Virginia Barleywine is for Beer and Food Lovers

The Starr Hill Brewery currently has three special beers on tap, an 8% ABV saison, a 10.3% tripel and a 10.7% barleywine. I realise I am about to commit yet another beer geek heresy, but quite often the lighter coloured Belgian style beers do nothing for me - although I have found lately that this opinion isn't as rare as I assumed, and I have been told several times in the tasting room at Starr Hill just not to mention it on Ratebeer or BeerAdvocate. Barleywine by contrast is one of my favourite styles.

The first barleywine to pass my lips was last Christmas when I had a bottle of the delightful Benedictus from the Durham Brewery. The style also features in my homebrew calendar as a beer to be brewed in November and then stored for a year in preparation of the next Thanksgiving. I, like many of our regulars coming in for a growler fill at the tasting room, was looking forward to seeing what the brewers would come with for this most venerable of styles.

The weekend when Mrs Velkyal broke her foot, trying to kick some sense into me, I bought a 1 litre bottle of barelywine home with me from work, which we duly polished off over some angel food cake with some friends. So on Saturday I refilled my bottle and decided to do a Cyclops session with the beer, as well as use a little of it in a cooking project I had been ruminating about for a while. First to the Cyclops:

• Sight - dark copper, foamy ivory head
• Smell - nutty, earthy, spicy hops, strongly caramel
• Taste - very malty, toffee, nuts, alcoholic edge
• Sweet - 4/5
• Bitter - 3/5

This is fantastic stuff in my book, big, bold and yet so smooth and silky. Yes it is rather sweet, but the spiciness of the hops counteracts that, so it isn't cloying in my experience. There is a very noticeable alcoholic glow that hits you after about half a glass - the one in the picture is a half pint glass. As I was drinking I wanted a nice single malt to go with the beer (I wonder how it would be given the Paradox treatment?). Gorgeous, gorgeous beer.
On then to my cooking project, sticky toffee pudding with barleywine sauce, basically a study in boozy, sweet, powerful desserts. The basic cake part of the dessert was Jamie Oliver's recipe, which you can see here. The sauce though was my own little creation using:

• a knob of unsalted butter
• quarter pint of barleywine
• 1 small can condensed milk

Melt the butter in a small pan, add the barleywine and bring to the boil. Once the beer has reduced by about a quarter, add the condensed milk and then stir, and stir, and stir.

Eventually you end up with a beautifully silky, rich sauce to pour over the cake, or in the case of the picture below, around the case - I was watching Hell's Kitchen while I ate my dessert last night and I could help but

think Gordon Ramsay would have beeping loved it!

How could I stop at a single serving of this delight? So I didn't and had a second!

Caramel 60 and Chocolate Malt Bread

As planned, I spent this morning brewing, making my Gael Scottish ale which I wrote about previously. Well once I was done with the brewing I decided that I would give making bread with the spent grains a bash. Making bread is something I do fairly regularly, and I seem to have a knack for making tasty loaves which are appreciated by more than just Mrs Velkyal and I - last week I traded a cinnamon loaf for 18 free range eggs, and I am looking at doing more such swaps.

If it weren't for my love of brewing, I could quite happily take up being a baker - I don't use a bread machine because I enjoy the process of kneading and proving the bread the old fashioned way. Below are some pictures of the bread in various stages, I am about to enjoy the final stage; butter, a sprinkling of salt and enjoying the latest episode of House!

Happiness is...

Judging by the pouring rain and the cooler temperatures, you can safely say that Autumn has arrived. I am one of the few people I know who loves it when it rains, probably just as well given the winters I grew up with in the Outer Hebrides - a little aside here, I always died laughing when people in Prague thought a force 4 wind was "really windy", heaven knows what they would make of a North Atlantic gale. In fact I love Autumn and Winter so much, I have sometimes wondered if I have Seasonally Affective Disorder in reverse, the colder and darker it gets, the happier I become. The big thing I love about the drawing in of the days, the darkening skies and the rain is that I know the best time of the year for my favourite beers is coming.

Sure, summers drinking weizen and pale ale are great, but as the things get colder I turn to darker thoughts, a pint of stout, a good strong ESB, a barley wine - I style I only really discovered last Christmas and which became an instant favourite and one that is on special at Starr Hill at the moment, hence I plan to bring some home with me tomorrow and use it for a creamy sauce to go atop my sticky toffee pudding. As I mentioned in my last post, this is the time when I plan to make my autmnal quaffer and some big hitters for the winter. From my provisional brewing calendar, I will making dark and/or strong ales from now until March.

