How to pair homemade wheat beer with an Aussie brunch

It's a sunny weekend morning, your mates are coming around, and there's a decent spread on the table. Instead of opening another bottle of bubbly or putting the kettle on again, you pour everyone a glass of the wheat beer you brewed yourself, which sounds like showing off right up until somebody tries it with the food. Wheat beer is light and gently citrusy, and it carries so little bitterness that it doesn't fight anything on a brunch plate, which is exactly why it works at that hour when a pale ale or a stout would feel like hard work.

Matching food and drink doesn't have to be complicated, and most of it comes down to whether you want the drink to echo what's on the plate or cut through it. With a wheat beer you're usually echoing, because the soft banana and clove notes that come off the yeast sit alongside sweet and creamy things rather than scrubbing them away. The four below are the ones I keep coming back to.

Wheat beer and avocado toast

Avocado toast is the easiest one to get right, because avocado is creamy and a bit fatty and it wants something light beside it rather than something heavy. A wheat beer with a touch of citrus in it lifts the avocado without burying it, and if you've gone the full version with feta and a poached egg on top, the beer still holds its own because it isn't trying to compete with anything.

Wheat beer and bacon

Bacon is salty and smoky and it loves the bready sweetness in a wheat beer, so the two balance each other and neither one takes over. If there's maple on the bacon it works even better, because that bit of caramel sweetness runs straight into the beer's own softness rather than clashing with it.

Wheat beer and a loaded omelette

An omelette can carry a lot of rich filling, whether that's mushrooms, melted cheese or a bit of smoked salmon, and richness is where the carbonation earns its keep. The bubbles reset your mouth between forkfuls so the fifth bite tastes like the first one, which is the whole job a drink is meant to do next to a heavy dish.

Wheat beer and banana bread

This is the one people raise an eyebrow at, and then they try it. A lot of wheat beers already carry a faint banana note that comes from the yeast rather than from any fruit, so putting one next to banana bread is basically putting the same flavour beside itself, and warm banana bread with butter melting into it alongside a cold wheat beer is a genuinely good combination even if it sounds daft written down.

Brewing one worth pouring

Wheat beer is a good style to start on, because it's forgiving. A bit of cloudiness is meant to be there, so you're not chasing a crystal clear pint the way you would with a lager, and the yeast character covers a multitude of small sins that would show up straight away in something cleaner. Keep your fermentation somewhere steady and on the cool side of warm, be properly fussy about sanitising everything the beer touches, and you'll get a drinkable result first go more often than not.

The one thing I'd say is don't rush the bottle conditioning. Wheat beer is meant to be lively and it takes a couple of weeks in the bottle to get there, so if you crack one after five days and it's flat, that's not a failed brew, it's an impatient brewer.

Shop related products

• Coopers Light Malt Extract 1.5kg. A light base that lets the yeast character come through.
• US-05 Safale Ale Yeast 11.5g. Clean and reliable if you want the fruit dialled back.
• Coopers Brew Enhancer 2 1kg. Adds body so the beer isn't thin.
• Coopers Dextrose 1kg. Priming sugar for bottling day.

Did you know we also stock the Preacher's Hefe Wheat kit, Coopers Wheat Malt 1.5kg and spray dried wheat malt extract in the shop. They're not on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what's on the shelf.

The rest of the gear is in our homebrew beer supplies, and if you want a hand working out which kit gets you closest to the beer in your head, Brewhilder will walk you through it.

More from the blog

• 5 beer and food pairings to try with your homebrew
• The best beer styles to go with lamb chops on the barbie
• How to host a beer and barbecue tasting night

Beer before noon needs a reason, and I reckon this one counts.

Candeece