World of Goo with New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red

I recently drove up to Madison, Wisconsin, with my brother in order to wait in line for 5 hours to buy tickets to the Great Taste of the Midwest. The Great Taste is a fantastic beer festival that is held in Madison every August, and I'm sure it will prove to have been worth the trip to get tickets. While in Madison, I was sure to buy some beers from New Glarus Brewing Company. New Glarus doesn't sell their beer outside of Wisconsin, and while I wish they would distribute to Chicago, I know that their small size has a lot to do with the quality of their products. I was most excited about picking up a bottle of their Wisconsin Belgian Red, a cherry lambic that I had only ever tasted a thimbleful of prior to last night.


Tiana (my lovely girlfriend) had recently expressed interest in re-playing World of Goo, a fantastic downloadable game that involves building structures out of little goo blobs in order to help them travel through strange and colorful landscapes. I thought that the Wisconsin Belgian Red might go well with this game, so last night, we fired up the Wii and poured the beer into large white wine glasses.

The pairing worked out pretty well. Wisconsin Belgian Red is the color of dried blood and has an intense cherry pie aroma. It tastes richly of cherries and spice, its refreshing tartness balanced by plenty of sweetness. Wisconsin Belgian Red is a tasty candy of a beer, with more to it than Lindemans Kriek or other sugary pseudo-lambics. World of Goo is similarly colorful and unique. They are cartoonish in delightful and thoughtful ways, and consuming them together was a lot of fun. Of course, good pairings are not always the result of similarity. Perhaps an imperial stout could have been just as good. I do feel that beer is probably the way to go with World of Goo, or failing that, some fine German schnapps.