@Thornbridge Brewery at @BeerRitzLeeds - The Heart Desires & Bear State

So, the last Saturday of the month is now a fixture for tastings at Beer-Ritz in Leeds. February saw Thornbridge Brewery in attendance, bringing along some of their elegant but still hoptastic west coast-style IPA Bear State, as well as a new release from their Barrel Room series, The Heart Desires.

Although in the video I skate over Bear State a bit, it shouldn't really be dismissed so easily. It's a classic Thornbridge take on a style - precise without being showy, refined without being boring, reliable without the contempt of familiarity. But of course, my inner geek wanted to talk about the next installment of the Barrel Room series, the series that spawned the unprecedented gold and silver medal duo for Thornbridge at the World Beer Cup. With two new beers. At the first time of entering. Really, that's quite an achievement.

The Heart Desires is a complex beer. On the nose, you get the white wine barrel influence immediately - bit of oak, bit of fruit, and it smells zingy, your brain gets excited and starts your mouth watering for what is about to happen. In the mouth, it's medium-bodied, with a clean zip of acidity and fruitiness, unsurprising as the beer is aged on gooseberries for 18 months - green apples, lemons, just crunchy, zippy dry fruitiness.

This is a barrel-aged wild beer, subject to the influence of organisms in the wood of the barrel (pediococcus and lactobacillus being among them - in the video, the only reason I mention them because George didn't want to). It's something of a paradox that a beer that is exposed to all manner of unruly microbial influence should taste so clean, but it does. It's something that it has in common with a lot of American wild ales, notably the wild beers produced at Russian River Brewing in California, which are Thornbridge brewmaster Rob Lovatt's inspiration for this series. The Russian River wild beers are ace, as are the Thornbridge ones.


Next up, Ilkley Brewery will be debuting a new beer and puring samples of their new range - come down to Beer-Ritz on Saturday 25th March - no need to book, it's free, just turn up between 1pm and 4pm.

You can follow @BeerRitzLeeds on Twitter for more updates, and like them on Facebook (and in real life too)

You can follow @BeerRitzByMail on Twitter, and give them the Zuckerberg thumbs-up here, or just ignore all the social media hoopla and head over and start shopping

Borefts #2

Gaustalle-Brau Natrub Zoiglbier (5.8%) - very slightly hazy, gold, hint of wildness in the aroma. Great texture, slightly heavy, slightly sweet, perfumed, fruity, big bitterness building towards a grassy finish. Great.

Mont Saleve Sorachi Bitter (2.5%) - hazy peach colour, classic Sorachi aroma (oily coconut) but somehow a tasty beer emerges from the Sorachi slickness. Enjoyable orange peel character emerges from the oiliness, before a big, big bitter finish. Good.

Buxton Wild Boar (5.7%) - tropical fruit nose, diesely undertones. Lovely balance of fruitiness, dryness and bitterness. Excellent.

This is such an unusual festival, this year spread across two sites a couple of hundred yards apart.The road between the new brewery and the old mill is a constant procession of people parading from one to the other, glass of beer in hand, crossing roads, all without incident.

Jester King Wytchmaker (7.3%) - hazy copper colour, spicy hop nose, toffee and pepper. Sweet on the palate, spicy pepper and oranges. A funky rye-driven farmhouse saison. Very good.

Buxton Tsar Bomba (9.5%) - Tsar with an old cultured strain of brett. Lush, smooth and complex, intense espresso mocha with a tickle of brett. Excellent.

Buxton Axe Edge (6.8%) - I can smell this from the tabletop two feet away. Lychees, passion fruit, diesel. Slick and sweet, touch of alcohol mid-palate, then a long and sweetly perfumed finish. Excellent.

At the old mill, a woodwind quintet strikes up, sounding for all the world like the backing band for a 'Debut'-era Bjork Unplugged session. All around them, people drink great beer and chat. The quintet are all dressed in freshly ironed white clothes, a single unit, an island of beautifully syncopated music, an oasis of cool concentration among the polite bacchanals.

