The English Experiment

Posted on by

On dropping off some empty firkins at Hardknott brewery just before the Jubilee weekend I was lucky enough to be handed a bottle of a new beer by @HardknottSarah – it was “The English Experiment“. This beer is the result of the rumoured collaboration between @HardknottDave & @FullersJohn – do go and read Dave’s blog post about it, and definitely watch the accompanying video!

We intended to give it a try during the long weekend, which we spent tramping over hills in Galloway Forest Park. So I lugged this bottle of beer up into the hills with me – so an idea was born, how about I take a photo of the beer on top of every Donald we ascend? Yeah, it’s a bit daft – but it’s the sort of thing I do for a laugh.

It also seems quite appropriate that we started out near Bruce’s Stone above Loch Trool – the site of a battle where Robert the Bruce humiliated the English (so I read). So here’s a bit of England coming back conquer in these hills… well, sort of!

So, here is The English Experiment – Scottish hill walking beer – a photo log.

Day 1: The Dungeon Range

The English Experiment atop Craignaw - 645m - a Graham & Donald

The English Experiment atop Dungeon Hill - 620m - a Donald - next destination, Mullwharchar, in the background

The English Experiment atop Mullwharchar - 692m - a Graham & Donald - in the distance: Loch Macaterick to the left, Loch Doon to the right

 Day 2: Range of the Awful Hand

The English Experiment atop Merrick, the highest Donald of them all - 843m - a Corbet & Donald

The English Experiment atop Kirriereoch Hill - 786m - a Donald

The English Experiment atop Tarfessock - 697m - a Donald

The English Experiment atop Shalloch on Minnoch - 768m - a Corbett & Donald - this is not the actual top, that's the cairn at 775m but I didn't realise at the time and didn't take a photo there!

 Day 3: Rhinns of The Kells

The English Experiment atop Coran of Portmark - 623m - a Donald

The English Experiment atop Meaul - 695m - a Donald

The English Experiment atop Carlin's Cairn - 807m - a Donald - looking SW towards Merrick with Loch Enoch below

The English Experiment atop Corserine - 814m - a Corbett & Donald - our last hill of the trip

So, that’s 11 Donalds! Not bad for a weekend – and they include 3 Corbetts and 2 Grahams as well. A few more hills bagged… no, I’m not a hill bagger really, but I feel I could become one. We walked around 70km in 2.5 days, punctuated by a couple of wild camps. One idyllic, beside Loch Enoch – though it was a windy night. The other midge infested (thankfully we have a good tent) near Loch Doon.

The Beer

Well, we never did get around to drinking it during the walk. It never really felt quite the right time. However, when we got home we made a point of sitting down and letting our taste-buds become acquainted with this beer. I believes it achieves its aim, it is an essentially English rendition of what most of us now think of as an “IPA” (after the US style) and the new hops do seem to add a twist of the different. (Recall I’m an Aussie, and here I am talking about “essentially English” – hah, YMMV!) Great to see work being done on developing local hop varieties, in this case by Charles Faram. I think these hops must come through with earthier and more dark-fruit tones, more alike to traditional English hop flavours – with less of the zing, citrus, and tropical fruit of new world hops. I look forward to seeing more of Landlady, Bishop, Archer, and Baron and can’t wait for someone to present them in single-hop format.  All in all, The English Experiment was a highly enjoyable beer, of a style akin to the Durham Brewery Bombay 106 IPA, rather than the likes of BrewDog’s Punk – we’ll be ordering ourselves a few more bottles from the Hardknott shop shortly!

What you want to do is get yourself to the official release at The Rake in London early in the evening of Monday June 11th – The English Experiment will be available in cask! Hope I can get there myself! (Might be a bit difficult alas.) Failing that, order some of this great beer online.

We did get to drink one beer during our walk at least – the other bottle I was lugging with me was a Hardknott Code Black. Another excellent beer. Now, if only Hardknott put some of their beer in cans so once the beer is drunk the remaining pack weight is much less!

Camp near Loch Doon - real fire, necessary to keep the midges at bay!

