New Belgium Brewery

Neither of us have ever been keen cyclists, but after two trips to New Belgium during our time in Fort Collins we might just be tempted to dust off and re-oil our bikes (currently decaying in the cellar).

On our first trip to the brewery we met with Spokes Model and long serving employee Bryan Simpson in the tap room over a generous pour of their flagship amber ale Fat Tire (5.2%) and he ran us through some of the history of Fort Collins' biggest craft brewery. Established in 1991 after a cycling trip to (Old) Belgium frequenting many of the beer bars and Brasseries the country has to offer, husband and wife team Jeff Lebesch and Kim Jordan aimed to emulate some the beers on their garage brew kit. And so New Belgium was born.

The original brew kit

As we travelled through the state of the art facility, one of the largest craft breweries in America, we were struck by the sensitivity for tradition in the brewery as well as the want to push forward and produce modern American beer, all against an ideology of environmental care and sustainability. From the original brew kit from humble home brew origins, to the highly polished stainless steel four vessel brew system with steam recollection, to the traditional oak vats used to produce their sour beer next door, to the ultra-modern lab with stir-plates and Erlenmeyer flasks of beer samples. This approach of modern brewing technology coupled with traditional European techniques allows New Belgium to produce one of the biggest ranges of quality beers of any brewery we've been to.

As the tour continued we headed into the foudre forest, an absolutely beautiful room with more than 64 10,000l repurposed wine vats used in the making of slow sour beer, intermingled with a selection of whisky casks from Denver distillery Leopold Brothers, and a climbing wall. All the foudres are filled with one of two different base beers lovingly named Oscar and Felix, the first a black lager and the other being a golden ale. As we stood chatting surrounded by wood we were offered a glass of La Folie (GABF 2001 Gold Medal), an utterly delectable Flanders Red style sour beer with a blend that has been acidifying for anywhere between one year to as much as three. The tartness is reminiscent of apples and peaches, with a light yet lingering oaken texture toward the end. One of the best beers we've ever drunk, and in the most perfect of settings to try it... the heady aroma of the room is the sort you can conjure up just from thinking about it.

The final section of our tour through what is affectionately referred to as the Thunderdome - a frankly enormous bottling line and relatively smaller canning line which took in all around 4 minutes to stroll across. The continuous rattling of glass and clunk of machines highlights the scale of New Belgium's output (as if 64 oak vats of beer weren't enough to do that), capable of 700 bottles a minute with only a hand-full of people operating it. Slick.

We finished up in back in the tap room with a glass of La Terroir, created with the aforementioned Felix as the base then dry hopped to add a layer of complexity, that buoys all the other layers of sour freshness. Another contender for lifetime favourite beer for us both, and impossible to pick which we loved more between La Terroir and La Folie. We brought a bottle of each home just to re-test this theory but still just concluded that both were astounding.

Us with Bryan and Chris from the New Belgium team!

We spent a good couple more hours in the taproom, working our way through the New Belgium core range along with specials including their collaboration with Ben & Jerry's - a 6.3% salted caramel brownie brown ale which was SO up Laura's street (and she got to to try the ice cream the following day too). We massively enjoyed chatting to all of the staff we met, every single one of whom was bursting with enthusiasm for the company they all feel truly a part of (which indeed they are, the company being 100% employee owned). Bryan also told us a story of how Neil Fallon from one of our favourite bands, Clutch, had a go on Bryan's guitar while the band were involved in creating a collaboration beer. Bryan might just be the coolest man we've ever met.

We had such a brilliant day that for Laura's birthday we decided to return, where we joined on the general tour. This followed the same format as the first but was slightly less in-depth but still relaxed and informative. This one included a go on the brewery's helter skelter!

