Beer Jelly - The Session #30

This month the session hosted over at Beer47 is on the subject of beer deserts. I decided to take it literally and make a desert from beer trying out a recipe I'd been wanting to make for a while. It's from Appetite for Ale by Will Beckett and Fiona Beckett. I love this book, it's like a manual on how to match food and beer with recipes as a bonus.

I made the beer jelly recipe from the book. I used Liefmann's Kriek since the off license didn't have any Floris. I'll probably use Floris in a future version of this recipe since it's pretty sweet and comes in lots of different flavours which you can match to the fruit used in the jelly. Since I was using kriek beer I used preserved cherries from the local Polish shop, these are one of the few things you find preserved in jars from Poland that are actually nice. I also put in some fresh raspberries. Leaf gelatine and some sugar completed the ingredients.

I never knew making real jelly was so easy. I always used stuff from packets but now I've used the gelatine I'll be on the look out for new jelly recipes. A few hours in the fridge and it was all set.

We had some friends over for dinner and they tested out the jelly. We topped it with some vanilla ice cream. It was really good. I didn't sweeten up the beer too much so there was a lovely lambic tartness to the jelly which worked really well as jelly is usually too sticky sweet for me. I paired it with some Rodenbach Grand Cru. I love this beer but I do think it's one of those love or hate it affairs. It's fruity and sour and a bit complicated. I think it went well with the jelly for me. If you have a sweet tooth I think something a bit sweeter would go better with it. Or you could just drink the beer that the jelly was made from. In this case Liefmann's kriek was too expensive to buy a few of so I just used it to make the jelly.

I'll definitely make beer jelly again so thanks to the session for giving me the push to try it out.

The Session 27: Beer Cocktails

The Session this month is hosted by Beer At Joes and is called Beyond the Black and Tan (Beer Cocktails). In America a Black and Tan is a mixture of pale ale and porter but we don't get them in Ireland. A word of warning if you're American walking into most Irish bars and asking for a Black and Tan will at best get you a three hour history lesson from a drunk local and at worst you'll be asked to leave. I think the closest we get to beer cocktails in Ireland is when women get Guinness with a dash of blackcurrant cordial in them. Usually though the blackcurrant is just put in there until you get used to the taste and then you just drink normal Guinness.

The other time I saw a beer cocktail was when I was in Havana last year. In the Caribbean they are crazy for cocktails and in Cuba the mojito is king. I love mojitos and due to almost constant food poisoning I gave up eating and just drank mojitos for the few days we were there. We went to Taverna de la Muralla on the Plaza Vieja which is Havana's brew pub. They brew three beers and they also offer beer cocktails. One was a mojito made with their blonde ale. It's a nice if odd drink. It tasted more of mojito than beer if I remember rightly.

Dave has blogged before about the insane combination of Guinness and Red Bull that you get in Jamaica. It tastes horrible but that's not the point. We asked some barmen in our hotel what we should drink at a wedding in Kingston and they said Guinness and Red Bull so you get drunk and can dance all night. You certainly need energy if you're going to be dancing to Jamaican dancehall all night. Dancehall sounds like a bunch of power tools being randomly being turned on and off. It makes no sense until you dance to it. Though being Irish we weren't very good, all the Jamaicans are incredible dancers, even old grannies and they know all the moves to every song.

I can't resist putting up this photo again as it's so funny. It's The Beer Nut and Dave enjoying a picon beer. It's bavaria mixed with sirop de picon. I like Bavaria as it reminds me of sitting outside the Pav bar in Trinity watching the cricket. Me and my pals would come up from our underground laser lab to see some real daylight and drink a six pack of cheap Bavaria. Even better the crazy, french, obsessed by physics postdoc I worked with would go home and not come to the pub. He never talked about anything but our project and talking about resonance energy transfer in nanocrystals while slightly merry was never a forte of mine. We never knew that we could have claimed to be classy by pouring in some picon into our cans.

I really don't know many beer cocktails but maybe in honour of this session I'll try some of the ones posted by fellow session bloggers this weekend.

The Session 25: Love Lager

This month The Beer Nut hosts the session with the title love lager. He exhorts us to just get out there and have what the next guy's having.

It's cold and there's no sign of spring so I'm going to talk about Red Stripe beer. It brings me back to Negril, Jamaica where Dave and I got married last year. Red Stripe is the ordinary everyday beer in Jamaica. We drank a lot of cocktails in the evenings but for a sneaky drink during the day Red Stripe light is great as it's low alcohol. We discovered that for special occasions when you need to dance all night Guinness and Red Bull is the drink of choice. Red Stripe light tastes of nothing really but Red Stripe is ok. When it's really warm soft drinks are just too sweet to quench your thirst but beer really works.

So here's to sitting back with a Red Stripe and gazing out at a view as relaxing as this one.





