Wednesday 8 December 2010
Cooking with Beer: Imperial Chilli
Sunday 5 December 2010
Nectar Ales Black Xantus: Open It!
Monday 17 May 2010
FABPOW! P2 Stout with Strawberries and Clotted Cream
Tuesday 4 May 2010
Hardknott to like Aether Blaec
Monday 5 April 2010
Easter, Chocolate and Durham Temptation
Sunday 7 February 2010
Hoppy and Roasty
Tuesday 24 November 2009
Stout Night
The top three on the night were:
Sunday 6 September 2009
Gooey Chocolate Puddings
This is my favourite dessert recipe in the whole wide world. And just to forewarn you, this pudding is so good that whoever you serve it to will fall madly and deeply in love with you, so just watch who you give it to...
I’ve had this recipe written since January and just haven’t got around to posting it, but the time has come to unleash this dessert and change the world by pairing it with some awesome beers.
The chocolate pudding is feather-light on the outside, hot, rich and gooey in the middle and it’s enough to melt even an iron heart. Pair this with the right beer and it turns all magical and supernatural. But what beer? Some would go straight for the cherry beer, and this is wise, no doubt, but there are better beers to pour with this. Personally, I’m thinking a big coffee stout. Here’s why: coffee stouts and chocolate are killer combos. It’s all about the lustful coming together of sweet chocolate and roasty-bitter coffee beer: it just works. But you need a big coffee beer, something full-bodied, imperial, rich and strong enough to leave you wired. It’s a real pick-me-up pairing, like a do-it-yourself tiramisu (I have to make tiramisu with coffee stout in the base one day…) where the chocolate soothes and the coffee kicks.
The pudding recipe has never failed me and it’s incredible. The pudding coats the tongue in the way that only good chocolate can and then the beer glides in and lifts it all away, making you want more and more and more… But there are careful steps needed to get that oh-so-important gooey centre. First, I add grated chocolate to the mix. Second, I add a little contingency square of chocolate in the centre. Third, make the mix a few hours before you need it (this is helpful anyway) and then chill it. Fourth, bake it for exactly 10 minutes at 220C – no more, no less.
Gooey Chocolate Puddings
This makes 6 puddings.
- 200g dark chocolate (or part and part with milk chocolate)
- 150g butter, plus some for lining the dishes
- Pinch sea salt
- 3 whole eggs and 3 yolks
- 50g caster sugar
- 20g plain flour
- Cocoa powder for dusting
Line the ramekins with butter and sprinkle cocoa into each so it all sticks to the butter. Melt 150g of the chocolate with the butter (in a glass bowl over a pan of bubbling water) and add a pinch of sea salt. While that’s melting whisk the eggs, yolks and sugar until they are pale and creamy. When the chocolate is done take it off the heat for a minute, in that minute grate a few chunks of chocolate (leaving six squares behind) into the egg/sugar mix then add the melted chocolate and butter and stir through gently. Next add the flour and stir into a pudding mix. Pour into the ramekins and pop a square of chocolate into the middle of each one. Chill until you need it.
To cook the puddings the oven must be preheated to 220C – exactly 220C. Add the ramekins and watch the clock very closely. As soon as ten minutes are up take them out, run a knife around the edge and turn them out onto a plate.
I like this served with ice cream. The first time I tried it I had it with a coffee ice cream and that was super but I personally think a more subtle ice cream would be best, and something like the RipTide Stout Ice Cream would be spot on. Another excellent choice would be a banana ice cream (coffee, chocolate and banana is a truly great combo). Or just go for a good vanilla ice cream.
As for the beer, I’d jump straight to Mikkeller and grab the Beer Geek Breakfast, or even better, the Beer Geek Brunch Weasel (I wrote about that here). I’ve had the puddings with BrewDog’s Coffee Imperial Stout, as the picture shows, and that was fantastic. You could try the Meantime Coffee but I think it might struggle to deal with the awesomeness of the dessert. If you can’t do a coffee beer then go for a straight up imperial stout - Thornbridge’s Bracia would kick serious pudding-fattened ass, Stone’s Imperial Russian Stout or a sublime De Struise Black Albert. The dessert deserves good beer, the dessert demands good beer. But remember the cautionary words at the beginning: whoever you serve this to will fall wildly in love with you.
