Hello Everyone!
Welcome to 2013!! Well, I guess it is a little late for that having only just got my act together to write something up nearly a fortnight into the year, but you can’t blame me too much. It has been rather a busy time of late with the Laboratory playing host to the families for Christmas Dinner and then a leaving party for a friend on NYE, but that doesn’t mean the experiments and observations have stopped at any point! As alluded to in some of my (less than occasional) twitter updates, there is much on the horizon this year to get gastric juices flowing and to feel rather excited about in the first few months of this year at least… I have no doubt there will be much more in the pipeline later on too. First up is the CAMRA Winter Ales Fesitval which is taking place again over in Manchester [http://nwaf.org.uk/] which we attended last year and were pleasantly surprised at some very good beers on offer. Full details can be seen here: [http://electrokemistcuisine.weebly.com/1/post/2012/02/threshold-festival-gets-its-own-beer-plus-the-camra-winter-ales-festival-in-manchester.html]. However, due to the seasonality and hop availability, you must go expecting the more Chestnut and Amber Ales to take the place of paler counterparts. Bear in mind that there are some exceptional Stouts and Porter Ales also available, not least last years superb offering from Coniston Brewery in the form of an oatmeal stout. The festival is running from the 23rd to the 26th January at the Sheridan Suite in Manchester, Saturday and Friday tickets are £5 for the session and you will be charged another £1 at least for a programme! Also described in the article linked above was the Threshold Festival [http://www.thresholdfestival.co.uk/], which is back this year with a vengeance. Holding the festival in March will mean slightly more clement temperatures than those experienced last year, but the Camp and Furnace will be ready for more great music, art and Threshold’s own delicious beer from the Liverpool Craft boys. More details on the festival will be given in another article at some point soon!! The Laboratory is considering some events of its own this year, in lieu of the successful Wheat Beer tasting that was run during the summer of 2012, there is going to be an introductory wine tasting conducted at some point (explaining the very basics of wine, vintage, grapes etc). Stay tuned for details on this; the pricing is likely to be in the region of £12 per head (with all wine and probably some cheese and nibbles included!) and places are going to be limited based on the venue we have available. There may be follow up tastings based on the success of this event with some more experienced speakers, so I will keep an eye on things and keep you all informed! The second event that the Laboratory is hatching is going to be a pub crawl, which was conducted last year to great success across the city centre, picking people up along the way and finishing with a curry at East Z East at the King’s Dock on the waterfront. The event will be completely free aside from providing your costs for booze and food should you feel the need, but at some point soon, a map will be published showing the likely establishments that the Kemistry will be taking place. Full details will be given soon. A return visit to the Liverpool Organic Brewery has been booked for the 2nd February, a full review of this can be seen here: [http://electrokemistcuisine.weebly.com/1/post/2012/11/liverpool-organic-brewery-tour-november-2012.html]. I shall report back if anything has changed, but suffice to say, the event was great and there are two extra dates planned in March (Saturday 23rd) and in May (Saturday 18th). You can book onto the Brewery Tour events here: [http://lobtours.eventbrite.co.uk/] Finally, I shall leave you with a brief write up of a restaurant we attended at the back end of last year for a break at the Manchester Christmas Markets, as always, no marks out of five or ten, but our best descriptive offering should suffice! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ElectroKemistry Review: Phetpailin – 46 George Street, Manchester Disclaimer: This review was conducted in December, so it is possible the menu and prices have changed. After picking up a couple of decent bottles of vino from Hanging Ditch (located near the cathedral), we headed to this place on the recommendation of a friend who was due to attend the following week for a Christmas meal with work colleagues. All in all, we were not disappointed with the food on offer and the experience was overall, a very pleasant and positive one. The ambience of the restaurant is pleasant enough, with the usual Thai paraphernalia placed around the restaurant along with various greenery, although this does make it feel a touch more claustrophobic with the premises being relatively long and narrow as it is. With the restaurant busy or 'ticking over', you can still hold a conversation without too much raising of voices, again, another positive. The food was very very good, all presented very well and cooked perfectly. The dishes our party ordered ranged from sharing platters of spring rolls, bite size entrees and dips to excellent Peanut (penang) Curries with King Prawns and the 'Weeping Tiger' (sirloin steak sliced and cooked with spices, beanspouts and other vegetables). All the food was delivered in a timely manner and with a friendly smile. We had expected some fuss over the wine we brought, but a cooler was brought without fuss for both bottles. I would definitely recommend this place for a visit, the pricing was reasonable for all dishes, plus being able to bring your own drinks means it works out a lot cheaper to pair beer or wine with your meal should you want to give the soft drinks a miss. One minor quibble was that over the charge we incurred for asking to take some leftovers (of which there were a reasonable amount - portion sizes are fairly generous!) away. A surcharge of 50p per plastic tub was added to our bill, which while no great shakes in the grand scheme of things, is a pretty poor touch considering the restaurant had scored highly for everything else in our evening. I would suggest this is scrapped in the interests of their reputation. Short of ideas? You could do far worse than giving this place a visit, just remember to bring your own drinks! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Well, that was rather a jam packed episode this time around! I hope you stayed focused and are rubbing your grubby palms with glee at the prospect of the forthcoming events in Liverpool? I shall endeavour to keep you all abreast of the events as details reveal themselves to us at the Laboratory and bid you farewell for a couple of weeks until more information hits us! Adios mi todos! Pedro.
