I was up at the Florence pub, home of Head in a Hat brewery. Unlike Mordue brewery this one has the more typical everything crammed in as small a space as possible look.
A wide range of beers are produced, in part using recipes inherited when it was taken over and in part drawing on the work of Ron Pattinson. I don't think I'd describe any of them as delicious, but several were interesting. A wheat beer made with Whitbread B yeast was pleasantly drinkable but unsurprisingly lacking in flavour. A sour beer made by inoculating lactobacillus into the wort before boiling went down well with the sour beer fan at my table but wasn't to my taste. Though this method definitely gets the acidity level up the beer lacked the complexity you get from long mixed lambic fermentations. How it would compare to a Berline weiss I couldn't really say as my experience of them was, and will remain, limited.
Of the beers based on historic recipes the 1805 porter was the one I was most pleased to see, and being made with 40% brown malt had a distinctive taste reminiscent of a beer I made using 100% diastatic brown malt.
As to the food we were given a range of courses to share between three of us. Some were good, some were not so good. And none of them went with any of the beers.
As a general rule, beer goes very well with hearty comfort food: shepherd's pie, beef stew, wienerschnitzel, chicken stew in cream sauce, pork chops in mushroom cream and bacon sauce. Something one is happy to just shovel on a sofa watching a good film. I also like beer with those cheese cubes they have in Belgium, sprinkled with celery salt, mustard on the side.
ReplyDeleteFair enough, but I wouldn't make a meal of it! ;-)
DeleteWhen I was growing up it was received wisdom that you had to have Guinness with a ploughman's. I suppose this went back to the early CAMRA "Guinness if there's nothing else" attitude, nitro stout being seen as a cut above keg bitter. If only John Smith's had got into 'smooth' twenty years earlier...
ReplyDeleteI recently had to resort to drinking draught Guinness in a keg only pub and without prompting the landlord started explaining why he didn't serve real ale. I guess he's noticed my forlorn searching along the bar before ordering.
DeleteThe food-and-beer pairing thing is a weak attempt to make beer seem a bit more up-market (and, dare I say, pretentious). I really don't get it but then I don't get food-and-wine pairing either. When there is a plate of food in front of me I eat. Before and after the food arrives I drink. Maybe I am weird but I prefer to enjoy my beer/wine for what it is rather than mixed up with (and the flavour altered by) my food.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, it's trying to win market share back from wine. And I very seldom drink when I'm eating either.
DeleteI like to drink beer before, while and after I'm eating, surely that is also a food pairing? Seems very normal to me to "pair" food with beer. Ed, the problem is some people use fancy terminology like "pairing". I use the term beer with food.
ReplyDeletePart of the trying to make beer sound more sohisticated policy.
DeleteSounds a little like you'd made your mind up before you'd even arrived at the pub.
ReplyDeleteOh aye, I'm definitley biased on this one. But I do try to get into it when I'm at these events, honest!
DeleteAre you guys still making 100% diastatic brown malt in house...? Any plans to offer a few kilos here and there to homebrewers...? (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more, say no more...)
ReplyDeleteIt was made at home not at work. I'll try and get a post up about how I made it soon, though just to give you a taster it helps if you like baked potatoes.
DeleteI love baked potatoes, they're great for making gnocchi... ;-)
DeleteI think food & beer "pairing" is a good thing. :-p So there!
ReplyDeleteMore seriously - I'm from a very food oriented background, I quite literally grew up in restaurants. In a wine region. Where food and wine went hand in hand. When I started getting into beer doing the same with beer seemed pretty natural. I was doing it before I was a beer nerd of any sort. (But I've always been a food/flavour nerd to some extent.) I don't see why folk angst about it so much, as if its the death of beer. On the flipside I think folk go overboard with it too...
Anyway, the existence of the concept:
- doesn't mean you have to have beer with every meal.
- doesn't mean you have to have food with every beer.
Of course, not everybody has to have anything to do with it at all.
Oh, and the whole "there's a beer for that" type nonsense can bugger off and die, AFAIC.