Thursday 27 August 2009
As-Live Tasting: BrewDog’s Rake Raspberry Paradox Smokehead
21.09pm. I’m into the newest of the Paradox range and it pours out a big bowl of opaque black with a head the colour of a sunburnt bottom.
21.10pm. I want to smell raspberries and I’m expecting it. I’m expecting a lot; regular Smokehead is a crazy-wonderful beer but add a heck of a lot of fresh raspberries and I’m there.
21.11pm. It smells like milk chocolate, like kindling smoke, like old and dry wood, it’s earthy and it’s bold. And there it is: raspberries. Not a tart in-your-face kind of smell, more of a raspberry milkshake kind of thing.
21.13pm. Ok, wow. So I had to take a few sips back there and really roll around in it. This beer is seriously something. It has Smokehead’s earthy-smokiness but layered thickly above this are raspberries. They are fruity and fresh, sharp and sweet and the balancing act between barrel and berries is knife-edge stuff.
21.15pm. There’s something really opposing about the sweetness of the aroma and the sharpness of the taste. It draws you back in again and again. It’s an intense and new flavour experiences for me, mixing all the tastes in one sip with a crazy interplay and melding of complexity which threatens to fall over into complicated.
21.18pm. Sitting back and chilling, thinking about the beer, trying to get words to describe it.
21.21pm. I think I was unduly harsh last week (EDIT: it’s more like last month now…) about the British beers at the GBBF. Let me explain. You see, I’m an emotional chap and I lead with me heart so when I checked the beer list for the first time I immediately jumped to those breweries that I most want to drink at an event like the GBBF. When I saw none of them there I felt a little bit let down by the whole thing. I want to see Thornbridge, I want to see Ramsgate, Marble, Oakham, Pictish, Moor, Darkstar, BrewDog. And I want to see them put out their best beers along with festival specials. The fact that these breweries won’t be well represented is sad news to me. But, my plan is currently to go on the Tuesday and the Saturday. Tuesday will be BSF o’clock and Saturday will mean a day on the British stuff, so hopefully I’ll be able to scour the place and won’t find many me-too bitters but will be given an education in fine British ales. But just think, how much more excited would I be if I knew there would be BrewDog’s there, especially if I could get something like cask Smokehead. Pfwoar!
21.26pm. Talking of the GBBF… I don’t usually drink Mondays to Wednesday’s if I can help it to try and restore some balance for the huge drinking that happens at weekends, but this week I am changing that. I have a plan you see… I don’t want to rock up to the GBBF and drink three pints of US IPA and be rolling on the floor giggling like a little girl while all the big boys sip away at their beers completely unaffected and trying to ignore my slobbering silliness. My thinking is that spending a week drinking strong beers will build up my resilience and I’ll be able to drink hardcore with everyone else. That’s the vain thinking anyway; I very much doubt it’ll work like that, especially when I see all those barrels of beers!
21.30pm. The beer is warming up and… uh oh, do I smell cheese? And I’m struggling to tell if I’m getting a wild-ness to the beer or whether that is purely fruit and barrel. I don’t think my palate is sharp enough to deal with this beer!
21.32pm. If you like Smokehead then check out this totally amazing food and beer pairing and a few incredible recipes – the flapjacks are brilliant.
21.34pm. I’m nearing the end and I’ve finished it fairly quickly. There’s something very drinkable and alluring about the beer and I think that’s all to do with its mystery: I don’t fully understand it but I want to. I’m telling you, you can expect me to write the word mystery a few more times in coming posts, it’s my latest fave beer idea.
21.40pm. This beer is quite something. What that something is I don’t know. I’ve got two more bottles so hopefully I will find out when I drink those.
21.45pm. Done-diddly-done with that one. I don’t quite know else to say so I’m out.
Wednesday 15 April 2009
Beers I Want
I read a lot about beers, often books or cruising blogs and websites, checking out tasting notes and other peoples’ words. I guess you could say I’m a beer voyeur, jealous of what others are drinking. I drink a lot of great beer but you always want what you can’t/don’t have. Here is a list of the beers which I really really really want to try.