Thornbridge Aussie Summer Ale (5%) - pin-bright, golden, softly fruity aroma, tropical hints ont he palate and nose, Classic Thornbridge. Made from Victoria's Secret hops - only 200kg in the world this year, of which Thornbridge got 30kg. Good.

Del Ducato Via Emilia (5%) - is there a hint of green gold about this, or is it just a trick of the mind? Noble hop character all the way through, but perfectly in balance, FOr me, a text-book pilsner. Brilliantly hoppy, but perfectly balanced. Very good.

Mont Saleve Blanche (5%) - neither as hazy nor as aromatic as you might want from a biere blanche,but hints of lemon barley water on the nose and palate, faintly cat-pissy. Doesn't really have much drinkability or moreishness. Oddly bitter finish. Not much cop, in all honesty.

Day two arrives, brisk and bright, with cartoon cotton wool clouds scudding across a Simpsons-blue sky. Everywhere people bustle about, on Saturday chores, on foot, on bikes so large they need to be climbed down from at a red light. A woman takes the lead off her chocolate Labrador, and in gentle guttural Dutch urges it onto the grass verge for a pee.

Alvinne Freaky (3.8%) - hazy copper colour, wild nose, thin body, wild tart finish. I don't think I'm a fan of their Morpheus yeast.

Del Ducato New Morning Saison (6%) - slightly yoghurty lactic aroma alongside classic saison spiciness. Pinprick carbonation, savoury celery quality. Burst of gently perfumed brett in the finish. Excellent.

Del Ducato Masochist IPA (6.5%) - hazy orange gold, tangerine aroma, tangerine palate, tangerine finish. Unsophisticated, but very good.

Bodegraven is such a sleepy suburban town that I'm struggling to see how it fits in with the mainly urban phenomenon of "craft beer". And yet people have travelled from all over the world to be here for a couple of days of low-key, almost inconspicuous beer geeking. All human life is here, and a few other forms besides, from the pot-bellied local guy, to the chi-chi Euro-femme, to hipsters of all ages and nationalities arriving on Saturday to be disappointed by Mikkeller having sold out of beer already.

Haandbryggeriet Sur Megge (8%) - peachy gold, tartly fruity nose, peach, lemons, honey, mano, pineapple, a total riot of fruit. Tart finish, faintly nutty, dry cider, more fruit. Absurdly good, monumentally good, actually indescribably good [my beer of the festival]

Narke Coffee Porter - [no note]

Kernel Topaz IPA - what to say? It's good.

ACCELERATED DRINKING PROGRAMME including Kernel Imperial Brown Stout (excellent) [it actually says this in my notebook. IN CAPS]

The Tulip Hotel, 2am Sunday morning: woken by a raucous party in the room next door. Is it an overspill from Saturday night hotel bar antics, or is it a bottle-sampling party. Sleep. Wake. Is that Craig's voice? Is that the Spanish guy I spoke to earlier? Is someone smoking? I hope the fire alarm doesn't go off.

Borefts #1

Christ, Holland is flat. From the upper deck of this train, you can see for miles. Well, you could see for miles if the Dutch nation, no doubt freaked out by the endless expanse of Netherlands all around them, hadn't planted a lot of trees. The trees follow the road, they follow the canal, they act as waymarkers, and they break up the agoraphobia-inducing sense of colossal sky pressing down with biblical force on the horizon all round.

Buxton SPA (4%abv, Nelson Sauvin dry-hopped special edition) - straw gold colour, slightly hazy. Nose is a touch dieselly, like Riesling (diesling?), almost certainly from the Nelson. Tropical fruit, then slightly tart bitterness. Good.

Thornbridge Baby Black Harry (2.8%) - given that it's advertised as being dry-hopped with Amarillo and Citra, I was expecting a bit of oomph, but it's a pretty straight down the line dark mild, roasty, designed for pints rather than dinky tasting glasses. Nice.

An adapted line from Salt N Pepa's Grammy-winning smash hit "None Of Your Business" loops over and over and over in my head: "If he wants to be a freak and be a beer geek then its none of your business". I'm heading for the Borefts Beer Festival at De Molen brewery, for two days of unashamed beer-geekery. I've got a leather-bound notebook, a purple corduroy jacket, and a mischievous intention to try and introduce the phrase "boutique brewery" to the lexicon over the weekend.

