I love it when the mainstream media runs a story about craft beer. If nothing else, it is a pleasant change of pace around the usual news mentions of beer: stolen beer trucks, beer-swilling sports hooligans, and megabrewer profits.

Yesterday, the Associated Press ran a story by Catherine Tsai about pairing beer with traditional Thanksgiving fare. (Being from AP, it was syndicated in newspapers around the country. Here’s a version from the North Country Times.)

The article doesn’t really include anything that a fan of craft-brewed beers doesn’t already know. Still, anything that helps educate the ignorant masses is a good thing, I suppose. One of the people interviewed is Jorge de la Torre, the Dean of culinary education at Johnson & Wales University in Denver.

…Thanksgiving, when dinner plates become cacophonies of taste — savory turkey, salty ham, sweet and tart cranberries, creamy mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie with hints of cinnamon and nutmeg.

“That is a tough plate to match (with a wine),” de la Torre said. “The beauty of beer is that with one or two beers, you can hit all those flavors without contrasting and clashing.”

Indeed. Of course, the article refers to “Belgian-style beer”. How many hundreds of Belgian styles are there? Oh, well. This is the mainstream media we’re talking about here.

I’ve been invited to Thanksgiving dinner with some new friends down here in Maryland. I’ll be bringing along some of the IPA I brewed a couple of weeks ago. (That is, if it tastes good. I haven’t tested it yet.)

But, as the article points out, it’s nice to introduce people to beers that they simply don’t know about.

“It’s like a jazz record. There came one day when someone played you your first Coltrane or Miles Davis record. Slowly you became a jazz fan, and that just made your life better,” [Brooklyn Brewery brewmaster Garrett] Oliver said. “It’s just absolutely wonderful to be that person who opened that door for you.”