Dogfish Head’s Pangaea. A beer made with ingredients from all seven continents. That’s cool. It’s water from Antarctica, moscavado sugar from Africa, rice from Asia, hops and malt from Europe and North America (in what order I don’t know), Belgian yeast (from Belgium?!) crystallised ginger from Australasia and quinoa from South America (I think this is right, the DFH website only lists the water, rice and ginger, finishing it with ‘etc…’ which is kinda stupid because I want to know what’s in it and exactly where it came from!). I love the idea behind this beer.
DogFish Head’s 120-Minute IPA. 21% IPA that is boiled with hops for two hours, fermented with hops (fresh batches added daily) and aged on hops. Flipping insane! I wouldn’t turn away the 60- or 90-Minute brews either. [Edit: see this post – I now have a DFH90 coming my way!]
Another DogFish Head. World Wide Stout. An 18% monster. Enough said.
Alesmith’s Speedway Stout. Another 18% imperial monster, yes please. And they do one in a bourbon barrel so let me at that too!
Some of the stuff from Short’s Brewing Company’s, including crazy-awesome beers such as Imperial Black Cherry Porter, Bloody Beer (Bloody Mary-style beer), Peaches and Crème, Uber Goober Oatmeal Stout (it has peanut puree in it!) and Bananas n Blow (banana and cocoa). Nuts.
Russian River Brewing’s Pliny the Younger: Number 2 on BeerAdvocate’s Best Of and a hop bomb. And I’d obviously need the Elder Pliny too, to compare. [Edit: I got the Elder coming too, see this post again]
Mikkeller Beer Geek Brunch Weasel made from Civet coffee which has been crapped out of a weasel. [Edit: I nearly crapped myself when I saw this at Planet Thanet beer festival in Margate last weekend! I did a double-take, squealed in excitement and then bought two]
Harviestoun’s Ola Dubh. Old Engine Oil aged in malt whisky barrels. Woo!
Westvleteren 12. Obviously. [Edit: Done it here]
Moor's JJJ IPA. A massive English IPA. Hit me!
The Thornbridge St. Petersburgs aged in three different whisky barrels. Can St. Pete’s get any better?! I have to know. [Edit: I now have one of each which I got when I went up to visit for the day]
Fresh Stone Ruination IPA. I adore the bottle and want to see how much better the cask could be in San Diego!
BrewDog made a beer called Zephyr, a 12% IPA aged in grain whisky barrels for 18 months with a load of strawberries. I want that. A lot. [Edit: This is coming soon!!]
If anyone has any Samuel Adams’ Utopia going then I’d like to a have taste of that too, or some of the other 25%+ beers. Are they really beer?!
And I was born in 1984 so I really want a beer from that year. Any beer, as long as it’s drinkable. To be honest, if it isn’t drinkable I’ll take it anyway. I’m thinking a Thomas Hardy’s 1984 would be the most realistic or maybe some Belgian classics.
And here’s some which have made the list since February… the BrewDog/Stone/Cambridge collaboration which is a 10% Black pilsner. Dark Lord because I’m a sucker for the hype and the fact that they release it on ‘Dark Lord Day’.
As you can see the last few months has seen some good beer come my way, but there's still more that I'm searching for and the list will always be evolving. What’s on your ‘I really want to try’ list? And any ideas on how I could get a bottle of beer from 1984?!
Thursday 19 March 2009
If you had to...
It’s inspired by my evening at the London Drinker last night. The two beers at the top of my hit list were Thornbridge’s Jaipur and Fuller’s London Porter (cask!). Two fantastic beers with similar ABVs (5.9 and 5.4 respectively) but two completely different beers. So…
If you had to... would you rather drink Pale beers or Dark beers for the rest of your drinking days?
No arguments about the spectrum of brown, I’m ignoring that, this is: Pale Beer (lagers, IPAs, golden ales, etc. – anything lighter than amber) vs. Dark Beer (mild, dark ales, stout, porter, etc. – we all know Wychwood’s Hobgoblin, so anything darker than that). Go!
Sunday 22 February 2009
Pancake Day
I love pancakes so much that I deprive myself of them for the whole year to be able to enjoy them even more on Pancake Day, which is one of the best days of the year. This year I’m out on Tuesday so it’s a Pancake Sunday.
