When in Leicester...

More from The Red Hand, this time from 1955. And this picture deserves a post all of its own.

Nowadays, especially in magazines, it's de rigeur to make a potentially humdrum snap a little more exciting by giving it a cheeky caption that in some way takes the piss out of the photo's subjects.

The Red Hand occasionally manages this - apparently without actually trying to be funny.

Take this one: the photo is worthy of any caption competition. But you'd be hard pressed to beat the one that accompanied the original snap.

Yep, what you're looking at here 'has been described' as 'Leicester's most original cocktail bar'.

If there's a higher accolade than that, I have no idea what it is.

Purity and Simpsons - a match made in a very posh kitchen

Back in September I was invited to a beer and food matching dinner at Simpsons restaurant in Birmingham by Purity Brewing. It was an intimate gathering for twenty in a private dining room with chandeliers and silver floral wallpaper.

To the best of their knowledge it was the first serious beer and food matching dinner in the Midlands, after restaurants in London, Leeds and Manchester have started getting quite into it. The fact that it happened the week the brewery announced a like for like annual sales increase of 84% gave the whole evening a triumphal air.

"We're passionate about beer. Andreas, the restaurant owner is passionate about food. We let the French get away with murder with their wines. Let's get a scene going!" said Purity's MD Paul Halsey as we sat down to a daunting-looking menu.

As well as their own beers - Pure Gold, UBU and Mad Goose - Purity have an exclusive import deal in the Midlands for Veltins and Maisel Weisse. These formed the beers. Paul Corbett from hop merchants Charles Farham was on hand to talk about the hops in the beers, and the fresh hops he'd brought with him filled the room with their woozy, resiny perfume.

But I wasn't sure about the menu. I do get frustrated when people talk about beer and food matching or cooking with beer and all they deliver is a steak and ale pie or beer battered cod. But this was at the other end of the scale.

Five courses - and the first one was - according to the menu - 'Terrine of ham hock, chicken and foie gras, sweetcorn puree, truffle vinaigrette'. By any standards this was a bit fancy, but as the first of five courses it filled me with foreboding. And it was to be matched with Veltins Pilsner.

But it worked. Veltins is a big, soft Pilsner, like a comforting bready pillow. There were some diverse flavours in the terrine, but the beer dried off the sensuous, slimy jelly and gave a very decadent dish a sheen of respectability, bringing the whole together and reassuring me that this was indeed a starter.

Next up was 'Escalope of salmon on a bed of sauerkraut, light mustard sauce". Again, what were they thinking? Salmon is reasonably light. I love fish, and here it was being weighed down with mustard and sauerkraut. It was matched with Purity Pure Gold, the lightest beer in the range, brewed with Northern Brewer, Fuggles, Hereford Golding and Styrian Gold hops. That's a big mix of hops. Wasn't the whole thing becoming too tricksy?

Most of my fellow diners were regular customers at the restaurant and this was their first experience of beer with food. A girl opposite me asked if there was honey in the beer. No, just an extraordinarily complex hop character, that also brought a big hit of lemon with it.

And it worked perfectly with the dish. The hoppiness in the beer married with the earthiness of the sauerkraut, and the flavours of the salmon flowed around it. There were hints of smoke and wood, and my brain leapt to images of freshly ploughed fields, damp clear mornings and the first chill of autumn on the air. Not bad for a bit of beer, cabbage and fish.

OK. The next course was there the wheels must surely come off. The menu read like something from the last days of Nero's Rome: 'Slow-cooked belly of sucking pig, ravioli of braised trotter, fennel compote, spiced baby pears, honey & cracked pepper sauce'. I expected I was going to have to eat it from the naked belly of a Reubenesque model. What next - lark's tongues? I started to suspect someone in the kitchen needed a holiday.

And I wasn't sure about matching all this with Mad Goose. Brewed with Northern Brewer, Cascade and Willamette for a fruitier, more rounded flavour, it may be SIBA's best bitter of the year but there was an absence of hoppy notes on the nose for me - all I was getting was caramel.

Of course, it worked. I mean, this was just mental. How could something so ridiculous actually make any sense? But it did.

What looked on the menu like a banquet fit for Mr Creosote's last supper was of course exquisitely presented. There was just a tiny bit of everything mentioned, arranged artfully on the plate with dun swirls and gravy flourishes - though my use of the word gravy in this context is probably as welcome as nails clawing a chalkboard.

The buttery, opulent sweetness of the pork crackling took down the bolshy caramel of the beer as if with a taser, allowing the spicy hops to come out to play and wrap themselves around the pork. Finally, the dish made sense.