0 Comments
I love beer. To an unhealthy extreme some might say. They’re probably right, but I don’t really care, it really is something to get genuinely excited and passionate about… plus it’s something that the British are exceptionally good at. The ales we produce in these fair isles are pretty much second to none in some categories. There has been a surge in the popularity of microbrewery wares in the last few years, this is probably due to a combination of factors including the skills of the brewers pouring their hearts, souls and bank account contents into their projects and sharing the fruit of the labour with the rest of us. Another big factor believe it or not, has to be attributed to former Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. Mr Brown introduced a tax break for small breweries in the UK in 2002, the number of microbreweries has proliferated to double the number that year (http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2079988/CITY-FOCUS-Raising-glass-micro-breweries.html). Sadly, the number of pubs has been declining due to the harsher financial times we are all experiencing, but the quality certainly has been going in the opposite direction in some towns and cities. This is due to better food on offer, but more importantly a better range of beers with significantly better quality also present at these establishments. A recent visit across to Brasenose Street in Liverpool to pick up some goodies for Christmas (2 crates of very excellent brews) from the Liverpool Organic Brewery (http://www.liverpoolorganicbrewery.com/) warmed the cockles of my heart. The brewery, who are currently preparing for the Waterloo Beer Festival (http://www.waterloobeerfestival.com/) and increasing the range of the beers they have developed over the last 3 and a half years (since September 2008), has gone from strength to strength and also had a major presence at the National Winter Ales Festival over in Manchester. The National Winter Ales festival was held over 4 days just outside the city centre in Manchester, so after a train from Lime Street to Piccadilly and a short walk via meeting some friends, we built up a bit of a thirst whilst wondering what beers would be represented. I was slightly dubious about what would be on offer, as traditionally the beers at this time of year tend to be darker and heavier… more Stouts and Old Ales, accompanied by treacle, toffee, autumn leaves and heavily malted flavours. I was pleased at some of the easier-going drinks that were available at the event, but also managed a fair share of some rather less pleasant offerings. The atmosphere at the event was pretty good, there were a few seasoned veterans (you always get the obligatory ‘Stetson hat with goggles strapped to the top’ type along with several guys who look like they’re there for a Gandalf look a like convention) a few less eccentric people and surprisingly a lot more girls aged 20-30 which is something of a shift in the demographic over the last few years for Real Ale/Bitter drinkers. This speaks at length to how the image has changed for these types of beverages down the years. With regards the drinks that were tried at the Festival, the 1/3rd measure of beer available was immensely helpful for those who wanted to broaden the range of drinks they were able to partake in; especially useful since there were a number of barley wines available (typically higher alcohol contents and much stronger all round). I have a full list of tasting notes and ticks next to all the beers tried at the Festival, but suffice to say the results from the CAMRA judging panel did pick out what I regarded as one the best of what was available by the Saturday session for an award. The full results can be found here: (http://www.camra.org.uk/article.php?group_id=4140). The two favourites on display for our group were both Stouts and significantly more delicious than Guinness (in our opinion). First up, related to the prose above, Liverpool Organic Brewery’s Russian Stout was a big favourite in the absence of Kitty Wilkinson’s Chocolate and Vanilla Stout. The smooth finish on the smoky velvet texture belies the strength and although I was no stranger to the stuff, our mancunian counterparts were suitably impressed with it. The second stout was that produced by the excellent Coniston Brewery from Coniston in Cumbria. Their Special Oatmeal Stout was exceptional, even better than the excellent and very interesting No.9 Barley Wine (which is very strong, but has unusual cognac and marzipan qualities) which won the Gold Award in the Barley Wine category. The tasting notes described the Stout thus “Oats used in the grist give body and smoothness, enhancing the roasted barley, giving