My pancakes are the thin, lacy ones. Like crepes but better. They fry briefly on one side, picking up a golden tan, then they’re flipped over and tanned on the other, going crispy on the outside and soft and flimsy in the middle. So simple yet so flipping good!
Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, is to do with Lent. It was originally a day to use up luxury foods (milk, butter, eggs) before the 40 days of fasting which begins on Ash Wednesday. Now I don’t follow Lent and I don’t give stuff up but I do strictly follow the golden glories of Pancake Day!
I wanted a new spin on things this year and tried to match a beer to go with them. I considered making American-style blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, I thought about banana and chocolate pancakes and I even toyed with the savoury idea, all of which would be fairly easy pairings. But you know what? I have my pancakes with sugar and lemon. I always have and I always will. So I had to find a beer to go with that.
You need a beer that can balance both the sweet and sour while still letting the buttery pancake through and you need the beer to keep its true flavours and not become flabby and lifeless. Pancakes aren’t designed to be a balance treat, it’s a feast of fun, so I didn’t really know what was going to work best, so I opened a coffee imperial stout and an imperial IPA (figuring that it’d need some beer mega-flavours to work), to see what I got. I also thought about popping the cork on a lambic or gueuze, but wasn’t certain how the acidity in the glass and on the plate would work together. Maybe next year I can try my pancakes with sugar and lambic!
The coffee stout was rich and strong, with roasted bitterness, a woody sweetness and a nice smack of hops to finish it. The beer worked well with the pancakes; not perfect but pretty damn good. It’d be better with blueberry pancakes and maple syrup, to be honest.
The IPA was 9%, it’s got a syrupy sweet malt base and then a dry, scratching finish of earthy, pithy bitterness. It’s got hops but they don’t go all the way to 11, they’re about a 7. This worked great when the pancakes were loaded with sugar and lemon and there was a great balance over the palate of sweet, bitter, sour and savoury. Beware: when there wasn’t so much sweet and sour then the beer blew the doors off the pancakes.
I did discover that the pancakes would work with a softer beer, lower in alcohol and less punchy, so there’s plenty of choice for Tuesday. English IPA or porter would be cool; the Meantime beers, White Shield IPA, Gadd’s Dogbolter porter. A strong ale like Fuller’s Golden Pride, or something like Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale. Great Divide’s Yeti Imperial Stout would blend the coffee stout and the IPA and that’d make for an interesting combo. And some barrel aged beers with their buttery, oaky sweetness; Innis & Gunn Original or even a leftfield choice of BrewDog’s Storm (see the Lemon Cheesecake for why it’d work a treat).
Pancakes – makes 8-10
- 120g plain flour
- Pinch salt
- 2 eggs
- 300ml milk
- Butter and some plain flavoured oil
- 2 lemons
- A bag of sugar
Mix the flour, salt, eggs and milk into a batter, add a pinch of sugar and a splash of oil, stir and leave it to chill out in the fridge. If you want, you could replace half the milk in the recipe with beer, but go for a mild or something with little hop bitterness.
To cook, heat a large pan so that it’s hot hot hot and melt a small knob of butter with a trickle of oil and put just enough batter in to cover in a thin layer. Fry until golden and crisp on one side, flip over and cook for another minute or so. Slide onto a plate and lavish in as much or little lemon and sugar as you like. I roll mine up here, but you can have them flat. Lovely stuff.
Now I’ve got two half-drunk bottles of imperial beer to see me through the night. Oh the hardships of searching for cool beer and food matches (I just tried a cheeky black and tan too and that was blinding!).
Sunday 15 February 2009
Beer and Cheese 1: Dorothy Goodbody’s Wholesome Stout
Today comes the first of a series of beer and cheese pairings to try different beers with a range of different cheeses to see what works with what. The possibilities are endless.
Today’s, the first, takes CAMRA’s choice for the 2008 Bottled Beer of the Year: Dorothy Goodbody’s Wholesome Stout from Wye Valley Brewery. It’s a 4.6% stout and very good indeed. It’s smooth, gluggable, full of fantastic roasted grain flavours, chocolate and coffee with a lingering dry hoppy finish.