Thornbridge Wye (4.7%) - pale, nay limpid gold. Fresh air (?) and pale malt on the nose, and then the palate bursts at the finish with cucumbers. Yes, it's wet-cucumbered (the antithesis of dry-hopped) in the conditioning tank. Very good, but again, needs at least a half pint to get it.

Mikkeller SpontanDoubleBlueberry (8.5%) - thick indigo, with a persistent purple head. Tart funky nose, intense jammy aroma, violets. Fruity and tart on the tongue, big bursts of red fruit and funk in the finish. Symphonic, superb.

Bodegraven is such a sleepy, two-storey sleeper suburb of a commuter town that it's hard to believe there is anything going on here at all, let alone a dozen or more of the worlds hippest brewers in town pouring beer for a couple of thousand fans. Which makes it all the more thrilling to turn the corner on Overtocht to be confronted with the the mill, De Molen, in full sail, turning briskly in the breeze. My stomach actually lurches at the romance of it all.

Evil Twin Gooseberry Danbic (5%) - hazy pink (aged in red wine barrels) with a weirdly nutty nose. Faint hints of oloroso sherry (oxidation? age? barrels?). Tartly fruity (although could be any fruit), slightly acetic, oddly mousy finish. Interesting.

De Molen Nat & Droog (6.2%) - hazy orange - end of the keg. Massive hopsack and marmalade aroma. Big sweeetness on the palate, then spicy, then a bitterness that after a while develops an oddly chemical note to the hop character, which m'colleague The Beer Nut describes as beeing "too much like sucking hop pellets". Good, becoming odd later.

Soaking up the easy-easy nature of it all. You can wander round the brewery and look at everything, from the shiny stainless beer porn of the brewery itself, to the bottle store, to fresh-filled barrels, to the pallets upon pallets of Keykegs waiting to be filled. Mind gently boggles as it realises there are far to many beers to try.....

Jester King Petit Prince (2.5%) - hazy double-shine gold, appealing witbier/saison nose. Full carbonation, silky and smoothly drinkable, again on the palate a witbier/saison cross. Totally sessionable, and the sun has come out in agreement. Excellent

Jester King Buddha's Brew (4.7%) - cidery nose, slightly mealy and slick on the palate. Gently tart, slightly mousy, but hangs together nicely. Honey, lemon, dry cider in the finish. Good.

Weekend Beers Round-Up

It seems a tad prosaic after the epic response that the previous post elicited, but I thought I'd quickly round a few of the beers opened this weekend - the majority are samples, and so I guess I should do my duty and at least pass comment.

The Dogfish Head/Birra Del Borgo My Antonia that I'm drinking as I write is still great - not as great as BrewDog Avery Brown Dredge (which seems to have been getting a bit of a mention on Twitter this week), but still a corker.

Last night was a couple of dark beers - Zatec Dark, which is a great black lager, soft, smooth and creamy - and Brain's Original Stout, which is a great mediumweight stout with a lot of lovely leafy hop character in the finish.

Adnam's Ghost Ship and Salopian Oracle are two beer cut from a similar cloth, both having the sort of pungent hop character that first caused me to use the phrase "hop-forward, and in the modern style" - pungently hoppy, zippy, and palate-awakening the both.

Natural Selection Finch is descibed on the label as a "robust red ale". Other people have written kindly about this beer, which makes it all the stranger that I found it to be an undrinkable crystal malt bomb. I like crystal malt, but this was just OTT.

A brief detour into a homebrew, which is going to be my entry for the Nicholson's / Thornbridge homebrew competition, confirmed that I'm going to walk away with the first prize - if you'd like to try it and be in awe, it's the beer that I'll be bringing along to the inaugural Leeds Homebrew meet-up - and then things got serious with a Thornbridge Bracia, a stunning beer, both metaphorically and physically. I needed a long lie down after that one, for sure.

This is the full and frank account of a weekend's drinking, recorded this day, the 25th of September, in the two thousand and eleventh year of our lord. Amen.

To Cardiff!