There have recently been a number of rumours regarding the future of New Belgium and the likelihood of it being bought out. We asked Bryan on our first trip who vehemently denied that this was a possibility. Our tour guide on the second visit was a little more vague, which could suggest that it has been mentioned throughout the company but is still by no means a certain. But as the brewery is an employee owned company, it would be hoped that their votes and opinions would be taken into consideration before making a decision with potentially a huge impact on their future.

With a second site in Asheville, North Carolina, having opened earlier this month, it will surely be the case that New Belgium's reputation as a progressive and far-reaching brewery can only increase. Although the brewery prioritises the American market and hopes to sell in every state as a priority over growing export, we are hopeful that before too long we will start to see their beer on our shores!

Cheers,

J&L

DIPA Day

Double, or Imperial, IPAs are all the rage at the moment, with an array of big-hitting breweries all coming out with new releases recently. We had a few of the most highly regarded and eagerly anticipated brews lurking in the fridge, so decided to do a bit of a taste test. Here are our thoughts...

New Belgium - Rampant, 8.5%

Brought back direct from the brewery itself from our trip to the states,  Rampant roars with a chewy, resinous nature but hides its ABV well (probably a good thing as it's the lowest of our selection today...) - surprisingly easy to drink with a delicate floral blossom characteristic. The combination of Mosaic, Calypso, and Centennial hops provide masses of fruit and the malt backbone gives a sweetness which keeps the hop bitterness in check. A lasting bitter, piney finish rounds off what is a very well-balanced beer indeed.

Cloudwater - DIPA v3, 9%

We had this on keg on release day at the wonderful Small Bar in Bristol, where the main delicious concern was whether some wily devil had switched our beer for peach juice. In bottle, pleasingly, much the same is true... Fresh and oh so fruity, with a bite of bitterness that doesn't overpower the sheer peachiness of the brew. For this reason it's not in our opinion a massively true to style IPA (this isn't a criticism). The hops (Mosaic, Comet, Citra and Chinook) come together in such harmony that the effect isn't really a "hoppy" flavour, it's just JUICE, and like the Rampant before it the booziness is hidden by waves of flavour. By contrast the finish is a massive thwack of bitterness that keeps the tongue a-tingling for AN AGE. One of the most-hyped beers of the year so far and we reckon deservedly so. It's delicious.

Tempest - Longer White Cloud, 10.2%

Deliciously boozy and absolutely oozing with a rich toffee penny character. Alongside this are notes of apricot softness and something akin to honeydew melon. This was the only beer we've had in our possession for longer than a few weeks (having bought it just after Christmas) so it's worth considering that some of the freshness experienced in the rest of our selection may well have once been present here too... but we have to say, it's aged incredibly well over the past few months and become almost barley wine-ish in character.

Buxton - King Maker, 10.5%

Obviously, we chose to drink this whilst watching Game of Thrones, it felt only right! Surprisingly creamy in aroma with floral notes and a hint of pine. On the palate, a chewy, tacky sweetness is followed by an intense bitterness and a wonderfully robust mouthfeel. Ever present is a big hit of Sorachi Ace hops which, though delicious, don't really seem to meld particularly well with the rest of the beer but provide an interesting overarching character which reminded Laura a little of those fruity coconut mushroom-shaped sweets! An intriguing brew.

Human Cannonball, not pictured, is lurking in the wings for a Cannonball x3 tasting!

Cheers,

L&J

The Man Behind the Curtain

It was our fourth wedding anniversary last weekend, and to celebrate we went to our first ever Michelin starred restaurant. We both fell a bit in love with Michael O'Hare and his shiny silver apron on last year's Great British Menu, and his eclectic, immersive style of cooking was something which intrigued us immensely. And so on a grey April afternoon, we found ourselves in the centre of Leeds at The Man Behind The Curtain for a dining experience like we'd never had before...

It feels a bit like stepping into another world to get there, as you walk in through Flannels clothing shop before heading up to the third floor in an eerily quiet lift. The venue itself was calm, relaxed and modern, and we instantly felt comfortable being there, unlike other "posh" restaurants we've eaten in before. The staff added to this environment, being elegant and just the right amount of formal.

