Beer, a good dinner companion

So what wine or beer? A citizen of the northern Mediterranean shore, in the south, more or less Islamic countries, there is no place for alcohol-almost always prefer the signature drink of that sea, that culture, that gastronomy: wine. An Anglo-Saxon, a Central, a Scandinavian, perhaps choose the beer. But his is that both drinks have their place at the table worldwide.
In South Europe, struggled to accept the beer was a thing of Germans, Flemish. Spanish writers of the Golden Age, as Lope and Cervantes, echoed the little that pleased the soldiers in Flanders drink beer, and how they longed wines of Spain. It was the Emperor Charles, in his youth accustomed to it, who pushed brewing in Spain.
Today, the Spanish drink more beer than wine enough ... but overall, still not taken seriously. Drink beer, cold, thirst quencher. The looks more like a soft drink than an alcoholic drink can have a seat at the table at mealtime. He is wrong, of course.
There are things that support pretty bad wine, but take more or less well with beer. Think studs: no wine that resists ... but we can face his natural bitterness-spoke white asparagus in spring season, ie, fresh-one love you own: a lager or pilsner will do in change, all right.
Everything goes better with beer vinegar: vinegar, lest we forget, is something like the "body" of the wine, which turns your dying ethyl alcohol into acetic acid. Nobody is comfortable with a corpse, and less with an advance of one.
Well that's wrong with the wine and vinegar, so no wine to go with a salad-actually more normal with salads is wrong more than water-or a pickle ... with the exception, perhaps, of a good target barrel fermented. But better a beer with some body, special, or "abbey".
The regular beer, the lager is very good companion of many seafood and perfect to escort some of those wonderful canned fish or shellfish: mussels in escabeche, some cockles, some sardines ... but above all, good loins anchovies in olive oil: one seem made for each other, is a perfect combination, which pleased the said Carlos I of Spain and V of Germany, despite paying their feasts with strong attacks of gout.
For beer with more body, a good black stout, Guinness type, I suggest two alternatives quite different: it is ideal with pickled oysters, Galician old recipe now practices a cook, serving those oysters-pleasing to British writer XVIII known as Dr. Johnson, according to a biography of James Boswell, with a glass of old Dublin's beer.
And there's nothing like the same beer to solemnize the "second round" of a roast-beef, cold, in thinner films, with pickles and mustards. The dish calls this beer: the last two elements are, they too, little wine friends.
Naturally, there are more things to get along better with beer than wine: an Alsatian choucroute garni style, a flamande carbonade the Belgian style, a mussel mouclade La Rochelle ... Beer, if granted the consideration it deserves, it may be, in fact it is an excellent companion at the table. But she should not make us forget the wine or beer to despise it: there's room for both.