Getting ready to go and see Old Cheesy Pockets, I make sure that I have a few gifts that he will appreciate tucked away in the boot of the car. Some pale golden ales will do the job, so Buxton Moor Top, Thornbridge Wild Swan, Ilkley Mary Jane and some Odell IPA (he professes not to like American craft beer).

Of the four beers in the boot, it's not the never-ordinary, ever-dazzling Thornbridge beer that I'm excited about showing him, nor the soon-to-be-crowned-classic Ilkley Mary Jane, but the Buxton Moor Top. I can't think of a beer that is more of the moment than this one. Pale, low %abv, but absolutely stuffed full of hop character, it's at once both no-nonsense and spectacular. I first tried a bottle a little over a year ago, and was then made sure that we had the beer in stock at the Headingley shop as soon as we could. It's a beauty.

If you haven't tried it, you should. If you can't find it, weep no more - we are selling it mail order. In a move that's sure to strip this blog of every vestige of independence, integrity and credibility, I'm delighted to say, BUY IT HERE, NOW!

On Badgers, Wild Swans, Crooked Lines and Dishwater

Uinta Detour Double IPA is part of the 'Crooked Line' series of beers which, setting aside whether they're any good or not, have some of the coolest labels ever to appear on a beer bottle (pic from Ratebeer.com). Want to know what the beer is like? This is a quick round-up of some of the beers I drank over this weekend, notable for no other reason than it was my birthday, and a year ago I did this.

Badger very kindly sent me a case of the reformulated Hopping Hare (4.4%abv), which like all Badger beers, is a perfectly decent example of what an English beer should be. Mercifully free of flavour additives, its soft, straw-like flavours were a surreally spring-like accompaniment to watching snow hammer down for six hours on my actual birthday.

Thornbridge sent me a three-pack of beer – Wild Swan, Italia and Bracia. The Italia was excellent – grab some of this limited beer while you can. An unfiltered pilsner stuffed with herbal and citrus notes, and a pleasant slightly savoury edge that beer maven Jeff Pickthall once memorably described as 'celery salt'. The Wild Swan suffered a little from being bottled – at 3.5%abv, not surprising, but having tasted it from cask, I think the exotic flavours (lime leaf and lychee) lose quite a lot of definition.

Happily, it was still much better than the piss-water that was being sold from a pump marked 'Springhead' at the Cross Keys in Leeds on Saturday night – the name of the beer escapes me (I was having a night off, but checking their website, it may be their beer 'Springhead', described on their website as “a clean-tasting, easy drinking amber coloured bitter with a dry, hoppy finish “). It was in perfectly good condition, but having had only fleeting association with ingredients usually used to make beer, tasted (according to one of my friends) “like dishwater that has been shown some twigs”. Further alarm bells ring when you note that the website informs you that “It was winner of the Best Bitter, Northern Beer Festival 1995” - that was 16 years ago guys! Come on! In that time, Sharp's brewery has grown from being a hobby in a garage to producing the fastest-growing real ale brand on the planet, and been purchased by Molson Coors! This surprising failure from what I've come to view as an otherwise reliable brewery drove us to drink Sierra Nevada Pale from keg for the rest of the night, the CO2 from which I think might blame for the hideous bout of indigestion that woke me in the night.

Sunday brought with it another bottle of Hopping Hare, still perfectly decent, and to my palate slightly drier than it was last year. I mean this in a nice way, but it's the sort of beer that doesn't jump up and down and demand your full attention – you can drink it while you do something else, like slow cook a frying pan full of onions and trim a steak while you listen to BBC6 Music. A bottle of Uinta Detour Double IPA (9.5%abv) rounded off the night nicely, and came pretty close to delivering the lysergic lupulin lightshow that I was hoping for. And it made a great counterpoint for a steak and onion sandwich, which is a noble and worthy end to any beer's life. To paraphrase Wilfred Owen: Dulce et decorum est pro steak sandwich mori.

Kelly Ryan, Begone!

