We spend a lot of time talking about which drinks pair with which foods. Red wine with steak, white wine with fish, beer with curry or Champagne with oysters. Most traditional pairing advice starts with the same question: does the flavour of the drink complement the flavour of the dish?
It’s a useful question, but when we were developing BARHI we became interested in something slightly different. What should the drink actually be doing between one bite and the next?
After all, that’s how we really experience food and drink together. You take a bite, have a sip and then return to the food. Whatever the drink leaves behind becomes part of how you experience that next mouthful.
That simple observation became fundamental to the development of BARHI. Instead of creating a drink first and finding foods to pair with it afterwards, we started with the dining experience and thought about what we wanted from the glass throughout the meal.
Food Pairing Is About More Than Matching Flavours
A good pairing can absolutely be about flavour. A wine might complement a sauce, a beer might echo something roasted or bitter in a dish, and a cocktail might pick up an ingredient from the plate.
But a meal lasts much longer than one bite and one sip.
Over the course of an hour or two, other things begin to matter. Does the drink start to feel substantial alongside the food? How much carbonation are you consuming? Does bitterness linger on your palate? Does sweetness build as the meal continues? Most importantly, when you return to the plate, are you experiencing the food again or are you still experiencing the drink?
Those questions shaped BARHI much more than the traditional idea of simply matching one flavour with another.
A Drink Shouldn’t Become Another Course
This was one of the first things we thought about because the drink is being consumed on top of everything already on the table.
Beer can be wonderfully refreshing when it’s cold, but it also brings grain, carbonation and, depending on the style, considerable body. Cider can bring its own combination of fruit, sweetness and carbonation. These characteristics can be part of what makes those drinks enjoyable, but alongside a substantial meal we wanted something that would feel different.
BARHI was deliberately developed with a light drinking character. A 330ml bottle contains 1.52g of carbohydrate, all of which is sugar, and 115 kcal. At 6% ABV, it still has the character and strength of a proper alcoholic drink, but the intention was for it to accompany the meal without becoming another substantial element competing with the food.
That distinction is important. When you’ve ordered food you’re genuinely excited about eating, the drink should help you enjoy the meal rather than gradually becoming the reason you’ve had enough of it.
Why BARHI Is Lightly Sparkling Rather Than Heavily Carbonated
We didn’t want to remove carbonation altogether because sparkle can play a useful role with food. A chilled sparkling drink provides a welcome change of sensation between rich or intense bites, and that can be particularly satisfying when chilli heat is involved.
The question was how much.
BARHI was deliberately made lightly sparkling. We wanted enough sparkle to provide that moment of refreshment without making intense fizz one of the dominant sensations throughout the meal.
This is an important part of the BARHI approach because refreshment isn’t simply a word we use to describe the drink. It has a job to do. The sip should interrupt the intensity of the previous bite, give you a refreshing moment, and then allow you to return to the plate.
The Finish Matters as Much as the First Sip
This is probably one of the most overlooked parts of food pairing.
A drink doesn’t stop influencing your palate simply because you’ve swallowed it. Depending on what you’re drinking, bitterness, sweetness or a particularly strong flavour can remain, and the next bite then arrives on top of whatever the previous sip left behind.
Beer provides an obvious example. For many styles, hop bitterness is deliberately part of the character of the drink, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But when we were thinking specifically about food, we didn’t want a lingering bitter finish becoming part of the flavour of the next mouthful.
BARHI isn’t hop-based and was developed with a clean finish without a lingering hop-led bitterness. The aim wasn’t to make the drink flavourless; it was to give BARHI its own character while allowing that character to leave the palate cleanly enough for the food to return.
Put simply, the drink should refresh your palate, not rewrite the flavour of the next bite.
Dates and Honey Don’t Have to Mean Sweet
The same thinking applied to sweetness.
BARHI begins with fresh Barhee dates and honey, so people quite reasonably expect the finished drink to be sweet. Fermentation takes those ingredients somewhere very different.