Windsor & Eton “Treetops” Diamond Jubilee Stew

Posted on by

[tl;dr: skip the windbag intro and shoot straight to the recipe!]

Ingredients

The 2012 Hitchin Beer Festival is now firmly in the past. At the end of the festival there was some beer left and us volunteers got to take what we can home with us. Cask ale doesn’t keep too well, so there isn’t a lot of point taking more home than you’re likely to drink in the next 24 hours. However, beer can be for cooking as well as for drinking. When the festival shut its doors there was still quite a lot of the Windsor & Eton “Treetops” stout left at the end – despite it being our “beer of the festival” winner. Windsor & Eton suffer, but perhaps profit in this case, from being at the end of the alphabet and thus at the back of the hall. Treetops was brewed to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and is named after the African estate she was at when she inherited the throne. It is described by the brewery as “a rich, intense Africa Export Stout brewed from a blend of British and African ingredients, including coffee and vanilla” – my mouth waters as I copy-&-paste those words! All in all it was a very worthy festival winner, though my personal vote was cast for the same brewery’s “Conqueror” which has a little more “hop” in its step.

A good rich stout generally makes for a good stew and with this in mind I trundled home after closing up at the festival with 6 pints of Treetops in my bag (plus 2 pints of “Conqueror” and 2 of “Windsor Knot” – my own mini @webrew festival!).

I’ve used beef shin as my stewing meat. In my opinion it cannot be beaten for this sort of long-slow cooking. It doesn’t need any fancy trimming, just take the shin as it comes from the butcher and quarter of halve each round – purely for convenience in handling. Once it is cooked it should be fall-apart tender. If you can’t get shin then any cut sold as stewing steak will do.

Browning Shin

The practice of flour-coating meat is a little controversial. Older books refer to it along the lines of “sealing” the meat to keep the “juices in”, which doesn’t make a lot of sense as a bit of flour isn’t going to achieve this. Let alone the fact that we want the juices to flow freely between the meat and the stew stock. That said, I do think it may have a role to play in both caramelising the meat and in thickening the stock – of course you can add it any old way for the latter. If for no other reason, then I’ll do it because it is kind of fun and feels “right”. Skip the flour if you prefer! On with the show…

Ready for stewing…

Ingredients

The meat:

  • 2kg – beef shin (roughly quartered)
  • 1 cup – plain flour
  • 1.5tsp – ground ginger
  • 1.5tsp – ground coriander seed

The stewing liquor:

  • 90g – tomato purée,
  • 2 – medium brown onions (diced) – about 425g
  • 1 – whole garlic (sliced) – at least 40g
  • 20g – fresh ginger (peeled & matchsticked)
  • 3 pints – Windsor & Eton Treetops Stout (or any rich stout)

To extend with vegetables add:

  • 3 or 4 – parsnips (peeled & cubed) – about 590g
  • 3 or 4 – beetroot (peeled & cubed) – about 450g
  • 1 pint – same stout as above

Method

Shin – browned!

Thoroughly mix the spices into the plain flour. Use a fine sieve to sprinkle this over the beef pieces until they’re entirely coated. (Use of a sieve here means excess seasoned flour can be kept for another time.) Heat 2tbsp of vegetable oil in large casserole, I use a 28cm Chasseur – a sound investment I made 8 years ago. Heat the oil until it begins to smoke and then place meat in to brown. Do this in 3 or 4 batches, the chunks of meat should sit in the bottom of the casserole without touching each other. This ensures moisture can escape and you caramelize the meat rather than simmer it in its own juices. Coat the base of the pan with another tbsp of oil between each batch – don’t be afraid of smoke. (The smoke detector in my kitchen never has a battery in it!)

Now is probably a good time to pre-heat your oven to 150°C (300°F).

Cartouched!

