‘Cheese with a sip of coffee? Bingo’: I tried the new gourmet power pairing

Can a cheese really go with coffee? Okay, we might grab a cheddar sandwich and a latte for lunch but that’s more about fuel and caffeine, not a gastronomic pairing. “They don’t naturally go together,” agrees Telegraph wine writer Susy Atkins. “Cheese works best in general with fruit-forward drinks with a bit of acidity – low-oak, low-tannin wines, for example, and some beers. Cider, too, is great,” she explains. Coffee, with its intrinsic bitterness, not so much.

A British cheesemonger, however, is seeking to disrupt these culinary norms by releasing a new cheese which he claims is the perfect match for a cup of coffee – and the ideal breakfast food.

Swift Reserve, a nine-month aged gouda-style cheese, has been specifically created with flavours that supposedly pair best with a long black americano or espresso. “At nine months, it is the real sweet spot – rich, clotted-cream dairy flavour, buttery decadence, but also containing a hint of sweet milkiness, like milk after your cereal, that works so well with coffee,” explains Edward Hancock, the founder of artisan cheesemonger Cheesegeek which is behind the innovation.

According to Hancock there are two ways to best enjoy Swift Reserve alongside your morning coffee. The first, “for the more cautious,” he says, “is a bite of cheese to coat the palate, then sip of coffee, then repeat.” The second option is “to fork the cheese into the coffee and leave for around 35 to 40 seconds. The cheese will absorb the flavour of the coffee but also release some fats and oils into it. This approach also leaves you with tiny bits of coffee cheese at the bottom of the cup once you’ve finished that are lovely.”

The tasting: cheese with (and in) coffee, put to the test

The flavour of Swift Reserve (which is shaped, gouda-like, as a flattened football but has a dull greyish rind rather than gouda’s traditional waxy yellow exterior) is salty and mildly savoury, with Bovril notes – pleasant but muted, like posh background music. The coffee I brewed for it (bearing in mind Atkins’ advice) was a fruity, tangy, single-origin variety from my local roasters.

As a control, I first tried bites of Cheddar alongside sips of the drink: palatable initially, but as the warm coffee melded with the fat, the pong of rancid milk filled my mouth. Parmesan was no improvement; the coffee brought out its vomit-like flavour of butyric acid. I tried stirring some in but one sniff was enough to banish the concoction down the plughole.

Time, then, to try Swift Reserve, which is made for Cheesegeek by Hugh Padfield, a fourth-generation dairy farmer who believes the “high butterfat content and sweetness [...] balances the drier and darker notes of a roasted bean.” With a sip of coffee – bingo. Like some sensory fruit machine, all the flavours lined up. The cheese’s lactic notes exploded against a mellow background of cooked milk and hints of evaporated. I nibbled and sipped, nibbled and sipped. Yes, this definitely works.

As for stirring the cheese into the drink, to Brits this may be a leap of faith but other cultures are already on board, not least northern Scandinavia, where kaffeost stars chunks of cheese at the bottom of the mug, and Colombia, where cafe con queso is served – a black coffee with a couple of cubes of bouncy cheese stirred in. I once tried the latter from a shack deep in the coffee-growing highlands near Bogota, scooping stretchy mozzarella-like strings of gloop out of the glass of murky filter brew with a teaspoon. Surprisingly, it tasted okay, the blandness of the cheese melding into the bitter drink, but it was hard to stomach the beads of fat that floated to the surface.

Likewise, some cubes of Swift Reserve crumbled into my cup of coffee were far less pleasing than the sip-alongside approach. The cheese took on a soft, fudgy texture – not horrible, but far from the satisfying molten strings I enjoyed in the cafe con queso, and the flavour was duller.

The globules of fat that floated to the top, meanwhile, reminded me unpleasantly of butter coffee, aka bulletproof coffee, which was a thing in hipster cafes a few years ago. Blended with MCT (medium-chain triglyceride) oil as well as actual butter, bulletproof coffee was promoted as a low-carb way to start the day for keto dieters, and as a brain booster, allegedly improving mental clarity. At the time I found it eye-bogglingly disgusting, with a weird bittersweet flavour and thick slick of oil on top. I’m not convinced to blend my beans instead with cheese.

A breakfast proposal

Hancock believes Britain is behind the rest of the Western world when it comes to eating cheese for breakfast  – a tradition across much of continental Europe – and this is something he wants to change with Swift Reserve. “We see this as the beginning of a cultural shift in acceptance of cheese in the morning,” he says. While it is said to be the first cheese designed specifically to be paired with coffee, others have been experimenting with the same flavour fusion, not least centuries-old London cheesemonger Paxton & Whitfield which recently teamed up with Rave coffee company to launch a coffee-coated goat’s cheese, called Kaldi.

Cheese and coffee can work, then, but I’d rather shake it up in the morning by keeping them separate, thanks, rather than stirred.

Additional reporting by Blathnaid Corless