King’s Arms – Bury St Edmunds

When I was working in Bury St Edmunds the King’s Arms was our favourite spot to head to for lunch and a few pints on a Friday.

It is a reasonably quiet pub owing to it’s location just off of the main shopping area in town and as such has a nice relaxing vibe that is perfect for winding down after work or chilling out of a weekend.

The pub itself is of a reasonable size and is pretty much what you would expect for a traditional pub in a bustling market town; there is one main bar area with a good amount of seating, a smaller dining area off to one side and a lovely little beer garden which magically seems to always be in full sun….

Food was always good with the usual pub grub that one would expect done to a high standard and served with commendable speed, always a plus when you are on a “working lunch”!

The selection of beers is, or was as the case may now be, excellent. Usual suspects from Greene King, Ruddles and Morland accompanied by a nice choice of two or three guest beers on tap.

All things considered the King’s Arms is well worth a visit if you are passing through this charming little market town.

The King’s Arms, 23 Brentgovel Street, Bury St Edmunds Suffolk

http://gkpubs.co.uk/pubs-in-brentgovel/kingsarms-pub/

BrewDog AB06 Goes Live

Some of you might have been keeping pace with BrewDog’s Abstrakt range of beers, click here to find out more if you haven’t.

Well I have finally managed to get my hands on my first bottle of AB 06 and will be drinking it and reviewing it at the first available oppurtunity, until that time here is what the BrewDogs themsevles have to say about it.

 

“The latest version of our Abstrakt Series is now for sale.  You can get your paws on some here: http://www.brewdog.com/product/abstrakt-ab06 and from the abstrakt website here http://www.abstrakt.com/product/ab06 

 AB06 is a 11.5% Imperial Black IPA which has been triple dry hopped.  This beer is savage; boasting more bitterness and more hops than any BrewDog creation to date, combining loads of awesome malts and monumental amounts of our favourite hops.

 As always with Abstrakt, each bottle is individually numbered and very well suited to ageing. Drink one now and then age one for a couple of years and see how it develops. Cellar it up.”

 

Man Walks into a Pub: A sociable History of Beer by Pete Brown

Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer by Pete Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read quite a few books on beer in the past and have found that typically they all have one thing in common: they are either monumentally dull or a total farce.

Weighty volumes that document the complete history of a particular brewery right down to what tiny changes were made to a particular recipe and when are all very well and good. No doubt they are of great interest to men with big bushy beards who wear cable knit jumpers and who carry note books around with them but they are a bit too serious and stodgy for the more casual reader.

On the flip side of the coin I don’t want to read a book written by some tracksuit wearing chav who just wants to brag about how he can drink 20 pints of Stella, fight some rival football fans and still drive his barely legal Vauxhall Nova that should have been scrapped before he was born.

That is where Pete Brown has got things bang on the money, he treats the subject seriously and manages to convey a lot of useful information whilst keeping things light and smattered with humour throughout.

By choosing to focus more on the social history of beer brewing and drinking he avoids bogging the reader down with some of the useless minutiae that a lot of the more serious beer books pride themselves on.

I am also very impressed with the way that Pete Brown handles the often tricky real ale vs. lager issue. A lot of writers fall heavily on one side of the fence or the other and as such we often hear lager being decried as tasteless or a children’s drink or ale being slagged off for being a drink for fat, bearded weirdos who need to get out more.

Whilst I have my own views on the matter I realise no one really wants to hear them, and in return I don’t really want to hear their views rehashed over and over again either.
So it was certainly pleasant to come across an author who wasn’t using their book as a soapbox to take pot shots at their target of choice.

If you have anything more than a passing interest in beer and have ever considered reading more about beer and drinking then you could do an awful lot worse than to take this book as a starting point.

View all my reviews

Norfolk Nog homebrew

The time has come for me to start my next batch of homebew.

I have decided to go with a kit of one of my favourite beers; Woodfordes Norfolk Nog.

As I have mentioned in a previous post there is an inherent level of risk involved in this as up until I have only ever made generic beers, as such whilst there might be an overall style that you can judge it against there isn’t any particular named beer that you are expecting to have a clone of.

