Time to reflect

January is typically a time for reflection looking back on the previous year and looking forward to the year to come. That is after all why the month was named after the Roman god with two faces, Janus!

And what an apt post to do it on too, number 300 - I don't think I even dreamed I'd hit 300 posts when I started this blog 3 1/2 years ago! 2014 saw a slowdown in the number of posts due to the usual excuses (lethargy, apathy and procrastination) but will endeavour to be a little more frequent in 2015.

Despite the lack of blogging the beer sampling has still continued apace with over 1100 (new to me) beers sampled. I made great headway with sampling the wide array of beer Ireland has to offer, we may not yet have the depth and breadth of the UK but we have a bigger proportion of exciting brewers with even more planned for 2015. See my roundup of new openings and my Irish Golden Pints plus Irish beers to look out for posts.

The UK too has been no slouch, with so many decent brewers now available, I'm largely content to just drink our own countries' outputs rather than searching further afield. After all its usually fresher, cheaper and more interesting than most of the US stuff we can get over here. That's not going to stop me sampling stuff when I see it on keg, or coveting other people's beers when they're travelling but the UK can now proudly offer up brews to compete with the best of the US (as my Golden pints should attest).

So enough looking back, what does 2015 have in store? Well plenty more brewery openings of course, both here and across the UK as a whole will mean even more beers to sample with some other established breweries pushing into the limelight. Hopefully this will be the year that I finally get to Indy Man Brew Con and I'd love to go back and work at GBBF after a number of years off. I of course fully intend to get to the Irish Craft Beer and Cider Festival again too.

One of the highlights of the year will without a doubt be the Beer Bloggers Conference (which is in Brussels this year). With a number of pre and post conference excursions the weekend will be extended to almost a full week of beery education and frivolities. There's still time to book, hopefully see you there! Whilst on the subject of beery excursions Zephyr (The team behind the beer bloggers conference) are now also organising taste vacations, if you like good food, good drinks and travelling (and lets face it who doesn't?!) you can book a bespoke tour with them. Dislaimer: if you book through my affiliate link I get some monies!

300 posts in is also an excellent point to refocus the blog on beer and cider, especially on the island of Ireland which leads on to the launch of Our new blog (yes, Daisy is going to be writing too!)...drumroll please...DRINKS WE'VE KNOWN. Original eh? So expect to find whisky, rum, cocktails and perhaps even non-alcoholic beverage goings on at the other place. I'll try not to cross post too much, but if these things interest you please give us a follow.

That's all for now folks, thanks for sticking with me in 2014, all the best for 2015 and hope to see you all soon.

Not quite a Dum Dum

As many of you know I'm not monogamous with beer; Oh no, I enjoy cider, whisky and all kinds of other beverages too. Recently I have been enjoying rum (though I can't claim to be able to afford to buy many bottles!). 

A couple of months ago I was contacted by someone representing Diageo (booo, hiss I hear you cry). Given some of the company's previous antics you've a right to be sceptical: but I decided to give them a chance. Naomi was looking for coverage of Diageo's spirits portfolio as presented on their new website The Bar. More on that later, but the upshot was a chance to try some new (to me) booze and why pass that up?

I decided I'd take up Diageo's offer of reimbursing me for the required spirits to make a few cocktails and Guatemalan Rum Ron Zacapa caught my eye. I'd previously enjoyed this in a Dum Dum at love and death inc but had been put off by the bottle pricetag, a little over my usual budget at £45. I availed of Diageo's offer and also picked up a bottle of grand marnier for £13 whilst on offer in Tesco. That's £58 of free booze maths fans. All other ingredients came from my own store cupboard and whilst under no obligations to writethis post I thought I'd share the results with you, mainly as I like saying "look wot i dun"! Ron Zacapa is an excellent rum and is actually really easy to enjoy neat (I actually bought the bottle in duty free on the way out to China and shared it with Daisy, my in laws and my parents and well received by all (despite mum insisting on mixing coke with hers...). Its warming, smooth, deep earthy spiciness, rich high cocoa chocolate, fruity coffee and caramel make for an excellent evening drink which would equally work well in a fruit based cocktail.

After procrastinating for thebest part of two months since I returned I thought this weekend would be a good time to try out some cocktails. To get warmed up i mixed up a simple concoction using the gran marnier, some cranberry and blueberry juice and lime. Perhaps a little sweet but it lined the stomache for some of the boozier numbers that were to come later. Adding in an extra quarter of a lime did the trick and was enjoyed by Daisy whilst I tried out a different libation.