With the browned beef shin placed to one side add another tablespoon of oil to the pot and toss in the chopped onion. Sweat and brown the onion over high heat, using a wooden spoon or, better yet, a flat-edged wooden spatula to scrape the browned goodness from the base of the pan with the sweating onions. Do this for about 5 minutes and then add a cup of the stout and make sure the last flavoursome crusty bits are worked off the bottom of the pan. Now add the tomato paste, garlic, ginger, and stout. Bring the stew to simmering point, place a cartouche of baking paper over the stew, then the lid on the casserole. Into the oven! (The “cartouche” is simply a piece of baking paper cut to exactly fit the casserole – to make this I put the casserole lid on a square of baking paper and run a knife around it. This paper is placed directly on the stew, enticing out most air bubbles. The theory is that this means the liquid evaporates more slowly and any meat near the surface stays moist. However, IANAC!)

Stew!

Check the stew after 4 hours. The meat should be tender but not disintegrating, the liquor should be thick, deep brown, glistening, velvety, sumptuously rich… do taste some with a spoon, carefully. At this stage you have an excellent stew and could stop right here! Barring any desired salt or sugar adjustments, it should need some salt really. However, if you want to extend the stew with the addition of the vegetables continue…

Stew + Vegetables

I’ve chosen beetroot and parsnip, which release a lot of sweetness. However, about 1 kg of any typical stewing vegetables will do. Carefully, so as to not break up the meat too much, stir the raw vegetable cubes through the stew and add the extra pint of stout. Bring to simmering point on the stove again and then pop back into the oven for an hour at most, lest you over-cook the vegetables. Adding the vegetables at this late stage ensures that don’t turn to mush and retain a bit of “bite”.

There you have it. A great stew that will be even better after a day sitting in the fridge.

Enjoy with a glass of stout and a refreshing green salad with a sharp vinaigrette dressing. I didn’t have a Windsor & Eton Treetops handy alas, but the BrewDog Imperial Russian suited. Dig in!

Treetops Stew

For more helpful guiding photos for this recipe click here for the full Treetops Stew gallery.

Stop The Beer Duty Escalator – Hobgoblin Petition & EDM 2785

Posted on by

I’ve got myself caught up in the seemingly futile battle against the UK Government’s continuing attack on humble beer. The attack seems to be based on the premise that making beer more expensive (i.e. adding more tax to it) will help cover the cost of the ills it does to society. In my mind there are many things wrong with this argument, they have been well addressed by Pete Brown (and here) and CAMRA has some input too, so I won’t repeat here. Today is budget day I’m pretty certain nobody interested in this issue was waiting with baited breath for Osborne to get to the the the matter of beer duty, as expected beer duty will escalate yet again. This is no reason to stop trying – there is always the next budget.

I’ve signed the “Stop The Beer Duty Escalator” petition and emailed my MP asking him to support EDM 2785. Maybe you should too? I’ve even bought some of the Hobgoblin posters promoting the campaign, which I’m distributing to some of my local pubs.

I personalised my email to my MP, Peter Lilley, this is what I wrote:

Dear Mr Lilley,

I’m a local CAMRA member, beer drinker, and regular at a few of my local pubs in Hitchin. Some of the pubs in my area are having trouble, some have shut down, they’re squeezed from so many directions that life is becoming more difficult for landlords by the day.

I do not – nor have the time to – understand all the details about the beer duty escalator or the EDM in question, but I trust CAMRA and the wider beer industry’s advice that supporting EDM 2785 is a good thing for our pubs.

As an Australian living in the UK (I’ve been resident here for about 6 years) I feel compelled to support the British “local”. It is something unique and worth taking care of – a community hub, a place to meet people (it is in local pubs that my OH and I have met most of our non-work community of friends), even a place for business & professional networking. Good pub goers can do their best to help their locals by using them – “use it or loose it” has become a common mantra, but people can only sensibly drink so much and really are being driven out by the cost of a pint.

