Food & Wine: Understanding Champagne Through Beer

Got Champagne taste on a beer budget? Well guess what? For the price of about ten lattes, you can pick up some truly outstanding Champagne. The truth is that you should probably be more freaked out about the overwhelmingly wide range of nuanced flavors and styles of Champagne than its reputedly steep price. And fortunately, if you, like I do, drink beer, you're already primed to understand and appreciate the many forms in which the bubbly stuff comes.

I came to discover this when Michelle DeFeo, President of Laurent-Perrier U.S., hosted for me a private tasting of LP's six cuvées. In the process, I was able to identify six beers of wildly different styles that share particular qualities with each type of Champagne we enjoyed. Hopefully the following pairings will provide a beer-drinking Champagne hopeful a bit more context with which to dive into the world of sparkling...

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