There was more to come, of course. Pudding was 'Caramelised banana, caramel parfait, peanut butter ice cream'. The match with Maisel's Weisse was an easy win, schoolboy simple. The banoffee yeast character of the beer was going to make love to this dish. Put off only briefly by the fact that the caramelised banana looked exactly like a burnt Wall's sausage, I dived in. Everything I expected was there, the beer merging with a nicely tart orange and banana finish. But there was more too. The caramel biscuit at the bottom of the parfait, together with the caramel sauce, made me realise what a big caramel character there is to the beer. My stomach expanded, and began to creak.

Mercifully, it was almost over - just one more course to go. And what was that course? A little petit fours, perhaps? A nice, palate cleansing sorbet?

The only surprising thing is that there was still something they could do that did surprise me: 'Welsh rarebit'. No flowery descriptions or flourishes, just 'Welsh rarebit'. Cheese on toast, after four courses. Why not? Apparently it used to be traditional.

It was matched with UBU. The whole thing was dark and rich and lovely. No more. My hand had become too fat to write.

This was one of those meals after which you don't eat for twenty four hours. It was extraordinarily ambitious. I think it's probably a little too much for most people, and it was telling that, after the plates were finally cleared, most diners opted for a glass of burgundy or port rather than continuing to drink the excellent UBU.

But the restaurant and the brewer had set out to prove a point, and they had proved it. These were very fine beers, but they can't really be described as 'speciality' or 'extreme' in any way. And yet they were paired with Masterchef Grand Final levels of Fancy Dan food, and gave as good as they got. They worked perfectly, and in some cases stopped the dish from becoming too much.

I offer this account as proof to anyone who thinks beer and food matching can only work on a basic, clunky pub grub level.

Just don't hold your breath that pig's trotter ravioli will be appearing on the menu down your local any time soon.

The Red Hand Part II

Later in the same magazine from which I scanned yesterday's pictures, there's another side entirely to the Ind Coope & Allsopp estate.

Yesterday's pics seemed to offer a window onto the golden age of the pub as a centre of the community. But this age was passing even as it was being recorded. A few pages on, we get a big feature on the new jewel in the company's crown: the Hotel Leofric in Coventry.

The magazine uses the word 'splendour' to describe it. What word would you use?

While it was being prepared for opening, the manager slept on a mattress on the floor. 300 men were working on it, and their wives were bussed in from Burton to do the cleaning.

Pride and joy is the silver grill, where you can select your steak and watch it cooking:

If you don't fancy that, there's the snack bar, boasting a quick counter meal and "the longest bar in the Midlands". This huge room is windowless, but "modern lighting and air-conditioning give it an all-the-year-round summer atmosphere".

My favourite bit though is the cocktail bar, with its "unusual wall decoration". Yes. Unusual. That's a good word. This "intimate yet opulent" setting features a "cosy lounge atmosphere with a delightful Emmet-type mural."

The thing is, last year I stayed in a hotel in Sheffield that looked pretty much identical to this one, clearly untouched for at least thirty years. It was so appalling, I went all the way through anger and disgust in a second, and came out the other side and actually enjoyed the tackiness, the sense of desolation, the broken dreams of mid-century modernism, the short-sighted folly of the architects who sought to build a brave new post-war world, futuristic and yet, at the same time, with no provision whatsoever for surviving in any decent shape beyond the present moment it was built.

Funny how the average boozers featured elsewhere in the magazine would still look appealing today, innit?

Museum Brewery Queen's Ale Part II

I'm getting shoddy. Just found my tasting notes for the Queen's Ale I mentioned yesterday.

We opened a bottle in the brewery at around 9pm, twelve hours into our two day brewing session. It poured a dark chocolate brown with an acne-yellow head. Look, I know that makes it sound unappetising, but that's the colour it was. Maybe it was just the weak light in the brewery office.

There was a dusty old ale aroma at first, followed by sherry, port, chocolate, chicory, and hints of leather and wet autumn leaves. And then, on the palate it went berserk. It did the whole lot - the sweetness and acidity of wine, a meaty umame taste in the middle and strong bitterness at the end. All these flavours got on with each other quite happily, united in a pleasingly smooth mouthfeel. Molasses and caramel were there, but only fleetingly. After the overture, a second mouthful brought out touches of honey, banana, cinnamon and espresso grounds.

Steve and Jo, who brewed the beer, hadn't previously tasted one as old as this. They were shocked at how dramatically it had developed since its youth as a mere barley wine.