 

	Grand Cran 25ml Grand Marnier 25mlCranberry Juice 7ml lime juice

The next was Kiss Above the Clouds created by a Chinese bartender Cross Yu working in MUSE,Shanghai.Video
 Picking up on those coffee notes it uses coffee liquer and chocolate bitters alongside fruity rosso vermouth and a dash of whisky (he used johnny walker gold, i had none so substituted peat chimney). It was a decent drop, though perhaps lacked something to make it really sing. Use of cinnamon was inspired however as it plays well to the spice in the rum.

	Kiss Above The Clouds 60ml Ron Zacapa 5ml whisky 20ml Sweet Vermouth 5ml Coffee Liqueur 2 dahes Chocolate Bitters Cinnamon Stick

After a day off I returned to try out a different creation, this one by a Spaniard David Rios who works in the Jigger Bar, Bilbao. Turns out he won World Class Bartender of the Year last year in a Diageo competition; so this should be one to look forward to! Again using coffee liqueur but also orgeat, an almond based syrup, with a cream float. Named Aroma for his two children's names which is kinda cute.
I was pretty pleased that i didn't create some kind of curdled mess and it was an excellent rich drink too. Although a tiny component the mint leaf pulled thelot together which highlights the importance of a proper garnish on a cocktail. Nb a bit of confusion on the website which suggest the coffee beans be shaken with the cocktail but watching the video will set you straight. Also chose to go for regular cream rather than coconut cream.

	Aroma 50ml Ron Zacapa 10ml Coffee Liqueur 10ml orgeat 17.5ml cream coffee beans mint

Finally I decided to have a go at recreating that dum dum cocktail I tried over a year ago which started my rum discovery journey in the first place.Luckily Love&Death Inc are fairly open with their ingredients (if not proportions) in their bar menu (did I  mention its presented in the form of a comic montage?!) I didn't fancy forking out for a bottle of clement creole shrub just yet so substituted grand marnier with a few dashes of  peychauds bitters. Chilli tincture seems like a faff for just myself; so that was substituted with a small amount of chopped red chili. It was pretty close to hoe I remember the bar version being, though perhaps required another 10ml of rum to really bring out those deep fruity notes. Maybe someone from the bar will see this and kindly let me know the real proportions?!

	Steve's Dum Dum 50ml Ron Zacapa 23 25ml Dubonnet Rouge 1sp Amaro Averna 1tsp Grand Marnier 2 Dashes Peychaud's 1/8 tsp chopped red chili

So i had a bit of fun mixing up some cocktails and there's certainly a few worth looking at on their website. Its pretty easy to navigate with a decent search function that lets you search by ingredient or by spirit (but cocktaildb will still be my go to) and of course serves to highlight Diageo's own alcohol range. The majority of the cocktails on the website are of your standard spirit+mixer±citrus ilk but there are certainly some that s more original creations, along with short YouTube clips on how to make them presented by their creators. The site could stand to lose the majority of the standard mixes and highlight the likes of these which are the more interesting ones. What it really showed me though was the breadth of Diageo's spirits portfolio...seems they're not just about the black stuff and single malts after all.

Many thanks to the team at Diageo for getting in touch and arranging for reimbursement, I have the best part of a litre of rum to consume how i see fit, which will slot in nicely beside the Brugal and Appleton 12 y/o in my growing collection. More Diageo based frollicks coming soon as we attend a beer and food pairing meal at St James Gate this weekend as partof the European BeerBloggers Conference...stay tuned folks!

First forrays into cocktails with POM

As I mentioned a while back, Daisy enjoys a cocktail every now and again and this has led to me enjoying them too. Taking my usual make interests into obsessive pursuits path I bought a pile of equipment and boozes as well as books to start experimenting at home. So when a PR rep from POM asked me if I'd like to try out some of their new cocktail recipes with some free juice I thought sure, why not.

POM is fairly pricey at ~£3.50 for a litre, but that's in line with other high end juices, and if you've ever tried to juice a pomegranate you'll know you need a lot of them for any useful amount of juice. Its 100% juice with no additives; so better than those diluted sugary juice drinks out there.

Without teaching people to suck eggs, a common cocktail ingredient Grenadine (Pomegranate syrup) can actually be made from pomegranate juice. It tastes better than most store bought stuff because it turns out those are often made of other red fruits, often raspberry! The syrup can be made as a simple 1:1 (by weight) mixture. The POM site recommends heating, but it'll dissolve at room temperature if you're patient.

I flicked through the recipes on www.pomcocktails.co.uk and decided to try one using just the juice and another cocktail utilising POM grenadine syrup.

POM island iced tea is a riff on the boozy long island iced tea. The spicy fruit flavours of pomegranate working well with both the herbal cola and the rich molasses flavours in dark rum.

