Summer time

Summer is a great time to drink beer. You can kick back on the lawn with a few bottles (as above) or enjoy a pint of golden ale in your local pub's beer garden. A traditional practice of mine carried on from when I first got into beer is to hoard up a number of session beers for a few months before taking a day off to sit out on the lawn at my parent's house on a sun bed drinking beer. Sometimes I would invite mates round once or twice I even used my mobile phone to ring the house and order my mother to bring me the next beer. 

The great lawn session (GLS) I called it and the picture above is from GLS 2008, the last one where a single hour of sunshine was witnessed the entire day. But things change as you get older, these days I don't have a lawn and just can't be bothered/have other stuff on. The good news is that the new place I'm moving into in a month or so will have a lawn. I plan to hoard a few bottles together to have a few lawn sessions that's for sure but nothing's stopping me cracking open some summer beers now.

The thing about summer beers is, a lot of them are quite subtle.  Anchor Summer beer is no exception. The label description classes it as an American Wheat beer, but it doesn't drink like US Hefeweizen at all. Lots of fluffy wheaty texture but no subtle yeasty orange peel-coriander notes. In fact when I first tried this beer a few years back I wasn't that impressed but this time I kind of fell for it. So did my wife Helen, so I'm glad I had the sense to buy two bottles. The thing with this beer is it has that property that many beer geeks dislike and many non beer geeks admire, it's 'delicate'. Easy drinking and great for kicking back in the summer heat, with enough flavour to keep it interesting. 

Beer vs Wine

So what's the obvious thing on most people's minds when they hear 'beer and cheese evening'? Maybe this is some kind of crazy twist on the wine and cheese evening thing? Or maybe it's hosted by Morrissey Fox like characters telling pub jokes and seeing who can burp the loudest? But it isn't like this kind of thing is unheard of, check out events here, and here.

Beer and cheese, both born on the farm from natural grasses, both fermented, both sharing similar flavour ranges. Earthy, spicy, grainy, pungent. Like two similar characters. One liquid, one solid. It just makes sense. Apparently the Belgians have been into beer with cheese for along time now.

But another interesting thing I came across the other da , was this event of beer vs wine on the dinner table. Here Stone brewings Greg Koch and wine boffin Barry Wiss paired various dishes with wine and beer to determine which paired with food best.


Beer vs. Wine 2008 from Redtail Media on Vimeo.

Trailer
 
I'm not against wine, in fact I'm quite fond of the stuff. But here's my opinion. With matching beer/wine with food, you have the possibility of a million and one combinations. Maybe the beer/wine guy picks the best/worst combination, it depends. It depends on who picks the bests flavour harmonies (or contrasts). At  least on some level the above competition is just as much about Koch vs Wiss than beer vs cheese.

 Then you have the audience. If the audience is say, myself and a bunch of other beer enthusiasts and bloggers some could say the audience is subjectively biased in the favour of beer over wine. The same could be reversed if the audience are a team of wine writers. I myself have tried pairing wine and food but have more often paired beer and food. There is no doubt the two beverages have different chemistry with food, to me the beer and food chemistry makes more sense, the argument of which goes better is an entirely closed loop and subjective (on the subject, at about my fifth beer you may hear me mentioning that beer basically beats wines ass with food due to its greater diversity and versatility with food but to be PC it's more accurate to say its subjective). So yeah you know which side I'm on.


Finally you have the food itself. Most experts say beer goes with virtually anything but in a competition with wine pairing with Mediterranean cuisine then you might have problems. With Belgian or German cuisine the situation could be reversed. Food elements like sausage, chocolate and dare I say it, cheese can be used in beer's favour.

It seems Greg's little project back in 2007 and 2009 presented proof that the tables of beverage superiority laid down by the decades of media hype and pretentiousness behind wine could indeed be turned. What does it all mean?? Well that would be subjective. What is the moral of the story?? Well my advice would be to drink whatever the hell you like with whatever you like and never be afraid to try new stuff or experiment. Giving guidelines is all good but everyone tastes slightly differently.

Taking this big time.

Beer and cheese... Beer and cheese... Beer...... Cheese.

Dene house in Longframlington want me to help organise and host a beer and cheese evening.. Am I serious? I'm deadly serious. Look, this is my serious face.

