Whisky & Cheese Pairing

Our first whisky tasting event for 2025 took place over the weekend. As huge whisky fans, we think that wine has claimed cheese as it’s ideal companion for far too long – and so we decided to try our hand at pairing cheese with whisky!

It turns out that lots of people are surprised by the idea of pairing the two together, but there are some good reasons to think that whisky will go well with cheese. For starters, cheese (as well as whisky) can have an enormous range of complex flavours, and so it can be both fun and rewarding to play around with the sheer variety of flavour combinations between the two. Another reason cheese seems to go particularly well with whisky is the fat content of the cheese. Cheese can play a useful role when tasting stronger spirits as it can coat the palate a bit and so soften the harsh alcohol burn one might get from alcohol with a high ABV level – like whisky – and so allow one to more easily pick out flavours in the whisky. Likewise, the alcohol in whisky can cut through the fat of the cheese, revealing some flavours in the cheese one may have overlooked.

This was also some new territory for us – we don’t normally find ourselves pairing whisky with food, but we have on occasion happened to eat something or other while sipping some whisky, and sometimes we’ve been both surprised and intrigued by the changes we noticed taking place to the flavours we could detect in the whisky. In addition to being huge whisky fans, we’re also very fond of cheese – and we just so happened to have access to some wonderful locally sourced artisanal cheeses via our local bakery - so in a way pairing whisky with cheese was a natural progression!

After doing a little research on pairing whisky with cheese, here’s what we’ve found out: there are no very strict rules about how to do it. This is because we all have different tastes and preferences, and so a whisky and cheese pairing that you might find amazing might not appeal to your friends to the same extent. Nevertheless, there do still seem to be some generally accepted guidelines and recommendations about how to go about pairing whisky with cheese!

Firstly you need to think about whether you want to create a complimentary or a contrasting tasting experience. If you want to create a complimentary tasting experience, you’ll need to try and match up the flavours or style of the whisky with the flavours or style of the cheese. For example, a mild and delicate cheese could compliment a light and fruity whisky very nicely. If you want to create a rewarding contrast, however, you can try and match up contrasting flavours, like a sweet whisky with a particularly salty cheese.

The next thing to keep in mind is texture. It’s generally accepted that soft cheeses tend to go better with lighter, smoother whiskies, while harder aged cheeses will be able to stand up better to whisky that has a higher and more punchy ABV.

Finally, there’s the question of what to do with peaty whisky. The smoky flavour of a peated whisky tends to be a very dominant flavour, and so it’s generally agreed that peat needs to be paired with cheese that has big flavour (like a blue cheese), otherwise the whisky will simply overpower the cheese.

The whiskies we ended up choosing to pair were:

1) The Sexton – an Irish single malt, which unlike most Scotch, is triple distilled. As this tends to yield a lighter and smoother whisky, we paired it with some brie.

2) Woodford Reserve – a bourbon, which is legally required to be made from at least 51% corn and matured in new oak. This means it’ll have a fairly sweet flavour profile, so we opted to pair it with some salty mature boerenkaas.

3) Wolfburn Aurora – a no-age-statement single malt from Scotland. It’s matured in a combination of ex-bourbon and ex-Oloroso sherry casks. Apparently sherried whiskies tend to go quite well with cheese that has a bit of a nutty flavour, so we paired this whisky with Gruberg (the South African name for a Gruyere).

4) Laphroaig 10 – a ten-year-old single malt from Islay, a region of Scotland well-known for its very smoky whiskies. We decided to pair it up with a fairly bold gorgonzola.

Although we recommended the above pairings, we also encouraged everyone to play around with mixing and matching the whiskies and cheeses. As there are no hard and fast rules about pairing whisky and cheese, we wanted everyone to also experiment and to see what pairings they felt worked best for them. We discovered that pairing the Wolfburn Aurora with the mature boerenkaas was a hit, and that Laphroaig 10 and gorgonzola really is a winning combination!