it complex flavours reminiscent of dark chocolate and coffee”. The dark chocolate note was spot on, as was the description of its smoothness. There was a very rich and satisfying undertone to the Oatmeal Stout too, meaning it stood out above most of the other beers that were tried in our group. Moorhouse’s Pendle Witches’ Brew was also on, which is simply one of the finest ales I have ever had, on its day of course. But I have to shine the spotlight elsewhere now and again! Unfortunately, I have to caveat that this was not a scientific assessment of the beers available due to many of them simply having been demolished in the previous 3 days of drinking. This is something of a bugbear for me, but running out of a beer at a festival, especially ale that does sound incredible only for you queue for 10 minutes to be told it is all gone. The logistics of a festival are difficult at the best of times and an establishment simply can’t store as much ale to double up on what they provide, as such I know I can’t complain too much but maybe one day something will be done to ensure exciting sounding offerings such as the Lytham Gold will still be on for the final day of a festival! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Threshold Festival and Liverpool Craft Brewery Linking into the beer theme, some of you may have noticed there is a recent addition to the current crop of Merseyside brewers in the Liverpool Craft Brewing Company (http://www.liverpoolcraftbeer.com/). They have recently created two new brews to add to the Liverpool Icon, Icon Dark, Viking and Hop Beast in their range. Most recently, Tane Mahuta has been pushed as a result of tinkering with the Hop Beast recipe. Intriguingly, there has been an ale which the guys have specifically brewed to link into the Threshold Festival which takes place in Liverpool (http://www.thresholdfestival.co.uk/). The Threshold Festival began life as a collaboration between the Contemporary Urban Centre and Under the Influence in order to bring opportunities to push music, live performance, theatre and visual arts in a single setting. It is soon to have unshackled itself and pushed to be held at a multitude of venues to champion the grassroots artists that it prides itself on providing a platform to. The details of the venues and shows on offer are best sought out on the website for the Festival or by contacting the Festival organisers. Following the success on a maiden voyage and going into its second year, the festival has won many friends and some critical (including journalistic) acclaim in many quarters. Kaya Herstad Carney, ------ said of the collaboration with the Craft Brewing Company: “When Paul approached us and asked if we would be interested in having Liverpool Craft Beers making a special Threshold beer, the answer was indeed easy - Of course! Being able to be part of the process, even from the measuring and mixing to separating vanilla pods just made it perfect for us; DIY with a root in knowing your craft and a big measure of passion: Ingredients.” Rachel Dyer, a Festival Coordinator for the Threshold Festival also commented that: “It was great meeting Liverpool Craft Beer, I've never tasted beer let alone been to a brewery! Paul and Terry introduced us to the whole process and got involved with weighing ingredients, mixing and starting the brewing of the Threshold beer. The beer grain was so tasty I carried on nibbling at my sample! It's clear how passionate they are, and being self-taught independent and innovative, they're exactly the kind of people we want to call friends and work together for Threshold Festival 2012. Can't wait to see the final result!” The festival takes place between the 10th and 12th February 2012 and tickets for many of the events are available now. Heading along, spreading the Valentine’s love and having a look and trying a delicious pint of collaborative ale would be the only sensible thing to be doing! Links: Threshold Festival 2012 (10th til 12th February 2012, Baltic Triangle, Liverpool). Bigger Better and Baltic Bound! Facebook for Threshold Festival: https://www.facebook.com/undertheinfluencenight?sk=app_134506053246185#!/undertheinfluencenight?sk=info Follow the festival on Twitter (@thresholdfest), Tumblr (Thresholdfest) and Flickr (Thresholdfest). Buy advanced tickets through Skiddle. Follow Liverpool Craft Brewing on Twitter (@Craft_Beers) Follow Liverpool Organic Brewery on Twitter (@LivOrganicBrew) All the pictures for the Threshold Beer visit were kindly supplied by the organisers, therefore, it's their copyright too. ;o)
Catch you all next time dudes! Pedro x |
Archives
April 2022
Archives
April 2022
Click ^ the RSS Feed to follow me
Categories
All
|