The only problem I have is how to recreate the ideal drinking environs given the size of our flat, and the absence of a live fire. I have a slightly insane idea of buying a proper barbecue, not a gas thing, and using it to have a fire on our covered patio and get a few blankets to drape over the patio furniture. It may also be time to buy a nice bottle of whisky or two, if I can find Talisker over here.

It is also this time of the year that my family starts preparing the traditional Christmas foods. None of your shop bought, over-sugared junk for us, no sir! My mum still makes mincemeat with meat in it, originally a preserving method, still makes proper Christmas pudding, and will soon be making the Christmas cake to be loving fed brandy every weekend until the season is upon us. Mum might be thousands of miles away, but the family recipes are just on the next table, so Mrs Velkyal will be preparing them this year.

I will stop myself there, the temptation to rattle on and on about how much I love autumn and winter is becoming too much! Have a good weekend people!

Machair Mor and Gael 80/-

In the next couple of weeks I plan to do a couple of brews and so went to the local home brew shop to pick up the necessary hops and special grains to complement the DME on its way from Northern Brewer. While at the home brew shop I also picked up a clear 3 gallon carboy, so that I can make smaller batches of beer and because it is transparent will actually be ale to see what is going on.

The first one to go into the new carbaby will be an imperial stout, which I am calling Machair Mor - for those not from the west coast of Scotland, machair is the fertile land between peat bogs and the beach, and mor is the Gaelic word for "big" or "great". Machair Mor is inspired in part by Wrasslers XXXX from the Porterhouse in Dublin, which I really enjoyed when I was over in Ireland last year. The recipe for my beer is as follows:

• 1.75kg Light DME
• 250g Chocolate malt
• 100g Roasted barley
• 100g Flaked oats
• 30g Galena, boiled 60 minutes
• 10g East Kent Goldings, boiled for 15 minutes
• 5g East Kent Goldings, boiled for 5 minutes
• Wyeast Irish Ale

According the Beertools recipe calculator, this should give me an OG of 1.089 - by far the biggest beer I will have made to date, with a projected ABV of 8.7%! In terms of IBUs, my hopping schedule will apparently yield 51 IBUs, just on the lower end of the scale according to their style guides.

The second beer is kind of my autumnal quaffer, an 80/- ale which I am calling Gael 80/-. The recipe for this one is:

• 1kg Light DME
• 55g Crystal 60 malt
• 30g Chocolate malt
• 12g Fuggles, boiled for 60 minutes
• 5g East Kent Goldings, boiled for 15 minutes
• 5g East Kent Goldings, boiled for 1 minute
• Wyeast Scottish Ale

Again, according to Beertools, the OG for this should be in the region of 1.048, giving me an ABV of 4.5%. The IBUs rating for this recipe is 17, again on the lower end of the spectrum, but as Scottish ales are not particularly hoppy anyway, not a problem.

I decided to go back to using the yeast smackpacks from Wyeast as they always fermented when I used them in Prague, so it was a case of better the devil you know. I will also be using Irish Moss in the boil for the first time, so it will be interesting to see what effect that has on the clarity of the end products.

60 Minutes to Hop, 10 to Drink

America is full of beers that have acquired cult status, even bordering on legendary. Every time I meet with a fellow beer geek I am being recommended all manner of stuff; seemingly Colorado is home to some excellent breweries; of course California has Sierra Nevada and the Stone Brewing Company; here in Virginia we (can I say we after a couple of months?) have a slew of craft brewers; and then there are the likes of Samuel Adams and Brooklyn (who I hope make beers better than their pilsner). As is my habit before I go somewhere new, I like to do a bit of research about local beers, and I make it my intention to seek them out, one such brewer that I knew of and was keen to try their wares was the near mythical Dogfish Head. My friend Mark gave me a copy of an article about them some time ago in Prague and my interest was piqued, especially by the concept of continual hopping.

Not only had Mark given me an article about them, but another of my friend's, Jay, had mentioned that since his return from Prague, they had become one of his favourite breweries, notably the 60 Minute IPA. Thus when Jay descended from Philadelphia, he came bearing gifts - 11 bottles, and a can, of varied American craft beer, whose names now grace my Little Cellar Holdings list to the left of this site.