We selected the 9 course tasting menu which came accompanied by 7 wines. The menu itself is simply "Carte Blanche", meaning that every dish is a total surprise. The effect of this is an absolutely mindblowing experience... neither of us have ever felt so amazed, delighted, and often baffled by food. Laura cried twice. We'll let the pictures do the talking...

Octopus with caper and lemon butter - served with champagne

15 year old Galician beef with olives - served with spiced vermouth

Sea urchin bolognese with rice noodles which melted into the sauce as you stirred!

Spider crab lasagne with a quail's egg, bilberry, and potato crisps

Fish and chips (No, really...) - black cod with potato and ink. Served with Riesling.

Iberico pork, with smoked egg yolk served inside an edible shell and anchovies

Veal sweetbread with hot and sour consomme, brought out alongside a sous vide prawn.

Onto dessert...

Violet ice cream, dark chocolate, potato custard and beetroot puffed rice, served with plum wine

Passion fruit and praline mini "cupcake"

A touch we particularly loved was that for three of the courses, the chefs brought out the dishes themselves and talked us through what we were about to eat. The passion coming from them was palpable, and it's this sort of attention to detail which gets a place such deserved renown.

Quite honestly, this was far and away the most outstanding food we've ever eaten, and an experience we never wanted to end. Simply stunning.

L&J

Wet Yer Whiskers: A Collaboration Brew

What better way to celebrate Sheffield Beer Week than to brew a beer with some of our Steel City chums! Teaming with Meg and Chris from Karma Citra, we brewed with our day job mates Abbeydale Brewery.

We bandied around a few ideas before settling down on a classic oxymoronic beverage - the white stout. While yes, we know stout is just a traditional term for strong, in the current lexicon it is most commonly used as a dark beer descriptor.

Made with loads of coffee from local experts Pollards, cocoa nibs for a hit of rich sweetness and heaps of lactose, we aimed to create a beer that when drunk confuses as well as pleases.

The result? A 5.5% beauty we called Wet Yer Whiskers! Look out for it heading out on bars around Sheffield and beyond...

There are some hops underneath... Promise

Ar' Meg operating the squeegee

Chris is life and soul of all parties!

Brewsome Twosome

The final offering!

Cheers!

Laura, Jim, Chris and Meg

Sheffield Beer Map

Are you in need of a beer in Sheffield? Hopefully this map will help you find some liquid refreshment. We have arranged the map into four areas of Sheffield and highlighted our recommended watering holes.

We will endeavour to keep the maps information updated. Anywhere you think we've missed please let us know.

Jim and Laura

Beer and Food Pairing: Spontanbasil and Lasagne

First up, let's talk about THE BEER. Spontanbasil, crafted by the legendary combination of Mikkeller and Lindemans, is a spontaneously fermented wild beer that just completely sings of basil all the way through the drink, not just at the initial tasting (which is so often the case with this ilk of almost novelty additions into beers). The tartness of the wild yeast works incredibly well with the freshness of the herb and adds layers and layers of depth. It's the sort of beer that isn't just a flavour on the palate, it's an entire sensory experience, with a heady aroma that floods through the mind and makes it the type of drink that you won't forget in a hurry.

A beer this phenomenal needed a meal worthy of it to pair with. Having sampled a small amount before, we felt that a herb-ridden pasta sauce would be a winning flavour combination. So we decided to set ourselves a bit of a challenge and make a lasagne entirely from scratch. 

The key component to a cracking lasagne is surely a top quality tomato sauce. We cooked down 8 cans of plum tomatoes with two onions, a chilli and six cloves of garlic for a total of around 12 hours at 120°C... this made far too much for a family-sized lasagne, but we've got a bit of a sauce solera system situation going on in the freezer, which the remnants topped up perfectly. Whilst this might seem a ridiculously long amount of time, caring for a sauce in this way allows all of the sugars in the tomatoes and onions to break down and start to caramelise, leaving a wonderfully indulgent, almost "meaty" rich sauce. To give the sauce a fresher nature too, we added another tin of tomatoes just before assembling the lasagne.