I used Smirnoff vanilla vodka as it works well with coke, Hendricks Gin as its what I had to hand, Cointreau (which is basically a branded triple sec) and an own brand dark rum.

POM island iced tea

Very easy to follow the directions and no specialist equipment required. It makes a change to the regular iced tea which can sometimes be overly carbonated and cloying. There's also a mango version, but I couldn't get that variety of juice in Northern Ireland!

Purple Lady

The other recipe I decided to try was the Purple Lady. I must have been feeling brave as I usually avoid cocktails with egg white in! If you're worried about it there's no issue as long as you are using fresh eggs and shake well! As for the yolk, you can make a richer omelette/ scrambled egg or push the boat out and make crème brulee whilst you're in a making stuff and doing things mood.

A word of warning, the recipe doesn't go into as much detail as the video, which is well worth a watch if you're not sure about what order to use the ingredients in and mentions the all important "dry shake" which the written instructions omit. Beware the difference in measures between the video and the website, I followed the website but either should work, just don't mix and match!

I've also been given some extra coupons for a competition. So if one of you lucky readers fancies trying proper pomegranate juice and have a bash at home made grenadine or any of the other  recipes on the website, leave a comment below with why you should get the vouchers and what you would use the POM for and I'll pick my favourite on July 15th. There's also a competition on the webpage to win a home cocktail set.

Thanks to Esther at Escapade PR for sending the coupons and choosing my blog to help put the word out about POM.

Serendipity

It shouldn't surprise my readers to find out that beer isn't the only alcoholic beverage that I enjoy. In fact, even the not so eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed the link to all of my whisky posts above ^. I've also enjoyed cider from a  young age, but a drink class I've been getting into more recently is cocktails. 

It probably stems from my trip to the Maven in Leeds as recommended by Neil Eating Isn't Cheating where I enjoyed a very nice rum short drink. fast forward a year and I now have a well stocked cocktail cabinet at home and a couple of interesting old cocktail books to peruse for inspiration (more on those in a later post). It helps that my wife also enjoys trying cocktails; so I have a guinea pig for my creations!

From Love & Death Inc website

But I digress. Today's post is about a specific cocktail bar, Love & Death Inc to be precise. Its Ann Street location in Belfast (perched atop the fab Little Wing pizzeria) puts it within  stones throw of trendy shopping area Victoria Square and the more touristy area of Laganside.

To enter is to be transported back in time to American speakeasies of the 1920s. Oh no, I hear you dry, taht's been done to death already: well maybe so; but no-one does it quite like Love and Death Inc. Up the stairs from street level and you reach the bar area. All manner of bric a brac are suspended from the ceiling, including a full sized bike! Its always buzzing on evenings I've been in with a mixed soundtrack of easy listening and rock n' roll, though later on a DJ is often in attendance. There's also a nightclub upstairs, which I'm yet to investigate.

A view of the bar

 

From Love & Death Inc website

Staff are friendly and efficient, making cocktails with skill in front of your eyes. A number of them have entered competitions and performed well; not bad considering the bar is pretty new. The bar itself is an A-Z of alcohol with almost every liquer and spirit imaginable crammed into its many nooks and crevices, with a decent range of bitters and purees across the front. There's also food available, but I'm yet to sample this as both of my visits to date have been after dinner.

Dum dum (right) and (i think) Paradise Lost
with the comic book menu

One thing I particularly like is the menu (PDF), a collage of old comic strips, with speech replaced by cocktail descriptions. Average price for a cocktail is around £6 which is very decent considering the quality involved. I did splash out £12for a "dum dum" because it sounded intriguing with chili and orange alongside aged Guatemalan rum and sicilian digestif. That's it in the photo to the left. I thought about recreating it at home, but the rum is £100 a bottle so maybe not!

On my recent visit I stuck to rum creations. "Origins" features Appleton 8 and ginger and "To Have and Have Not" is an exposition in grapefruit featuring ruby grapefruit juice and grapefruit bitters alongside mint and rum. Both tasty and so appealing that I neglected to take a photo...

One thing that caught my eye this time around however wasn't a cocktail, but a half finished beer on my table. Still in its dark brown bottle with hand-written sticky label I'd discovered a new Northern Ireland brew! Turns out I'd managed to time my visit to co-inside with the release of the new house brews. I picked up the last couple of bottles, which I'll review on a later post.

So next time you're in Belfast, pay Love & Death Inc a visit, I promise you won't be disappointed.

Love & Death Inc

10a Ann Street, Belfast, BT1 4EF (map)

Facebook

Twitter @LoveanddeathNI

Hop Mixology

I've already reviewed this year's IPA is dead series, but decided to try some beer mixing to add depth to the flavours, partially inspired by tasting Mikkeller's 19 hop IPA, made from a  mixture of his single hop series.