It’s got a really cool logo with the voluptuous pin-up of Dorothy draped across it. The beer itself is pretty sexy too; dark, enticing, complex and full of flavour. The bottle says it’s good with cheeses, but doesn’t mention specifics, so this little impromptu tasting was to see how it worked with a few cheeses that I had in the fridge. I hadn’t tried the beer out of the bottle and I hadn’t tried it with any of the cheeses before I recorded it, so it was all off the cuff.
The Brie was creamy and mild but the beer did nothing to enhance the flavours, and what you most want is for the match of cheese and beer to lift off into a new direction, not lie flaccid and flat and skirt around each other awkwardly.
The sharp, creamy goats’ cheese was much better: the cheese is full of goaty punch and the beer sweeps in and lifts the palate with plenty of sweetness while the cheese still lingers throughout. This was a surprisingly good match.
The mature cheddar was Black Bomber from Snowdonia Cheese Company, and it’s fantastically strong, tangy and rich. The match was okay but not great; the cheese is probably too much for the beer to handle and the beer doesn’t get its chance to shine.
The Colston Basset stilton is one of my favourite cheeses there is. It’s creamy, smooth, strong and delicious. It worked really well with the stout, softening the coffee roast flavour and bringing out the sweetness within. And eating this after, with some crackers, it was an even better combo.
The final cheese was thrown in as a Valentine’s special - a white stilton with strawberries and white chocolate. It’s almost unpalatably sweet, kind of crazy, mainly full of strawberry flavour with the mildly sharp stilton underneath. It’s interesting. But it did work fairly well with the stout. The strawberry and chocolate paired up and the cheese and the roast flavours danced around a bit.
I say in the video that the goats’ cheese works best, but when I tried them all again after it was the stilton which I enjoyed the most. The best thing about this was the actual beer itself. It’s a really great bottled stout. And while none of the matches were amazing, there were some good ones.
Wednesday 11 February 2009
Thornbridge Brewery at The Bull
The pub was The Bull in Horton Kirby, Kent (check out their website here, or their Facebook group here). It’s a fantastic little corner pub with a bar lined with a selection of cask beers impeccably kept by Garrett the landlord (a proper beer lover!). There’s always Dark Star stuff on as well as ales from all over the country and a fridge with some beauties in too. It’s pretty much your ideal local.
For the Thornbridge showcase they had seven beers served off gravity. What a sight. Available was: White Swan, Lord Marples, Ashford, Kipling, Jaipur, Handel and St. Petersburg. That’s a party right there.
I started on the Ashford and worked my way upwards. Ashford is a glorious brown ale with a great malty base and a big hoppy finish – it’s surprisingly complex for a 4.2%-er. Kipling was next. I had opened a bottle of this the night before and loved it for its gorgeous fruitiness and all the tropical flavours from the Nelson Sauvin hop. From the cask it was one fine beer, judged by almost everyone as the second-best of the night. Jaipur followed and this is a near-magical IPA with a buttery-caramel-honey base and loads of tropical hops banging at the end (I also really love – maybe even prefer – the bottled version).
Handel came next, their Belgian-style ale, and I adore this beer. I wanted more and more of it (I still do! And check out Reluctant Scooper’s blog as he just cooked a great dish with the beer). Handel is so light and gluggable but so full of earthy, sweet, spicy flavours. Amazing. And it was exactly at this point that the complimentary buffet opened. Are there any finer words than ‘complimentary buffet’ at a beer festival (other than ‘free beer’)? A few blocks of cheese came out and being on a massive cheese-and-beer kick I helped myself. A strong-blue-and-Handel combo blew me away: that was pairing heaven.
Onwards, finishing at the crowning glory that is St. Petersburg. An immensely brilliant imperial stout that superlatives cannot do justice. At 7.7% it’s rich, thick, creamy and full of roasted grain and dark chocolate but it’s still a beer you can drink a pint of.
And then I had to leave for the train. I said earlier that Kipling came number two for most, well number one was of course St. Petersburg. Personally, I thought Handel was right up there alongside the St. Pete. Thornbridge rock. I’m going up to visit next month and I can’t wait. Oh, and Kelly, the Brewery Manager, has just started a blog here.