BARHI is fermented dry and made with no added sugar. Rather than creating a sweet accompaniment to food, we wanted something that wouldn’t continuously add another sugary or dominant layer to a meal that might already contain rich sauces, aromatic spices, chutneys or ingredients with their own sweetness.
That is one of the reasons BARHI can surprise people when they first taste it. The ingredients sound as though they should lead to one kind of drinking experience, while fermentation creates something much lighter, drier and more refreshing.
So What Does “Refreshing” Actually Mean With Food?
For us, refreshment makes most sense when you think about the whole sequence rather than the drink on its own.
Imagine you’ve just taken a bite of something rich, chilli-forward, smoky or intensely flavoured. You then take a chilled sip of BARHI. The gentle sparkle gives you a change of sensation, the drink has enough character to be enjoyable in its own right, and then it finishes cleanly enough for you to return to the dish.
The next bite should taste like the food again.
That’s the experience BARHI was developed around: bite, sip, refresh, clean finish, next bite. Not because every mouthful needs to be analysed that way, but because thinking about the entire sequence helped us understand what we actually wanted a food-first drink to do.
Why BARHI Still Needs Character
There is an obvious question here. If the objective is to let the food remain the focus, why not simply make the drink as neutral as possible?
Because a good food pairing still has to involve a drink you genuinely want to drink.
BARHI is a 6% ABV Fresh Date Spritz made by fermenting fresh Barhee dates and honey. Those ingredients and the fermentation process give it its own identity, while the two expressions allow BARHI to respond differently depending on what is happening on the plate.
BARHI Original has the cleaner, crisper profile of the two and works particularly well when chilli heat is one of the defining characteristics of the dish. Here, refreshment is the priority, rather than answering intensity with another intense flavour.
BARHI Spiced adds star anise and orange peel for a more aromatic character. It works particularly well with seafood, rich creamy gravies and BBQ, grilled or tandoori dishes where richness, smoke or char are more prominent.
The distinction isn’t simply Original for mild food and Spiced for spicy food. Chilli heat, richness, seafood, smoke and char create very different experiences, so it makes sense to think about them differently when choosing the drink as well.
Is This Different From Traditional Food Pairing?
In some ways, yes.
Beer, wine and cider have long histories at the dining table and can all create enjoyable pairings. Traditional pairing, however, often begins with an existing drink and asks which food works with it, or starts with a dish and searches among established drinks for the closest match.
BARHI began with a different brief. We asked what we would want from the drinking experience if the meal came first.
That led us towards something dry rather than sweet, lightly sparkling rather than dominated by carbonation, refreshing between bites and clean-finishing rather than leaving a strong flavour over the next mouthful. At the same time, it still needed enough character to be enjoyed as a proper alcoholic drink.
Those choices eventually became BARHI.
The Food Should Still Be the Thing You Remember
A great meal has taken someone time to create. Ingredients have been chosen, spices balanced, sauces developed, meat grilled, seafood cooked and dishes assembled so that every mouthful delivers what the chef intended.
For us, a drink designed around food should respect that.
It can have character. It can bring something to the occasion. It should certainly be enjoyable in its own right. But throughout the meal, it should also know when to step aside and let the food come back.
That’s what we mean when we say BARHI was created around food. It isn’t simply a claim that BARHI can be paired with different dishes. The experience of eating influenced the way the drink itself was developed.
If you’d like to understand where that philosophy began, read Why BARHI Was Created Around Food. For practical pairing advice, explore What Drinks Pair Best With Spicy Food. And if you’re interested specifically in the conventional beer, wine and cider choices around Indian dining, read What Alcohol Really Works With Indian Food?
You can also discover BARHI Original and BARHI Spiced or find BARHI near you to experience a Fresh Date Spritz with food for yourself.
Made for the love of food. Brewed for the celebration of laughter.
