It’s time for dessert. What kind of beer will you have?

In some parts of the country, the idea of drinking beer with dinner and then having a different style of beer with dessert would be weird — but not in Central Oregon, home to more than 25 breweries.

In some of our brewpubs, you will even find beer in desserts or on the dessert menu. We checked around and found an intriguing bunch of beer-infused desserts and beer-and-dessert pairing ideas in local brewpubs.

For instance: Beer is in the sauces drizzled over warm deep-dish cookies called “Jack Zookis” at Worthy Brewing Company.

“Lights Out Stout is in the marionberry drizzle we put over our Oatmeal Zooki, so I recommend having a glass of that with it. There’s vanilla bean in the stout, plus a coffee taste in it, and that’s why it matches really well,” said Worthy’s executive chef, Jack Reed.

Deschutes Brewery & Public House’s Obsidian Stout Float is for adults only, made with stout poured over vanilla ice cream.

“The float is for the true adventurer,” said the Public House’s executive chef, Brian Kerr, adding that Deschutes’ Nitro Obsidian Stout is a good pairing with the Public House’s Peanut Butter Pie (see recipe).

“The pie has many different flavors in it, not only sweet chocolate ganache, the Oreo crust, drizzled with a salted caramel sauce, plus the peanut butter filling as well. The dessert’s sweetness will overpower a mild or bitter beer, so you need to pair it with something with sweet notes like Nitro Obsidian Stout. It has chocolate notes in it and enough sweetness, and it lacks the carbonation which can give a feeling of bitterness to a beer. The nitrogen keeps it soft and in balance,” Kerr said.

He said another beer that would pair well with Peanut Butter Pie is an English-style barley wine (which sounds as if it’s wine, but it’s really beer).

“Barley wine is sweet, malty, and has caramel notes, which complement the caramel and peanut butter, too,” Kerr said.

Bend Brewing Company’s Ching Ching Marionberry Crisp is a marionberry compote infused with the brewery’s award-winning Ching Ching American Sour beer, topped with streusel and served warm, a la mode.Owner Wendi Day recommends a small glass of Ching Ching sour to accompany it.

“The Ching Ching beer is just a complement to the crisp. My education, over the years, of pairing dessert with beer has opened my eyes to how wonderful it can taste,” Day said.

Mirella Amato, author of “Beerology: Everything You Need to Know to Enjoy Beer … Even More” (Random House of Canada, 2014), said in a phone interview from her home in Toronto that the right beer can be delicious with dessert.

“There’s a beer for every food and a food for every beer; it’s simply a matter of finding the right one. Beer is excellent for dessert because sweetness in food can be balanced with either hop bitterness or a roast bitterness from roasted grains like stout, or strong carbonation in the beer,” Amato said.

She explained that carbonation provides an acidity that cuts through the sweeter, richer tones of dessert. High-alcohol beers also cut through rich foods and pair well with desserts, “since a higher alcohol content in beer is often accompanied by a certain degree of sweetness,” Amato writes in “Beerology.”

In Amato’s book about all things beer, she shares her general rule of thumb for beer and food pairing:

“Line up the depth of colour of the beer with the colour of the main ingredient in the dish. In other words, use a golden beer with chicken or white fish dishes; an amber beer with turkey, pork and root vegetables; a brown beer for beans or steak; and black beer for chocolate cake,” she writes.

She told us that dark beers are good with dessert because the roasted grains in those beers are roasted in the same way as coffee.

“Dark beers have a distinct coffee note and dark chocolate note, and that pairs nicely with dessert,” she said.

Whole Foods Market’s beer specialist in Bend, Arian Stevens, concurs.

“Pair rich, chocolaty desserts with either an Imperial stout such as Abyss from Deschutes or Black Butte XXVI. They’re heavy beers, and keep that chocolate flavor going. Or a lambic, like Kriek Lambic — a cherry beer — and a Framboise Lambic would be fun to have with a rich chocolate cake, because you’d get a cherry-raspberry combination,” Stevens said.

If you order Broken Top Bottle Shop & Ale Cafe’s Cherry Chocolate Rain for dessert, you’ll get a dark ale chocolate cheesecake with warm gluten-free hazelnut chocolate sauce and house-made bing cherry sauce.

Broken Top Bottle Shop owner Diana Fischetti said her shop’s cheesecake is actually very light, and a great beer pairing for it would be Bend Brewing Company’s Lovely Cherry Baltic Porter or Bend Brewing’s Big Bad Russian Imperial Stout. She said the Crux Fermentation Project’s Freakcake Barrel-Aged Oud Bruin would also taste great with the cheesecake.

Fruit desserts and beer

Our experts also shared suggestions for beers that would go well with fruit desserts.

Stevens recommended barley wine for a pie or cobbler.

“Deschutes makes an amazing one called Mirror Mirror. Silver Moon does Train Wreck, which is more on the sweet side but not supersweet. Barley wines hover around 10 percent alcohol. They’re really good in a little snifter,” Stevens said.

Amato has found that apple pie pairs well with any American-style pale ale that has some fruity flavor from the hops.

“Hops often gives you a fruity character. A pale ale that has enough malt sweetness pairs well with dessert, but pale ales can be fuller and maltier or quite dry. Dry won’t work so well with fruit pie,” Amato said.

To explore beer with dessert, order a small glass (2-ounce taster pour, 4-ounce flight glass, half-pint) to experiment with flavor combinations, and beware of consuming a lot of high-alcohol beer at the end of the meal if you’ve had a couple of pints throughout the evening, so you can get home safely.

“Enjoy the huge variety of beer,” said chef Brian Kerr from Deschutes, who admitted he has yet to experience its Obsidian Stout Float.

“I still haven’t tried it, but I put cream in my Dr. Pepper at lunchtime. Why not put ice cream in beer, why not?” Kerr said with a laugh.

Amato writes in “Beerology” that pairing beer with food is an art that’s full of nuances.

“Flavour interactions can be quite complex. Sometimes a sweet note in beer will coax out a sweet note in the food and sometimes it will obliterate it. In the same way, a bitter note in beer might provide a lovely contrast to a sweeter dish or it might stick out and become distracting. With practice, it becomes easier to predict these various subtle interactions. Beer pairing is not an exact science, but rather a gustatory adventure,” Amato writes.

— Reporter: ahighberger@mac.com