We decided on ox cheek for the meat, but really anything that can be slow cooked will do, such as brisket or pork shoulder, something cheap and cheerful. The meat was browned a piece at a time (we used three cheeks in total) on all sides. To this a quartered onion and a stick or two of celery were added, along with a bottle of beer (Poacher's Choice in this instance, but really you could use whatever you have lying around in the cupboard). This was cooked on the hob at the lowest setting to blip away for 4-6 hours, meaning the meat was super tender and just pulled apart once cooked. Just before assembling the lasagne, the cheeks were pulled and added to the tomatoes to warm through and let the flavours mingle. We found we also needed a little extra water to keep the sauce easily workable when layering up.

Admittedly, making pasta from scratch is a bit of a faff, but totally worth it. For a large lasagne, we made about 500g of pasta, which is 450g of '00 flour' and the equivalent of 6 free range eggs. This can come in the form of 12 yolks or 6 full eggs - the yolks give the pasta a great texture and a more "full" flavour of pasta that you simply can't get in dried. If you fancy having a go yourself, here’s a quick little tutorial:

Bring the eggs and flour together in a bowl. Once they have roughly conglomerated, tip out onto a clean worktop (you can do the whole mixing process on the work top, but it makes a tremendous mess unless you have a decent space to do it on, which we do not). Knead into a dough and really work it hard to allow the gluten to become stretchy. At this point you can set aside in the fridge for at least half an hour until its ready to roll and assemble. It also freezes perfectly well, should you want to double the quantities – just be sure to defrost thoroughly overnight in the fridge.

Back to our meal. The final thing to prepare was the white sauce. A roux of 80g of melted butter and 65g of flour formed the base, combined with a litre of hot/almost boiling milk gradually incorporated in a ladle full at a time, with the aromatic additions of parsley, basil and a grating of nutmeg. Finally a good handful of parmesan was added before removing from the heat.

Assembly time! The pasta was rolled out into thin sheets and blanched for a couple of minutes (we’d recommend doing this in more water than looks necessary, one or two sheets at a time). To layer up the dish, we started with pasta, then meaty tomatoes, then white sauce and topped with a layer of fresh basil leaves. We repeated this three times, then topped the final layer of pasta with the last of the white sauce and a good sprinkling of parmesan and mozzarella. 

45 minutes in the oven later... ta-dah!

The meal as a whole worked superbly together. The richness of the dish brought out the tartness in the beer, which in turn cut through the lasagne and freshened up the palate beautifully. Adding plenty of basil to the lasagne provided a bonus complement to the beer and allowed all the flavours to absolutely sing. A triumph!

Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project

Post-Traditional Brewing

Crooked Stave Artisan Beer Project are without doubt forging a name for themselves in the world of sour beer. Whilst still relatively small, their reputation is steadily growing, making slow beer in a way that is traditional yet at the same time truly modern. The techniques at the heart of their processes were long-established before "clean" beer became the mainstream... A time in which bacteria were embraced if not fully understood, a time where tartness was accepted and not a reason to bring a drink back to the bar. Crooked Stave take these principals but drag them full throttle into the modern age, showcasing innovation, knowledge and education in absolute spades.

The brewery is a producer of the kind of beer that is not really feasible for any brewery in the UK - here, we simply don't have the massive amount of space (and money, in the very vast majority of cases) required. America on the other hand, with an abundance of relatively cheap land, enables longer term sour producers to thrive. As well as this, in the case of Crooked Stave and other similar producers, the thriving wine scene across parts of the US is key too. The climate in areas such as along the West Coast and some of the southern states including Texas is perfect for grapes and is now home to an array of seriously up and coming vineyards. While these things don't seem directly linked, the major crossover on these two situations is wood... really big wood.


