A number of my favorite things will be brought together this coming Saturday when celebrated Mansfield food truck Altered Eats joins forces with Jackie O’s Brewery to host a “Beer Pairing Dinner” at the Eighteen-O-Three Taproom in Galion.
The event is being organized by Altered Eats owner Anne J. Massie along with Johnny Clift from Jackie O’s. They’re a couple in real life and I paid them a visit last week to see what they had lined up.
I always check how my interview subjects like to be referred to, so I asked if they were OK with “couple.”
“Yeah,” said Johnny, “just so long as you put ‘Mansfield Power Couple.’”
Actually Johnny is from Athens, Ohio, the home of Jackie O’s, a brewery (named in honor of the owner’s mother) that has made enough of an impact locally for me to consider them official “Friends of Mansfield.”
“That’s right,” said Johnny. “And I grew up two blocks from the barn.”
Barn?
Johnny explained that this is the site of the current brewery. “Before that it was an artisan cheese barn.”
“You need to visit,” said Anne. “They have a restaurant, a farm, a bakery, a brewpub …”
“About 130 employees,” Johnny added.
So how did you get involved, I asked?
“I started working there in 2007 after the brewery had been open about a year,” he explained. “I was part of the local music scene and I took some happy hour shifts in the bar, just one day a week to begin with. And it grew from there.
“Over time I was doing more bartending, sometimes in Columbus, too. Eventually I moved into sales. Now I’m State Sales Manager, which sounds dull …”
“It does,” I agreed, “but dude – you still look rock ‘n’ roll.”
“Well, yeah,” said Johnny, “I think that helps when I walk in the door. I don’t look like the sales guy, I look like the music guy. And I already had a kind of network around a lot of bars in this state through the music.”
So how did you come to Mansfield?
“Martini’s started it,” Johnny told me, referring to the bar on Main Street. “They brought us in for a tasting. When you’re trying to expand within the state like we are, these smaller markets are really important.”
“Johnny has hosted a lot of beer tastings,” said Anne. “And I’ve been to a lot.”
In fact, the two first met at Martini’s, during the inaugural Jackie O’s End of Summer Keg Party.
This event – an all-day Sunday blow-out – has already become an anticipated yearly tradition, featuring a line-up of great local bands and a selection of Jackie O’s brews served straight from the barrel.
Since Martini’s introduced draft beer earlier this year, Jackie O’s brown ale has been permanently on tap. It’s become my drink of choice on a Friday after work.
Johnny explained that the brown ale is actually called “Chomolungma.” I won’t be asking for it by that name. I’d have enough trouble pronouncing it at the beginning of the evening, let alone at the end.
For this coming partner event with the Altered Eats food truck, the location will be the Eighteen-O-Three Taproom in Galion. This is the place that serves Ohio brews exclusively, and they are big food truck supporters.
I’d heard a lot about them but never been, so I took a trip out there to get a feel for the place, standing at the bar for a couple of pints of Roughneck Red (Canton, Ohio). Their lines of indoor picnic tables will create a nice, informal setting for the beer pairing.
“Did you meet Chris?” asked Anne, referring to Taproom owner Chris Stone. “Chris is awesome. He welcomed the food truck. Actually he sought me out.
“I love going there,” she continued. “In fact sometimes I’ve had such a good time I’ve booked into a hotel and stayed the night!”
I noticed something was bothering Anne a little. Turned out it was the background music, a selection from the extensive house collection of vinyl.
“This is putting me off,” she said.
“It’s early Alice Cooper,” Johnny explained.
“Yeah, I like it,” replied Anne, “but I can’t concentrate.”
We switched to a recording of the 1969 Woodstock concert.
Anne’s Altered Eats food truck is now entering it’s 5th year of business, and this season Anne plans to introduce more lunch sessions as well as evenings.
“I’d love to promote the locations,” she said, “but I’m not sure I can mention them just yet.”
That’s fine, I told her. Sometimes it’s good to keep a bit of suspense.
“You know, people in the community have been so supportive,” she continued. “I love how they’ve been willing to take a chance, on Korean tacos or whatever. I hear things like ‘you’ve turned my kid into a foodie!’ or they tell me how I got them into goat cheese, or lamb.”
I’m sticking up for lamb, which is a lot more common in my native England. So much so that a couple of years ago the American Ambassador to the U.K. publicly complained about how much lamb he was being fed at official dinners.
“I must have had lamb and potatoes 180 times since I’ve been here,” he was reported as saying. “There are limits and I have reached them.”
There’s no lamb on the menu for Saturday’s beer pairing, but there will be locally-sourced chicken and bacon as well as a shrimp ceviche. I asked Johnny about the beers that would be going along with the grub.
“We’ve got the Chomolungma, the honey nut brown you like,” he told me.
“We’ve also got Morning Cloak. That one’s a traditional pale. A big, pungent, hoppy flavor with the alcohol still at 4.5%.
“Then there’s Hop Ryot IPA,” he continued, “one of my favorites. It tastes like a slice of grapefruit flesh with white pepper.
“And the Berliner Weisse. I was really interested to see what we paired this with,” Johnny said. “It goes well with cheese. We’ve got some goat cheese from Athens.”
A few years ago, at a beer and cheese pairing in Columbus, a brewer told me that beer goes much better with cheese than wine. “The cheese industry knows this,” he said, “but you’ll never hear them say it publicly, because there’s too much money in cheese and wine.”
I’ve been confidently stating this as a fact ever since. No-one ever questions me or asks where I got the information.
At the Taproom, the procession of food and drink will be capped with a surprise pairing, featuring a new twist on one of Jackie O’s brews. Also in the mix will be herbal magician Nicholas Copley, this season’s new face in the Altered Eats food truck.
“He’s got a lot of ideas,” said Anne. “In fact he’s the mastermind behind the special twist with our surprise brew.”
The Beer Pairing Dinner runs from 6-9 p.m. on Saturday March 25 and includes five courses of food and drink. Tickets are $45 and can be purchased at beerdinner.1803taproom.com.
Check out these fine Ohio businesses on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/AlteredEats/
https://www.facebook.com/JackieOsBrewery/
https://www.facebook.com/1803taproom/
