Archive for June, 2011

Saturday, 18 June, 2011

Beer and Michelin-starred curry

Beer and curry has long been recognised as a fantastic culinary combination. The British public has associated a visit to the local curry ‘Indian’ (as a term for a range of Asian foods) with a range of beers, such as Cobra, Kingfisher, Bangla and the new Mongoose. Indeed it’s not a massive stretch to suggest that beer, the UK’s most popular drink, has contributed to Chicken Tikka Masala being the UK’s most popular restaurant meal.

Chef Sriram Aylur - beer and food legend

The context of beer with curry has been developed further in recent years by a number of top chefs in recent years, led by Sriram Aylur at the London-based Michelin-starred Quilon restaurant. Quilon brings to the UK a taste of coastal South-West Indian cuisine, combining the modern and the traditional, whilst searching for the ‘perfect ingredients’.

The Quilon has demonstrated its focus on beer through the development of a vintage ale range, selling Fullers’ Vintages ales from 1996 to 2010, and over the last few months has been working on a fantastic five-course beer and curry menu. The menu was launched at a lunch attended by brewers, chefs, farmers, maltsters, catering schools, journalists and beer-brewing celebrities, and sponsored by Quilon and the BBPA.

The five course menu opens with an appetite whetter of popadums and tomato chutney paired with the light and fresh Ceilidh Lager by Williams Bros from Alloa in Scotland. This is followed by lotus stem chop with mango sauce and spiced stir-fried oysters, paired with Fuller’s Bengal Lancer. The Chef’s own special creation follows, the Quilon Salad, of mixed greens with patty pan dressed in lavender and kokum infusion. After that, baked black cod paired seamlessly with the delicate vanilla and citrus of Innis & Gunn Blonde Oak Aged Beer from Edinburgh.

The menu then moves on to a flavoursome lamb biryani followed by coconut asparagus and mange tout accompanied by Chalky’s Bite from Sharp’s brewery in Cornwall. A lentil cappuccino served with cardamom short breads, fig and pressed honey ice cream finishes the meal nicely with Sam Smith’s Organic Cherry Beer from Yorkshire as its accompaniment. A 1999 Fuller’s Vintage Ale provided a perfect digestif.

The entire experience was exhilarating. Each course, on its own magnificent, paired magically with all of the British beers. The lighter Ceilidh worked delicately with the popadums, while the lentil, shortbread and ice cream created a complex yet intriguing mix of flavours.

But beyond the food it was inspiring to see beer at the top table, being served with some of the finest food served anywhere in the country. The gathered crowd were equally positive about beer. Various speakers, from the host himself, to chef Richard Fox and popstar-turned brewer Tony Hadley praised beer as the perfect accompaniment to a huge range of foods. Many of the other guests were stunned by the range of flavours available and felt that beer wasn’t receiving the recognition it deserved.

With chefs and restaurants like Sriram and Quilon promoting beer, it cannot be too long before beer is found at even more top restaurants around the country.

 

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Thursday, 16 June, 2011

Spreading the wort of the lord

If you think about monks (which probably is not that often), images come to mind of men clothed in black or brown robes, taking vows of poverty, chastity and sometimes silence, and devoting their lives to prayer and hard work.

So it may come as a surprise (to those outside of the beer community!) that monks have played a central role in the history of brewing and some monasteries are still producing amazing beers.

In fact, brewing has always been a part of monastic life. In about AD545 a British cleric wrote about monks and beer and in the first millennium Irish priests seemed to have been connoisseurs of ale complaining about the local beer when travelling round Europe. One reported that the local brew was so bad he ‘threw his boots at it’…

It may seem strange to us that devoutly religious men would brew and drink beer but the monks were canny folk. Monks need to fast during certain times of the religious year. During a fast one cannot eat food. Beer, on the other hand, contains much of the same nutrition as bread (and monks’ ales may also contain elements of fruit), but it is not food, it is drink…

Clever eh!

In an age when most people were illiterate monks were the most learned part of the community and had time to study and experiment. They contributed enormously to the progress of science and mathematics and the art of brewing beer.

And I am sure they would agree with Benjamin Franklin who said “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

Some Suggestions

Although the tradition of monasteries and brewing has declined in volume of production, the quality is heavenly. So try these.

Achel 8 Blond, Trappist beer, 8.0%, 33cl.

A pale, strong, fruity and hoppy Trappist ale from Belgium’s newest Abbey brewery. The Saint Benedictus Abbey of Achel is the first monastery to take up brewing in Belgium since 1931, and is one of only six Trappist breweries now operating there.

http://www.beermerchants.com

Chimay Tripel, 8.0%, 33cl.

As Rate Beer says, Chimay Tripel, with its typical golden colour, its slightly hazy appearance and its fine head is especially characterised by its aroma which results from an agreeable combination of fresh hops and yeast.

Available in leading beer shops and supermarkets and from many beer bars around the country, including the Lowlander.