Hairy-handed and Hobbit-like, Antipodean refugee Kelly Ryan has struggled to fit into the UK brewing scene. After years of ham-fisted attempts at brewing something drinkable, he finally hit paydirt by somehow falling into a recently-vacated job. He was lucky to somehow gain the confidence of brewer Stefano Cossi - perhaps it was his fancy double degree in Microbiology and Food Science and Technology from the University of Otago. Clearly Thornbridge Brewery are not in the habit of checking references - there is in fact no such place as Otago.

After two long years of woeful incompetence, Thornbridge were forced to invest heavily in automated technology in an attempt to prevent Kelly from ruining any more beer. To this day, it is a mystery how Kelly's mere presence in a brewery can have such a detrimental effect on the beer that is being brewed, but it does. A programme of international mentorship, under the guise of a series of collaborative brews, all failed to stop the rot. Sadly, all the costly investment in brewing technology, not to mention endless hand-waxing and lessons in walking upright, have come to nought. In a last-ditch attempt to save what reputation he has, Kelly is returning to New Zealand.

This momentous event has seen a great outpouring of emotion in the blogosphere. No more shall we have to suffer exotically-monikered beers stuffed awkardly with crude hop character. No more absurd diatribes on forcing carbon dioxide into beer. And finally, no more tedious innovation and pursuit of some mythical, elysian notion of brewing. Frankly, it's been exhausting, and I think I speak for every beer-lover in the UK when I say that we're glad it's over.

Kelly Ryan, begone. You are dead to us already.

(For a more detailed exploration of the sort of contempt in which I hold Kelly's abilities, see Halcyon, Larkspur, and Jaipur & Bottle Conditioning)

Now Drinking: Thornbridge Larkspur

I must be bloody mad.

The M62 motorway has a certain notoriety. It is a hideously busy stretch of trans-Pennine tarmac that carries the dubious honour of being the highest motorway in the UK. It is also featured in The KLF's "It's Grim Up North" - "Morecambe, Macclesfield, Lytham St. Annes, Clitheroe, Cleethorpes, the M62 - its grim up north", a list of everything that might be thought to be soul-sucking and lifeless in the north of England, set over a pounding industrial acid techno beat.

Had I planned my visit a bit better, I would have used public transport and taken a long afternoon over this visit to The Grove Inn in Huddersfield. The pub itself is nothing short of sensational, a beer geek's dream, featuring permanent hand pumps from the cream of the new wave of British brewing - Thornbridge, Marble, BrewDog, Dark Star, - alongside a smattering of classics - Timothy Taylor, Burton Bridge, Fullers. In fact, this pub demands a long and leisurely session. Why have I spent a torturous rush-hour driving here for a single pint?

I'll tell you why. I got severely twitchy that a certain beer would run out before I got to try it - there were only 35 casks made this year, and eight of them passed through the possession of Ian, landlord of The Grove. He very generously passed five of these on to Eddie at Gadds brewery - I can only assume he hadn't tried the beer before he agreed to that. The beer is Thornbridge Larkspur (5.2%abv), a pale gold single-hop beer based around the hop variety Citra.

I use the term beer loosely. I know that this is beer, because it came out of a brewery, and is made of water, pale malt, hops and yeast. But no beer has ever tasted like this. The first sniff and mouthful, and I'm transported back to my first ever visit to Leeds, in the early 1990s, and buying fresh samosas and Rubicon mango juice drink at Maumoniat's Asian supermarket on Brudenell Grove. That first ever taste of mango juice, perfumed and almost indecently musky, was a shock to the senses, but a discovery of a pleasure that has stayed with me. In fact, for a while, I cursed the empty years that I lived without Rubicon mango juice, and devoted my life to drinking as much of it as I could.

That's the beauty of great beer - it transports you to another place, or another time, while rooting you to the spot, forcing you to pay attention to what is happening on your palate. Thornbridge Larkspur is a riot of mango juice, passion fruit, musk, a hint of vanilla custard, tangerine, peach, a nameless floral perfume, and a snap of biscuity pale malt husk in the steadily building bitterness of the finish. It's there and then it's gone, intense, but fleeting, demanding you take another sip, when the whole hokey-cokey of exotica starts over again. And again. And again, until the glass is empty.

That's not a beer, that's a love potion.