The foudre (or foeder, as our US pals know it) is an integral part of the large scale, long term sour beer production process. These vessels take up a fraction of the space to hold a massive amount of beer, allowing it to sour with the addition of in-house bacteria and yeast mainly comprised of Brettanomyces (we know it as Brett, coz' we are best buds). These gargantuan oak vats often come straight from wine producers, who often want rid of them as they are susceptible to the kind of bacterial infection that Crooked Stave crave... fortuitous indeed for us sour beer fiends. While Crooked Stave do also host an ageing program consisting of bourbon barrels and liqueur casks, these are mainly used to finish or round off a carefully selected blend of sour beer from different foudres.

Next door to the ageing room, the brew house itself is relatively small, with a tidy little brew kit and an open cooling plate used in spontaneously fermented beers, along with stainless steel holding tanks and fermenters. At the helm of this (cool)ship is Chad Yakobson, a man whose expertise lies in a Masters dissertation entitled "Pure Culture Fermentation Characteristics of Brettanomyces Yeast Species and Their Use in the Brewing Industry”, an intriguing topic indeed and a study which we'd love to have a good read of (the site hosting it is down at the moment, but we're hopeful!).

Not being able to drink on the brewery premises due to local liquor laws, and the brewery itself being well out of the way of Denver's central district, Crooked Stave have an additional brewery tap, quite unlike the majority of the breweries we visited during our Colorado trip. The tap itself is situated within a shopping collaborative that would make even Camden Town blush. The Source is an 1880s brick factory turned boutique food/boozery, consisting of a bakery selling delectable French pastries, a butcher's with an in-house beef ageing room, coffee roasters, an Italian deli with a wall of spice from around the globe, and more.

With 22 different lines across the bar, including a mixture of sour beers, saisons, a couple of more conventionally fermented beers and non-alcoholic Kombucha tea, the tap room was a wood-clad treat. We started off with two different releases of St. Bretta, a delightfully fresh whitebier fermented with 100% Brett. The first was finished with clementines and the second with satsumas and mandarins. Both were thirst-quenching and bursting with fruity freshness, although the satsuma version had a little more in the way of tartness which made it our unanimous favourite. We continued to drink through the list via beers that were dry-hopped, brewed with sage, or aged with apricots, until we reached the two barrel aged beauties sharing the name of Cybies.

The pair are oak-aged, mixed fermentation Belgian beers that sit happily at 9%. The key difference in these two beers is the fruit additions. The first, Salvador Cybies, is finished in barrels rippled with tart cherry stickiness, but it was the second that flew to the top of the list of beers we had in our short time in the US and possibly our joint all time favourite beer: Silly Cybies. Initially fresh raspberries on the nose and palate, exactly like fruits plucked straight from gardens and hedgerows, the alcohol and fermentation added waves of flavour on top of layers of funky depth, coupled with an intoxicating rich wood finish. Fantastic.

We are starting to see a few of Crooked Stave's beers making their way to the UK, as the market increasingly demands interesting tart beers on this side of the pond. What can be a little off-putting for consumers here is the cost, something we would refute as a reason to leave these beers on the shelf because frankly they are expensive to make. It can take years to create a high quality long term sour, which then needs to be blended and often finished, whether through dry hopping in the case of the excellent Progenitor or with fruit as in the aforementioned Cybies Series. There is a real skill in blending that is arguably closer to whisky production than conventional ale brewing. But for us that knowledge, skill and overall commitment to a product is the real cost of this style of brewing. Crooked Stave are proof that this investment is certainly worth paying the price for.

Massive thanks to Zack, Andy, and the rest of the Crooked Stave team for their warm hospitality and taking the time to teach us about their beers and show us round their magnificent brewery. We were beyond inspired!

Cheers,

Jim and Laura