Multi-award winning Redwell brewery has certainly been doing something right since its 2013 launch, having created a range of vegan-friendly beers and been handed the accolade for best can design at the Indie Beer Can Festival in 2016. Continue reading
You can’t even look at advent calendars this year without seeing the word “gin”, so trendy has the juniper tipple become. Its popularity has exploded in recent years, with experts crediting the influence of bartenders, gin’s ubiquity in cocktails, and its short production time and versatility for the boom. Continue reading
Beer so local it’s brewed on site, British tapas, and vegetarian food options galore? Count us in.
This corner of Norwich has certainly improved since the days the site hosted Delaneys. The stretch from Grapes Hill all the way down to Elm Hill is fast becoming a foodie mecca, playing host to quirky cafes and the infamous Benedicts restaurant. Just up the road from the gin-distilling Ten Bells, and next to the home of Norwich’s beer festival, St Andrews Brew House, with more than 30 different types of ale, lager, and craft beer on offer, certainly fits in here. Continue reading
Aren’t they the three best words to see together? I mean, of course there’s “I love you” and “Dinner is ready!” but…cheddar beer bread.
It’s been a bit of a month for bread around here, as I spend my weekends scouting out local bakeries and other produce and, well, it’d be rude not to take some home for the week, right?
But I’ll leave the complicated styles to the pros. This bread – the type that doesn’t require rising time or kneading – takes about an hour from start to finish, so it’s a great easy accompaniment to a hearty autumn stew or chilli. (The ease is a relief when you’ve spent the first half of your evening chopping, stirring, and lifting absurdly heavy pans in an effort to batch-cook something excellent.)
I feel like the base recipe also has plenty of scope for adaptions – herbs? Heavier beers and cocoa? More cheeses?
But we’ll start with this. Cheddar beer bread, I love you (dinner is ready!).
We all do different things to unwind. I can’t fathom going for a run to clear your head, or playing first person shooting games for hours. But one of my old post-work rituals was befitting of someone about 40 years older than me and the opposite gender – a nice quiet pub, a pint of ale, and a book. Shoes off and feet up on the sofa like I lived there, it was a sanctuary away from work stress and, crucially, out of the tiny flat I lived in. It’s also where I became “a beer drinker”.
There’s this idea, somehow, that women don’t drink beer, that all we really want is a white wine or maybe a G&T. But, although an adolescence that featured only Fosters or Boddingtons should have put me off, I can attest firmly to the fact that we quite like a pint, too.
So of course, when an email landed in my inbox about the Ladies Love Beer night at Neighbourhood, near Stratford, I was quick to confirm that I’d be there with bells on.
I went into the event a little sceptical – purely because my taste is quite specifically the darker, richer end of the spectrum. I’m not into “hoppy”, or “citrus”, and I’m certainly against lagers, which to me often taste more like they should be in the back room of a doctor’s surgery in a sample pot. So I headed off to Very East London, and I was pleasantly surprised. Continue reading