That said Woodfordes are one of the leaders in terms of home brew kits and having tried homebrewed Woodfordes Wherry before I can say that it was nigh on perfect.

Norfolk Nog is a 3kg all malt kit as such there are no additional sugars that need to be added, this is also a first for me as previously all my beers have had at least some sugars added.

Wish me luck

An update on my homebrewing project

 As regular readers will know my most recent homebrew was a traditional IPA, well it now a little over a month since it was bottled so I decided to give it a try and see how it is getting on.

 There is a fair amount of carbonation, certainly enough for my tastes. The beer pours to a very pleasant light amber with a decent sized head that lasts well throughout drinking with a fair bit of lacing.

 There is a decent aroma developing with hops, a slight hint of citrus and a rich maltiness being the predominant notes.

 For me the look and smell of my homebrew are important but the key is very definately how it tastes. Well I can officially say that this IPA is a winner as far as I’m concerned.

There is a good level of bitterness to the beer offset with a nice caramel like sweetness from the malt, I was really pleased as a lto of homebrews that I have sampled before have had an almost cider like quality to them coupled with a rather unpleasant sweetness.

If I compare this IPA with a commercially brewed version I would certainly take this over something like the ubiquitous Greene King offering and not only because this is tipping the scales at a little over 6% (6.2% as close as I can measure it)

I can’t wait until my next scheduled tasting at the end of November

Hobgoblin – the unofficial beer of Halloween

I wrote a review about Wychwood Hobgoblin a little while ago now (you can view it here if you want)

Since then I have had a few bottles of it here and there and have enjoyed it as always. The other day though I noticed something about the bottle…

There is a pumpkinesque orange label and a tagline proclaiming that Hobgoblin is the unofficial beer of Halloween.

Can’t say there is any better choice personally!

The most important change is on the little label up on the neck; Wychwood are running a Halloween competition that could net you a cool £5000!

Click here to enter and enjoy the Halloween fun.

 

Sloe Gin

I love sloe gin.

That isn’t really a trendy statement for a 20 something man to say but I say two fingers to what is and isn’t trendy, sloe gin is great.

To me it looks and tastes like Christmas in a bottle, not that it can’t be enjoyed at other times of the year as well.

For those who don’t know the sloe is the fruit of the Blackthorn, a lovely spikey hedgerow tree that grows like a weed. Sloes are roughly marble sized bluey/purple berries that are at their very best in October/November ideally just after the first frost.

Seeing as Blackthorn is so prolific in hedgerows throughout the UK and Ireland you can very easily bag yourself several pounds of delicious, sweet and most importantly free berries whilst still leaving ample for birds and fellow humans.

To give an example at the beginning of October 2009 we picked 8 3/4 lb of sloes from the hedges and bushes at the side of the River Lea between Springfield Marina and Stonebridge Lock.

As well as being one of my favourite tipples; Sloe gin also makes a great Christmas present, especially in the present economic climate.

Here is how to make your own Sloe Gin:

Buy several litres of cheap gin, we are talking the sort of stuff that they sell as own brand in Tesco or Asda.

You could waste your money buying the very best gin possible but the sloes will be completely changing the flavour of it and you really don’t need to

You will also need to get your hands on some extra 1 litre spirits bottles or ideally a nice glass demijohn.

First things first wash your sloes and get rid of any stray leaves and twigs that might be caught up with them, not to mention any unwanted visitors such as bugs or flies.

In order to get the best results out of your sloes you need to release the juices that are locked inside them. You can do this a number of ways, you can prick them with a pin/fork, gently squish them between your fingers or pop them in the freezer until they split.

Once you have prepared your sloes you are ready to begin, empty the gin from one bottle to the other/the demijohn so that each bottle is only half full.

Fill each bottle with sloes until the gin has been displaced enough that it is nearly at the top of the bottle.

Using a funnel add approx 150g of white sugar to each bottle.

*If you are using a demijohn then adjust the amount of sugar accordingly, for example if there are 2 litres of gin in the demijohn you will need 4 times the amount of sugar(600g)*

Once all of the bottles are filled and ready pop the caps on them and tip them upside down, be very careful if you are trying to do this with a demijohn.