John Keeling, who brews Fuller's Vintage Ale, talks about 'sine waves' in his beer, trying to explain how the character ebbs and flows over the years it ages.

I've no idea what kind of maths, physics, chemistry or plain old-fashioned juju is going on in Queen's Ale. But you can understand why it's perfect for a Christmas pudding. And why I was so upset about using it for this purpose.

The Red Hand cometh

I got my scanner working again. This means I can scan in some pics from a couple of magazines I picked up from a tat stall (sorry - "breweriana" emporium) at the Great British Beer Festival in August.

Since doing Hops & Glory I've been fascinated by Allsopps - the forgotten man of Burton. By the mid-fifties they were Ind Coope and Allsopp and their days as the brewer of the first Burton IPA were almost forgotten. The industry was undergoing massive change, and you get a snapshot of this change in the pages of The Red Hand, the staff magazine they published. Some of these are fascinating, others unintentionally funny more than half a century since they were published. I'm going to mix them up and post a few over the next few days.

Here's the opener, from a magazine published in 1956:

There's all sorts happening in Ind Coope & Allsopp's pubs. The barmaid at the Fox and Hounds has been "televised as one of the prettiest girls in the Leeds area". It would be beneath you to make a crack about what this says about the standard of prettiness in Leeds.

Next, Mr and Mrs Parker enjoyed their Golden Wedding Party down at the local:

But my favourite has to be the Admiralty Tavern's Easter bonnet parade:

The serious point here is that this all challenges the idea that pubs were until recently the preserve of blokes. These pics show the pub as the obvious place to go for any event, the beating heart of the communities they inhabit. Landlords - come on, we talk about all these pub closures and declining attendance - you can't get an Easter Bonnet Parade with your 24 pack of Carling from Tesco's can you?

Hops and History

The Westerham Brewery recently launched a new beer. The story behind it really fired my imagination and tickled my history muscle. So I wrote about it in this week's Publican, and you can read it here.

As posh as the queen

I spent two days in Burton-on-Trent last week, brewing No.1 Barley Wine and P2 Stout in the White Shield Brewery with Steve Wellington. I'm spending today writing up the story - complete with some exciting news about the future of the brewery - for a piece in CAMRA's Beer magazine. It'll be running in the Spring 2010 issue, out around February.

Anyway, while I was up there, Mrs PBBB - sorry, The Beer Widow - phoned me to discuss Christmas pudding plans. We've never made our own Christmas pudding before, and she'd been rooting around for recipes. This is the week you 'traditionally' make your pudding, apparently. Anyway, she'd found a Delia recipe which called for some barley wine and stout. Hey, I was brewing barley wine and stout! There was no barley wine near to hand, but I was sure Steve would let me have a bottle of P2 for the pud.

But Steve went one better than that. Yes, he gave me several bottles of P2. But when I told him what I wanted it for, he also gave me a bottle of Queen's Ale.

This is a special brew of No.1 Barley Wine brewed in 2002 to commemorate the Queen's Golden Jubilee. There are not many bottles left lying around the brewery, and we'd just polished one off for elevenses because Steve hadn't tasted it for a while. It was sublime - dark and rich and sherrylike but not too aggressive. The age on it had done wonderful things, creating a beer that was still a beer but as soft and mellow and deep and satisfying as a vintage Bordeaux.

The thing is, Buckingham Palace use it to marinate the fruit they put in the Royal Christmas pudding. And that's why Steve very, very kindly gave me a bottle to bring home for TBW.

This was one of those crises of conscience. All I wanted to do was stash it safely in my cellar, or maybe sneak it up to the study to enjoy to myself on a dark and stormy night. But Steve had only given it to me because of the pudding story. It seemed like a waste for such an amazing beer. But I wouldn't have it in my possession otherwise. With a heavy heart and some anguished mewling noises, I gave it to TBW. On Friday night, after a few tweaks to the Delia recipe, she poured it over some fruit.

Well, at least our Christmas pudding will be as posh as the Queen's.

Yesterday was the final mixing of the pudding before cooking. Its traditional to gather round and let each family member have a stir, and make a wish as they do so. I wished I could have some more Queen's Ale.

Later, I went down to tidy the beer cellar and try to make some room - it's a bit overfull at the moment. And lo, as I tried to make sense of the barley wine and vintage ale shelf, I found not one, but two bottles of Queen's Ale that the generous-to-a-fault master brewer of Burton must have given me when we were working together brewing Calcutta IPA, my Hops and Glory beer.

The magic of Christmas is at work already.