Thornbridge: Bottle-Conditioning for the 21st Century

There's no question that Thornbridge are one of the most exciting breweries in the UK today. While they stop short of actually using hummingbird's tears as an ingredient, they push the envelope both with what they can get out of conventional ingredients, and what they can do with more unconventional ones. They rarely miss the mark.

Thornbridge recently moved over to putting live beer in half-litre bottles. On bottles of Jaipur, it uses the phrase "bottle-conditioned", although this has caused a bit of confusion among consumers - if it's bottle-conditioned, why isn't there any sediment? Being an inquisitive sort, I called Kelly Ryan at Thornbridge. The short answer is that there isn't any visible sediment because they don't re-prime the bottles. The long answer is a bit, well, longer.

When Thornbridge moved over to their new brewery, they had a new level of control available to them. The closed cylindro-conical fermenters meant that they could allow the beer to carbonate naturally under the pressure of its own fermentation. The same fermenters allowed them to take dead yeast out of contact with their still-fermenting beer. Centrifuges meant that they could control how much yeast was left in the finished beer, removing the need for filtration. The conclusion to the long answer is that they don't reprime their bottles because they don't need to. Not only is there enough natural carbonation in the beer, there is also enough yeast left in suspension to keep things ticking over nicely when they bottle it. The fermentation continues slowly, maintaining carbonation and scavenging oxygen.

For my part, I've often thought that bottle-fermentation can actually substantially reduce the character of a beer - it's as though that vigorous secondary fermentation actually scavenges some of the flavour compounds from the beer. Or maybe if the brewery filters the beer before repriming (a very common practice), a lot of the character of the beer is removed, and never gets put back in the second time around.

So what do we make of all this? Is this live beer? Bottle- or brewery-conditioned? Does it even matter to the ordinary drinker? My take on it is that if 21st century brewing and hygiene technology allow this to happen, and the beer tastes better for it, then great.

Either way, what I find really impressive is that Thornbridge have decided to ditch 40,000 Jaipur back labels that say "bottle-conditioned” and replace them with ones that say “May contain sediment”. Not only do they care passionately about the beer, they also care passionately about getting the right message on the label. The devil, as ever, is in the details.

WHEN BREWERS GO BAD!!!!

This is a train of thought sparked by the large amount of sediment in the two bottles of Thornbridge Halcyon that I drank this week, although it's not specifically about that beer or brewery. For the record, I think it's a great beer, and after having been lucky enough to have a couple of pints at the Sheffield Tap last night, think that Thornbridge are one of the most most focused, exciting and technically proficient breweries in the UK today.

My question is pretty straightforward: How do people feel about brewers releasing new beers that turn out to be slightly flawed in some way? I made my feelings clear about Gadd's Reserved a few months ago, and would point out that Eddie Gadd correctly (but still quite magnanimously in my book) offered to replace any beers that people weren't happy with. Also, I'm sure that it was awesome when it was bottled, but perhaps it wasn't stable enough for the long haul (or even the medium haul).

This year's Halcyon is a great beer, but speaking to brewer Kelly Ryan, it's clear that they didn't actively engineer or desire the loose sediment that has occurred. And there are a few brewers currently making small batch trial beers (3 or 4 brewer's barrels at a time) which are just that - trial beers. And every now and again, something will happen so that a batch of a signature brew isn't quite what it should be. Should they be selling them? As a retailer, it's easy to sell the first case or two of a new beer, but the real test is repeat sales - are people coming back and buying it again, or is it a bit underwhelming? And if it is underwhelming, should it even be on sale in the first place?

I'd love to know your thoughts.

Beer and Curry (well, Halcyon and Kedgeree)

Because I'm such a frightful ponce, I like to try out food and beer combinations. I like to think that sometimes, you can get something that's greater than the sum of its parts - the beer and the food enhance each other, and you notice things in each that may have slipped by unnoticed. And of course, because I'm such a frightful ponce, I couldn't possibly do something as simple as compare a couple of IPAs over a chicken jalfrezi. No, tonight it's Thornbridge Halcyon (7.7%abv) and kedgeree.