I’m a full time employee in a professional industry so the cost doesn’t bother me too much personally, but most of the locals keeping my favourite local pub alive are labourers, van drivers, etc, or retired – many of them are earning less now than they were 4 years ago. The price of a pint in my local has gone up 60p since we’ve been in town (less than 4 years) and some people really have stopped drinking in the pub as a result. This doesn’t mean they have stopped drinking, in fact I met one of them the other day drinking a can of lager in a nearby park. He wasn’t drunk, it was his first drink of the evening, he had picked it up for 60p from the supermarket to get one in before going to the pub because he could only afford a couple of pints at pub prices (£3.20+). EDM 2785 won’t reduce this price, but it might mean that folk like this will keep drinking a couple of pints with their friends at their local rather than resorting to supermarket beer (or worse) at home – or in the park for that matter. This helps keep the local alive so that both they and I can continue to enjoy the facility it provides.

All the best,
Yvan Seth

The story about the bloke in the park is not made up – this sort of thing is REALLY HAPPENING. The bloke in question, who I don’t know all that well, is a pretty sensible drinker from what I’ve seen. He has a few pints while playing his darts then heads home. Though I haven’t seen much of him lately, a loss for the pub in my opinion.

The day after I sent the message above I received this response

Thank you for contacting Peter Lilley. Mr Lilley understands your concerns on this mattter and has already taken up the issues raised on behalf of other consstituents of his and will be in touch as soon as he receives a reply. However, the Deputy Speaker has warned Members that Early Day Motions are in danger of losing all credibility as they are being signed indiscriminately. Mr Lilley, therefore, makes it his practice to sign only those which relate specifically to his constituency or with which he has been personally involved.

Regards

Fiona Parker
Constituency Secretary to the Rt Hon Peter Lilley MP

This is pretty much exactly the same as what I saw published as a response from Peter Lilley [pdf – page 2] in our local CAMRA newsletter around budget time last year. (Except in my case they appear to have not bothered with the spell checker.) I only found the Pints of View reference because I did a search about the issue of EDMs loosing their credibility, our local newsletter was the top link. I’m wondering how credible the issue of them loosing their credibility is? Are they actually credible anyway? I don’t know… I’m new to UK politics.

I worry that Peter probably doesn’t really care much about pushing anything but his own personal agenda. He holds an extremely safe seat and from what I’ve seen barely bothers to campaign at election time – I’m not sure how these things work, but it looks like the seat was specifically created for him. Anyway, Peter Lilley’s recent EDM activity is mostly concerned with euthanasia and immigration/border control – though I’m glad to see signed the Fish Fight EDM (probably just for the PR I suppose). None of this is  specifically related to his constituency, so making that statement in the boilerplate response seems pointless.

In turn, I’ve responded to the response with this:

Hi Fiona,

Thankyou for your reply.

I would put it forward that the plight of the British pub is of importance to all constituencies. All communities stand to loose out from the ongoing closure of public houses. Especially in the countryside and our smaller villages, where residents stand to loose their only social meeting places.

Kind Regards,
Yvan Seth

I’m interested to see if I get any further response that isn’t a boilerplate standard reply.

In the meantime, please sign the petition (it takes near to no time) and email your MP if they haven’t already signed the EDM and you’re feeling eager (also next to no time if you use the CAMRA standard email, but I do recommend adding a personal note of your own).

I’m left with one lingering concern though: if the Save-the-NHS folk failed, then what hope do we have?

 

Time, ticking away…

Posted on by

Since the “great hard drive fire of 2011” my blogging has been a bit slow… well, non-existent!

Mostly this is down to a lack of time. Anyway, I hope to get back into it this year. The little writing time I have at the moment goes towards CAMRA. Maintenance and creating content for the North Hertfordshire CAMRA website and Hertfordshire “Pints of View” newsletter have taken priority! Most recently this includes a huge amount of effort getting in the run-up to the Hitchin Beer Festival – check out our maps! They’re fun. Also check out our time-lapse videos of the festival. More fun! As fun as it all is it is also a heck of a lot of work hours I (and Kat too) have put into CAMRA in the last year and I’m wondering if I should focus a bit more on my own stuff.

My CAMRA branch has its AGM in a couple of weeks and I plan to back away from some of my commitment here (Pints of View) and perhaps this will let me write some more here instead. We’ll see!