Now, I had certain pre-conceived notions as to what this would taste like. You know the score, American made IPA, so it will be heavy of the C-hops, lots of citrus and hoppy bite but not much of a malty sweetness to back it up. Oops, again my expectations proved to be wrong.

The colour was a beautiful clear amber, as you can see from the pictures, and the head was fairly minimal though came back to life when the glass was swished around. The nose took me aback, where was the grapefruit and orange I expected? There were nice lemon notes there, just not in the abundance I expected, the dominant smell was a sweet toffee laced with cocoa, I was intrigued. Tastewise, the hops and malt were nicely balanced, a good caramelly sweet body with the spiciness of the hops playing off it to perfection. God this was good beer, really, really good beer. Where I was expecting to be sucking lemons and making that sour drink face, this was lusciously smooth, even creamy and so dangerously easy to drink.

Quite simply a lovely beer

Beer and Cheese

When I read around beer blogs, I find that I am in minority when it comes to things such as music in a pub, in that I like a pub to have either a decent sound system and the occasional band. Having said that, I don't like pubs where the music is so loud that it gets in the way of talking with whoever I am there with. I am yet to reach that point where my sole purpose in going to a pub is to drink, I go primarily to meet with friends, or because I know the bar staff and am happy enough to drink at the bar and chat with them. If you ever see me in a pub drinking alone, it is because I am waiting for someone, or because everyone else was busy and so I brought a book with me - downing pint after pint by myself is just not my thing.

Because I like a pub with music, I have recently been wondering if there is any correlation between what is coming through the speakers and what I feel like drinking, so below are different songs and the beer styles (in some cases specific beers) that they put me in mind of, call it a soundtrack to Friday!

• Sweet and Tender Hooligan (song is important here not the "video") - Wychwood Hobgoblin

• Yesterday's Men - a nice pint of mild, ah lovely!

• Dignity (yeah right after 15 pints!) - Gillespie's Scottish Stout, I used to love that stuff

• Disarm - Budvar, a beer and music you don't need to think too much about, just plain good all round

• Folk Police - too much of the imperial stout and I am soon getting homesick, the Peatbog Faeries stoke that fire quite easily

So there you have it, some nice cheesy tunes and beery pairings! have a top weekend people, do good things, like buy calendars! ;)

Better in the Bottle

A few weeks before Mrs Velkyal and I got on the plane to Atlanta, I was sat in PK with Evan, drinking the Primátor Weizen, commenting that it was one of the beers I knew I would miss - really it is that good! Evan mentioned that an esteemed beer blogger/writer (can't remember who it was though) wasn't unduly impressed with it when he had it on draft. Evan then said something along the lines of wheat beer generally being better from the bottle, which of course goes against the grain of so much received wisdom when it comes to beer, but I have to agree.

Most of you probably know that I work at weekends for the Starr Hill brewery, where I serve samples of the brewery's range to visitors, just little 2oz servings of each. When I went to meet the guys there about the job they treated me to a sample of all the beers available in the tasting room, including their wheat beer pictured above. The Love is a perfectly respectable wheat beer, clean, refreshing and enough to make me long for proper bratwurst from an imbissbude on the streets of Dresden (just outside Hauptbahnhof there is a fantastic little snack stand that does a sublime currywurst). I say proper bratwurst because the "brats" I have bought in the shops over here are nothing like the bratwurst I grew up on as a kid in Celle and have an ongoing love affair with (yes, yes I am a Germanophile).

Every time I am working, I have to explain exactly what a wheat beer is, usually followed by the question "what is in the other beers then?", and tell visitors that the bananas and cloves they are experiencing are perfectly normal, and that the slight bubblegum touch is also ok, often much to their wonderment.

Perhaps it is the comfort of drinking at home, although I much prefer being in the pub, even if I am not paying "Tesco prices" to use Cooking Lager's oft mentioned phrase, but I am convinced that The Love is a better beer from the bottle than from the tap. The banana and clove are as present as on tap, but there is just something more lively, slightly more in your face when you pour it from the bottle, and perhaps a touch more body, which fills out the beer perfectly.

The Love very much embodies what Evan and I were discussing that afternoon in PK, and is a very welcome part of my little cellar of treats. Popping open the bottle you see in the pictures last night just brought that whole conversation back, and made me a little nostalgic for the many sessions I had with Evan, Rob and Pivní Filosof in various bars in Prague.

If you haven't already, have a look at the Fuggled calendars(the Lulu links in the corner) and buy one - great photography and a good present for your beer loving mates!