I won't write a great deal about the beer, as I sort of cover everything I want to say about it in the video. But I will say that after a long chat on the phone with Kelly Ryan, one of the brewers who helped create Halcyon, it's clear that they are both a brewery who like to push the envelope a bit, and are quite open about what happens when they try to do that. Kelly didn't pretend to be delighted about having a lot of very loose sediment in the bottle, but neither did he think it was the end of the world. In fact, as I show in the video, there's nothing wrong with the sediment, and I'm almost sure it was more strongly-flavoured than the brighter glass of beer I drank afterwards. Who knows - maybe some of those flavour compounds are lipophillic and bound to the lipids in the yeast cells. Yes, I know I'm good, but I didn't figure that one out myself - egg-headed, Segal-bodied Stuart Howe of Sharps planted the seeds of it here.



The Halcyon wasn't a perfect match for the food - I think that maybe a hopfen-weisse would be a better match - but it did the job pretty well, acting as an admirably spicy, citrussy cut against the spice and smoke of the kedgeree. Irritatingly, a chicken jalfrezi with a load of mango chutney would have been near perfect with Thornbridge Halcyon


Kedgeree for two.

Cook a couple of handfuls of rice (I like basmati and wild mixed). Towards the end of cooking, add a couple of handfuls of peas. You can also steam the fish over this - 300g of undyed smoked haddock will do it. And you can either boil a couple of eggs in here also, or poach a couple of eggs to go on the dish at the end.

Fry two finely sliced onions with half a finely diced green chilli, until the onions are golden. Add ground cumin and ground black pepper to taste (about half a teaspoon of each). Add the rice, peas, flaked fish, the chopped boiled egg (or top with a poached egg), and a handful of chopped coriander. Stir, season, serve.

Rooster's Brewery Retain Gold at World Beer Cup

I don't really 'do' news. I'm not sure why - maybe others do it better and more consistently, or maybe just because I'm lazy and prefer to talk about myself. Whatever, sometimes you just have to get off the couch, put Jeremy Kyle* on live pause and pick up the phone to speak to a brewer.

I did just that earlier today, and gladly, because the brewer I was calling was Sean Franklin, MD of Rooster's Brewery, near Harrogate in North Yorkshire. They've had a run of luck at the World Beer Cup (WBC), and by luck I mean a deserved recognition for their years of hard graft and commitment to producing iconic pale beers with stunningly bright hop character. Not only did they take gold in their category (English Style Summer Ale, whatever that's supposed to mean) with Leghorn (4.3%abv), but they also took silver in the same category with Yorkshire Pale Ale (4.3%abv). As if this isn't remarkable enough, this is the third consecutive World Beer Cup at which they've taken gold in that category. If that's not cause enough for celebration, I don't know what is. I'm particularly pleased for them as not only are their beers great, but they're a lovely bunch of people. I chose Sean to help me with the judging at last year's awards for the British Guild of Beer Writers, and his thoughtful input was very valuable. Not only does he know his beer, he knows his writers too.

How will I celebrate their achievement? Well, Rooster's don't usually bottle their beers for commercial release, but had to do so to enter the WBC. Fortunately for me, they were also good enough to give me a few bottles of a couple of their private brews - two double IPAs, one hopped with Nelson Sauvin, the other with Chinook and Amarillo. They are bottle-conditioned and sealed with crown caps that contain a little plastic liner. This is the same closure that the latest crop of Italian imports from Birra del Borgo and Baladin are sporting. Clearly if a three-times World Beer Cup winner is using this unusual closure, as well as a couple of well-respected Italian breweries, then it must have something going for it.

Did I take my eye off the ball there and geek out, talking about closures rather than beer? Yes! Am I looking forward to opening one of those double IPAs tonight? You betcha! Are you going to join me in congratulating Sean and his team at Rooster's? You'd better!

Congratulations too to Thornbridge, Shepherd Neame, and BrewDog, who also brought home some silverware for the cabinet.



*for overseas readers: Jeremy Kyle is a cross between a TV shock jock and a relationship counsellor. He counsels the sort of people who think it's a good idea to go on TV to resolve their issues. It's the televisual equivalent of bear-baiting in a 19th century lunatic asylum.