My challenge is to find 5-6 great beer and cheese pairings for July 14th. Then present each pairing to the 30 person audience in a kind of Garrett Oliver style, talking about the beer and how the pairing works.  I should be OK with questions, I know a lot about beer... Not much about cheese tho. But that's where my trusty chef assistant Chris Aird comes in, a real cheese enthusiast. I also have to work out how to afford all the beer inside the given budget, which is no easy challenge.

My research so far has been productive, heading to speciality beer and cheese shops trying out pairing after pairing. So far I have found that finding a great beer and cheese pairing is a bit like finding a great guitarist, or finding a great footballer as a scout. You can find  101 good pairings that go 'pretty well', or 'kind of work'. Then find 50 more that do hardly anything for each other. But then you get those combinations that work effortlessly, sublimely and take things to a whole new level, which is what I aim to present.

But under the restrictions I have set a few rules. Firstly; No lambics, double IPAs or high octane +13% monster brews that are likely to smash the budget and scare everyone away. Secondly I need international beers of various styles paired with various style cheeses to keep things interesting. My strategy so far is to focus on one beer and cheese pairing each week. Buy a specific cheese with 3-4 beers I think will suit them, then try out each beer with the cheese.

So if anyone fancies coming along then feel free to get in touch but only 30 tickets are on sale.

A short brewing holiday

By god what a lovely aroma. This late addition to the copper of Motueka, Centennial and Chinook hops counted for approximately 8 bitterness units (which for a late addition means a lot of hops) and was one of 6 hop additions for this American amber style ale. The massive citric and tropical fruit aromas kicking out of the vessel afterwards definitely made taking the day off work to double brew two separate batches of home brew at work worth it. That’s right, taking the day off to go to work and brew. I was thinking of getting a picture of me kicking back with a pint whilst watching everyone else scurry around working, but that would be too much (or you could say taking the piss). But out off all the parts of the brewing process I would probably say adding the hops, then standing over the vessel absorbing the aroma to the full has to be my favorite and most anticipated bit.

Overall the day went  really smoothly and quickly I became ahead of schedule. This was partly due to my new advanced piece of home brewing equipment which I call Panda & Frog home brewery Swann hot liquor tank (or PFSHLT).

Panda & Frog home brewery Swann hot liquor tank

This baby kept my mash liquor for the second brew warm while the first was boiling, allowing a more fluid process. Piece by piece I plan to keep improving my brewery and what I hope for next is a more efficient wort cooling system. A copper that’s not plastic (as you can see above) would also be nice. And while we're on the subject recent exciting news has it that I may be designing a new Daleside special release India Pale Ale in the next few months. Exciting stuff. I can't give much away but I know it will be a tad more hardcore than the current Alnwick IPA.

Mash tun run-off onto the first wort hops

As many of you in the UK would have also noticed, it has been a lot warmer recently with summer round the corner. This means I have had to keep an eye on fermentation temeratures but have saved electricity with the electric heaters. Hopefully it stays warm for plenty of evenings laid out in the sun with various beers or sat in beer gardens drinking summer seasonals from the cask. But hopefully it doesn't get so hot I have to take rescue my fermentations from becoming full of nasty off flavours or even worse infection.  

This week, I will be mostly brewing with...

The dual purpose Motueka hops of New Zealand are noted to be relatives of the noble Saaz type hop variety, but higher in alpha acid (or bittering potential) with a New Zealand twist. Goes great in pilsner style lager apparently but I will be using them alongside US Centennial hops in my US style Amber ale on Wednesday. This variety has also been blogged about here.

I have to admit compared to some bloggers I'm no hop head. Sure I enjoy vibrant fresh hop bombs like Deschutes hop trip (wet hopped), Stone IPA and Thornbridge Jaipur being some of my favourites. When it gets to some double or triple IPAs I shy off a bit. Acceptable in small quantities but the challenging factor gets a bit too much. But this relatively new Motueka variety sounds intriguing. If this project is a success I may put this variety amongst my favourites; Bramling Cross, Goldings, Progress, Willamette and Centennial  (OK, mainly boring old school varieties). I shall be brewing as much as possible in the next month or so. Me and my wife Helen are moving house, and my birthday barbecue is under five weeks away. That's two house parties so I need to be prepared.

Another thing that happened this week was the discovery of how well my very own Helen's beer went with Cheesy turkey meatloaf, prepared by the woman herself. This was probably the first decent beer and food pairing I have had where the beer was home brewed. I also found this beer to go with Parlick fell cheese. Like the beer, Helen is good with food.