takahashi
Art Direction: Sarah Ceniceros Gomez