Ever the scientist I tried each with each in order to work out the best and used a shot measure to ensure 50ml of each beer were used. Here's my notes (names abbreviated M= motueka, H=HBC, G=Galaxy, C=Challenger):

M+H: perfumed aroma, slight vegetal taste, soft carbonation and apricot finish

C+G: peppery Turkish delight and a hint of diesel on the nose. Caramel flavour with chalky texture and a sharp finish.

M+G: Turkish delight and satsuma on the nose, highly carbonated with pithy orange and finishing highly bitter.

M+C: Caramel and toffe plus lemon and plum on the nose. Opal fruits in the mouth with a fairly dry finish. 

This was the best combination of the six.

C+H:  Pine resin on the nose with peppery bitterness and orange marmalade in the finish.

Another great combination

H+G: Mango, bright carbonation, zingy palate with passion fruit in the finish.

I then went for three-way mixes

H+G+C: Less aroma on the nose with satsuma and a clean English bitterness in the finish.

H+G+M: Turkish delight with a bitter orange pith finish.

M+C+G: Satsuma, pear and grape on the nose, well carbonated with a messy finish. Shows that hopping has to be thought about in order to get something enjoyable, rather than just chucking in anything you feel like.

M+C+H:  Toffee on the nose with marmalade body and bitter mango rind and brief drying finish inviting the next sip. Unsurprising that the best of the pairs produced an even better trio. Would much rather have a pint of this than any of the single beers.

All 4: Hoppy nose with mango skin, resin and mango rind in the finish. The bitterness is just too dominant over the malt profile. 

Overall an interesting experiment. The blends are often better than the individual beers, and even in the dual-hopped beers the hops that I wasn't as keen on (HBC I'm looking at you) come into their own. I'm also now convinced that galaxy is not a good bittering hop, giving strange effects in most of the mixes it was used in.

Botany

Ugly Betty

Although primarily a whisky distillery, its not the only trick the Bruichladdich team have up their sleeve. The beauty pictured to the left is a gin still, which to date has been used to produce a single batch. Its a great additional revenue stream to pay for the whisky in the stores which will typically take 12 years or more until maturity.

After installation the still was charged with a tonne of juniper berries and various other botanicals (see below). Aside from a half-hour of foreshots the still kicked out a good 15 hours of spirit, which has given the distillery a good cash injection for refurbishment and experimentation.

The spirit safe

The spirit run is controlled via a spirit safe in the same way as whisky. As you can  tell from its sheen, this one is brand spanking new, whereas "Ugly Betty" was rescued from Innerleven distillery, alreadya venerable 50 years old. The team love her, despite her slowness.

The botanicals "basket"

The bulge on the lyne arm is where the botanicals sit, infusing the refluxing spirit with those volatile flavour compounds. Most mass-market gins only contain 4-10 botanicals whereas "The Botanist" contains a fantastic 31, 22 of which have been gathered from the wild on Islay!

They include: Elderflower, apple mint, wood sage, bog myrtle, sweet cicely, creeping thistle, peppermint leaf, heather flowers, meadowsweet, water mint, tansy, hawthorn flower, lemon balm, mugwort, thyme, gorse, white clover, red clover, birch leaf, sweet chamomile and lady's bedstraw. To maintain a tenuous link to beer, many of these were used in the past as gruit to flavour unhopped ales; so to revive their use in gin is to reconnect to the past of the island.

Gin!

But enough about how its made, the big question is how it tastes, no? Its all very well using all of these fantastic flavourings but does it make any difference? In a word - yes! I'd always been averse to gin suggesting it ruined the taste of tonic water. It would appear I'm averse to crap gin, and this is far from crap! A small measure in the distillery shop led me to purchase a whole bottle. I decided to go for that classic of cocktails - the martini a.k.a the botini, which i've attempted to write about below (you can tell the world of gin is new to me!)

It pours clear with no discernible colour and has an enticing freshly squeezed oranges and lemons aroma with a touch of coconut and juniper in the background. In goes the vermouth and a touch of lime zest and that coconut jumps out stronger alongside mint and other herbal smells, a veritable apothecary! The gin climbs the sides of the glass and eddies around the lime. Its extraordinarily smooth drinking, sweet and buttery up front, with a good citrus burst, warming the throat on the swallow with a pithy but sweet finish. A lovely drop.

I'm also tempted by the "skelped boti" which includes chambord and fresh ginger juice, but will save that to try another day. Here's what the Bruichladdich team think of the gin.

So thank you to the Bruichladdich team for opening my eyes to a whole new spirit! Look out for it in the shops and on the bars as i recommend trying it.