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Friday, 10 June, 2011

Beer is cooler than wine … and skiing

So admittedly, you probably wouldn’t be thinking about this during the balmy summer months, but then maybe if you love snowboarding as much as I do it’s never really that far from your mind! But something that was pretty obvious to me early on in my snowy love affair, separately from the fact that repeatedly falling on my chest wasn’t good for my ribs, was that snowboarding was cool and skiing wasn’t!

It’s all pretty harmless, good natured stuff…but the truth is the truth all the same. It’s not just that snowboarders have more comfortable gear. They do things that skiers can’t, go places that skiers won’t. It’s faster, harder and way more painful for boarders to learn the basics but no less technical, then as basics are mastered the advanced learning becomes more freeform, encouraging experimentation and learning by trial and error…fewer rules and constraints to inhibit that sparkle of creativity!

Which leads me to my other passion in life…beer, and this is something I’ve been doing far longer than snowboarding! But I’ve noticed something that is as true for one as it is for the other. Beer is cool and way cooler than wine…and for much the same reasons that snowboarding is cooler than skiing!

Today’s brewers are brave experimenters, not impinged by the boundaries of tradition. There are only a few natural ingredients in beer, each imparting a different character. Brewers however are masters of the art of combining these in new ways to elicit different, exotic and interesting flavours. Use of alternative yeast strains, even combinations of different yeasts, allows the resurrection of historic beer styles but with a unique, modern twist. Some crazy dudes have even started challenging an institution…using champagne yeast to produce a unique new style!

Beers today are fresh and exciting products that have caught the attention of Michelin starred chefs and fashionable restaurateurs as well as the quality conscious consumer, desperately seeking something new, exciting and invigorating…cool even! To a keen boarder, many of the craft brewers are immediately recognisable as geeky, brave individuals with a passion that, whilst maybe slightly unorthodox, is wholly irascible and infectious…all they lack is a wool beanie and pair of Gortex mittens!         

OK, so this is just my view and maybe I’m suffering, after all the sun is out and I haven’t been near a slope since March! But the proof to me seems clear and I can’t recall any self respecting boarder reaching for a glass of wine half way down the mountain so it must be true!

Beer Genie Steve

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Friday, 3 June, 2011

Collecting your beer memories

My bottle top collectionEverybody has a secret. Things you wish to keep from public view; traits that your closest friends would raise their eyebrows at, and never quite consider you in the same light. So it was a massive relief this morning that I discovered that I was not the only person with this ‘habit’. My closet custom is the collection of bottle tops, and reading Mark Dredge’s blog at Pencil & Spoon I realised I was not alone.

Mark’s blogpost was part of the Session, a monthly beer blogging focus on a specific issue associated with beer; this one being on the subject of beer collectibles, or breweriana.

Beer has been a passion of mine for all of my adult life. But only in the last few (or slightly more) years have I been collecting bottle tops. It started off as a purely aesthetic obsession; I started to keep bottle tops that were attractive to the eye. Since then it has turned into an historical record of the range of beers that I have tried and tasted.

Sadly it’s a very incomplete measure of one’s brand history. Obviously draught beer, the mainstay of most drinkers in this country, is excluded. Buying bottles from pubs creates the slightly awkward situation of having to ask the bar staff for the cap, leading to very peculiar looks and much sniggering! And then a personal frustration – brands and breweries that don’t brand their bottle tops. This is probably a gripe of very few people so you can understand why it’s not so important to brewers!

The exercise of writing this blog necessarily involved the examination of my collection. My bottle tops currently reside within a box of Christmas Celebrations. Spreading them across the table brought back fantastic memories, particularly of holidays – amazing how beer evokes such intense memories of places I’d forgotten I’d visited. Bottles of Smadny Mnich remind me of my first trip to Slovakia with my wife. I reminisced about an excellent trip to Croatia which included a few bottles of Karlovacko, memories of Thailand’s beers and many examples of trips to Belgium, as well as so many quality lagers and UK-brewed ales.

Bringing together all these beer experiences, in metallic form, reminds me just how big a part beer has played in my life over the last few years. And how different all the beers are!

For the record my current tally stands at 259 – and when I can get the photo uploader to work then I’ll post my collection!

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Thursday, 2 June, 2011

Dispelling the myths around lager

Lager is the world’s most popular beer style but regularly comes up against a lot of bad press.  People say that all lagers are only produced by big brewers, that they taste the same, and that they are full of chemicals. But these are patently all untrue.

The lager scene in the UK is the forgotten part of the beer revolution. While it’s absolutely right to celebrate the plethora of ales, stouts, porters and all every other style of beer, lagers are also changing.

Lagers are being produced by a range of brewers, from the UK’s number 1 brand Carling, down to some of the many of the smaller brewers including Camden Town, West and Cotswold. In SIBA’s 2011 report it was estimated that 14% of their members were now producing lager. Lager is being produced all over the British Isles, from St Austell’s Korev to a range of Scottish brewers – such as Williams Brothers’ Ceilidh. (more…)

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