Each bottle will need to be upended in this fashion once a day for the first week, after this point you will need to upend each bottle once a week for the next two months.

After two months your sloe gin will be ready to drink, I would advise though that you leave your sloe gin for longer. The gin that I will be drinking this year was made last year, the difference that the extra ten months or so makes is very noticeable.

Beer anyone?

A fair bit to report from my ongoing home brewing saga so far.

My second batch of beer has now been bottled, well about 6 days ago! So I am eagerly awaiting my first little taste in order to see how my IPA has turned out and whether playing with the choice of fermentables has backfired or not.

Meanwhile my lager is now into it’s third week since being bottled. My brother and I cracked a bottle open on Saturday evening and I think we were both quite pleasantly surprised at how it is coming along.

There is plenty of carbonation in the beer and it is developing a really good looking head, it is a little cloudy but that that will hopefully clear further and should definitely start to lessen when the lager is chucked in the fridge.

The taste is really rather good if I do say so myself, there is a nice bitterness to the beer and a pleasant slight sweetness coupled with a nice hint of maltiness. It isn’t dissimilar to something like an Erdinger in actual fact.

I will be honest enough to say that it has turned out better than I had hoped.

I think somewhere in the back of my mind I was fearing it would turn out to be like those brewbags that you used to be able to purchase at Boots, the ones that you just tipped water into and left on the back of the airing cupboard door for a month or so. As such the pleasant drinkable nature of the beer has bought a smile to my face

Week 1 taste test

My lager was bottled over a week ago now. It has spent this week liberally swaddled in coats and sweat shirts to ensure that it has stayed within it’s optimum temperature bracket of 21-24 degrees and it seems that I have succeeded

On getting home yesterday afternoon I decided to give it a quick taste test to see how things are faring one week on…. well the results are positive indeed.

The beer is reasonably fizzy (but not there yet) is keeping a decent head, has a reasonable amount of lacing on the glass and actually tastes good.

Not just like a half decent store bought lager but actually properly good!

Somehow by some miracle I was drinking lager that had a taste other then just being a really cold fizzy liquid

Now to leave it be for another week at room temperature before sticking half of it into the fridge and the rest under the floorboards.

Another beer :)

Having bottled my first ever homebrew last Sunday my fermenter was sitting looking empty and sad :’(

Luckily though this was just a temporary period of inactivity as my next batch of beer was only a day away.

The week before I had been sitting there contemplating the lager bubbling away in my fermenter and had thought to myself that if I was going to keep on track with my plan for all of my festive drinks to be of a homebrewed variety that I really needed to get cracking and minimise the downtime between brews.

So I ordered up a couple more kits and also another 40 odd bottles as there is no way all of the lager will be drunk by the time I need to bottle my next batch.

The choice of kits available is really quite large and I will readily admit that I did spend somewhere in the region of 4 hours trying to work out what I wanted to go with; in the end I settled on a Coopers Brewmaster IPA which I would be making using predominately spray malt instead of sugar and Woodfordes Norfolk Nog which is all malt and as such wont need any extra fermentables to be added at all.

I am taking a little bit of a risk with the Nog and I will tell you why; having lived fairly close to the Woodforde’s brewery when I was back home in the UK I have had the opportunity to try 95% of the beers that they have produced including of course Norfolk Nog.

Now on the one hand this is a good thing as I know how it should taste, on the other hand it is a bit of a problem as I know how it should taste… Whilst I’m sure that it will turn out to be very close to the original and be very drinkable I do worry that it is going to have a taste to it that doesn’t fit with how I know it should taste. Well nothing ventured nothing gained as they say!

The Coopers IPA is now in the fermenter and is bubbling away nicely at about 24 degrees in the end I added 500g of light spray malt and 300g of dextrose. I had been going to go with all spray malt but a few forums were listed as saying that this combination works out to be a more traditional tasting IPA.

It should hopefully be ready to bottle by Monday so I am keeping my fingers crossed that it turns out as well as people are suggesting it should.