Monday 8 December 2008
Harder, Faster, Bigger, Better… Double my IPA!
But what is common about all these?!
The more we have them, the more we want them as we ‘acquire’ the taste. These acquired tastes are for those things which are unnatural to our palettes: spicy foods, dark chocolate, salty oysters. To begin we have sweet chilli sauce, milk or white chocolate, fish fingers…
But tastes change.
I got into beer by drinking lager-pop. I’d have bitter shandies. I eased into Guinness, with a shot of blackcurrant cordial. I started on ales by having smoother, sweeter dark beers, and for the last few years it has been these dark beers that I have regularly leaned towards. I love them for their richness, the sweetness, the flavour of the grain, the taste of autumn fruit, dried fruit, caramel, chocolate or coffee. I preferred them for their relative lack of hop bitterness. And I was always searching for bigger and stronger beers, winter warmer’s, barley wines, Belgian triple’s, anything black and imperial. I was a malt monster.
But my taste is changing.
It seems there are two growing divisions in the beer world. These aren’t divisions away from each other, rather two interweaving and developing trends. Both are towards the extremes of flavour; one is for IPAs and the other for stouts. These new imperial or double IPAs are mega-hopped and massively bitter; the imperial stouts are thick, strong beasts, often aged in some-kind-of barrel to impart bourbon/oak characteristics. You just have to look on Beer Advocate at the best rated beers in the world right now to see this, and the trend seems to be growing. It started in America as they brought older styles to modern drinking.
We all know the history of IPA, which was shipped from England to India with added strength and hops to stop it going off on the boat trip. While (imperial) stouts have a similar-ish background, being brewed in London in the 18th century and transported to Russian Czars. For this reason it had to be extra-strong and well-hopped to survive the distance and the extreme cold. The styles have been around ever since, but it’s only in the last years that they have become the phenomenas that they are. Any why? Because tastes change.
In beer, the change has come as drinkers want ‘more’. More booze, more grain, more hops, more character, more flavour, more extremes, more history, more age, more more more. It’s the IPAs which have really piqued my interest of late. IPAs never really did it for me. That was until I tried BrewDog’s Punk IPA (available in Tesco’s – a perfect modern IPA) and their Chaos Theory (simply amazing and currently available on their website, but hurry!). After these the malt monster in me transformed into a hop-headed thrill-seeker.
The bitterness in these beer is high, but that’s what makes them so awesome. They have a supreme drinkability which makes you want to go back for more and more. In the mouth you get the sweet caramel grain then the hops flood in and ambush your palate, making the saliva glands gush, as the tropical fruits, citrus and pine flavours come through. It’s intoxicating what a few extra hops can do to you. For me, they work because the beer develops in layers: massive malt (it has to be massive to attain the extra higher ABVs) followed by the wave of juicy hops. The reason the ‘best beers’ are the ‘best beers’ is because they are so well balanced. It’s easy to go extreme on a beer, but it’s surely much harder to make it good. The same applies to food. Look at the top chefs in the world and their food – it challenges what we think we know about eating and food combinations, but it works because of the chef’s skill and supreme palate make it work.
I find it fascinating how our taste buds change, especially with stronger flavours. Blue cheese, slippery-salty oysters and coffee are foods which take some getting used to. The same applies to stronger, bigger beers. And the limits are always being pushed. Sam Adams’ Utopia is brewed at around 27% (it’s a beer!). Your ‘standard’ imperial stout now comes in at around 10% and if it isn’t aged in a bourbon barrel for extra complexity then why bother? And where a mass-produced lager may have 5-20 IBUs (International Bitterness Units – the scale of measuring a beer’s bitterness) and English bitter 20-40 IBUs, there are some double IPAs which measure in at 120 IBUs and beyond! That’s enough to make your taste buds explode!!
Barrel-aged stouts are incredibly exciting and complex and they are brilliant to sit down with on a cold night, swirl around a snifter and sip for while. It’s sophisticated, it’s smooth, rich in flavour, it’ll make you think about the world, think about the barrel it came from, the history that it has. But a double IPA is like a rollercoaster ride with ups and downs and twists and turns. It’s fresh, fun, intoxicating and exciting. It makes you want more and more as your taste for it develops. Who knows where it’ll go from here!