I have some slightly related lager news about my Cold Weather Kolsch. I said I came back after christmas to find the Better Bottle had leaked as I hadn't completely closed the high flow valve. I learned that lesson and it's all working well now. The better bottles are great, I can rack to secondary from them easily and bottle straight from them.

I left the Kolsch in the bottle and forgot about it. I went to empty it this week and tasted some to see how bad it was and was surprised to find it tasted ok, not just ok fairly good. I racked it to my keg and injected some carbon dioxide. Now I just have to wait until it carbonates but I think it might be fine to drink. More than that it might be drinkable. Another home brewing lesson learned, don't throw out beer until you're sure it's gone off.

The Session 24: A Tripel For Two

This month over at Musings Over A Pint the session is being held on the subject of A Tripel For Two. They must be getting into the valentines spirit already. I hate valentine's day, it's all too contrived for me, but sharing a beer you love with someone you love now that sounds ok to me. I'd have to pick my favourite tripel Maredsous 10 to share. It's one of my favourite beers, it has all the things that Belgian beers do well. Sweet, strong and spicy with good yeast character.
Of course I'd share it with my lovely husband over a nice home cooked dinner.

This reminds me, I've been planning my next brew for a while now. It's going to be a Belgian dubbel so it fits in with this post. I'm hoping to get it done next week. I have some nice caramunch malt that will combine with crystal and a dose of sugar to give a strong sweet malty beer. I even have the right yeast this time, some Safbrew s33. I'll ferment this in the sitting room by the radiator for some warmth. My fermenting room is pretty cold, I think it's too cold and my beers have been lacking yeast character. This is fine if you don't want yeast character but in a Belgian dubbel I want that fruity estery taste. It'll be an all grain brew so it will take all day but it's worth it.

The Session

This month The Session asks What's your favourite beer and why? This is a really hard question. I like lots of different beers, my faourite can change with the seasons and my mood. When talking about a favourite beer it's tempting to go for something really unusual and say it's your favourite to impress people. I'd be inclined to pick a beer I love but sometimes these can be strong beers that I can only have one of. I should go for something I drink on a regular basis. So by that definition my favourite beer would be Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Pale ales are one of my favourite styles of beer. To me they should be well balanced, tasty and easy to drink. This doesn't has to mean dull though. Sierra Nevada pale ale is all the above but it also adds a lovely fruity flavour which I assume is from the yeast. Not all beer has to be crazy and out there. Sometimes you want something solid and tasty to drink. And this beer is it.

The session - Beer and Memories

The session this month is being hosted by The Bath Tub Brewery on beer and memories. Is there a beer that reminds you of a specific memory? Here's a few.

Real english ale from a hand pump always reminds me of Yorkshire and caving. After a hard cave a pint of ale and a pie is super tasty. It often reminds me of the trip when I was still a young energetic caver and decided that I would climb back up the 80 metres of rope to get out of Alum pot.





Orval and the other trappist beers remind me of when I lived in Kilkenny and discovered the The Wine Centre. There are so many churches and monasteries in Kilkenny that I'm sure back in the day the monks used to brew interesting beers just the belgians still do. Orval is my favourite trappist beer. I love the yeasty aroma and the slightly leathery taste. The photo is of St. Francis Abbey in the middle of the brewery in Kilkenny. It's the less seen view of the abbey from the back with it's beautiful intact window.

When I have Fraoch heather beer I'm reminded of a trip to Edinburgh for hogmanay. Dave and I went to visit a friend of his and his girlfriend. The trip was a bit of a disaster as Dave's friend had an infection which I also got. We both sat there so sick we were unable to leave the apartment. Dave's friend even ended up in hospital for a while. So the celebrations were a bit muted to say the least. We did get to try this lovely beer while there though.


Hoegaarden in a big huge glass with a slice of lemon reminds me of bicycles and Holland. I lived in Eindhoven, the world's least exciting place, and spent many hours cycling around it on the lovely flat cycle paths on those lovely kronan bicycles.

At the moment I'm decorating the house so maybe the taste of the banana bread beer I'm having at the moment will mix with the smell of paint and remind me of decorating for ever more.

How it all started

I've decided to do my first session blog post although it is a day late. I didn't really try any new or different beers until about five years ago. I had worked in an off license and knew quite a bit about wine and I would try out all sorts of wines but I never thought about beer in quite the same way. It was just something you drank but wasn't particularly nice. Then a visit to Yorkshire changed that. I discovered all sorts of different real ales and they were really nice. You couldn't get the same variety of beer in Ireland but my interest in beer started there. A friend of mine introduced me to a great off license in Waterford, World Wide Wines where I could get lots of different beers which I started to try. It was just after this that I got a job in a brewery and that's when my interest in beer and it's brewing really took off. I tried to brew two kits the first of which was horrible, the second was ok but the barrel leaked all over my parents house. So I waited until I moved to Dublin to brew again. I moved to extract and boiling and the beers I've made have been good. I now appreciate good beers and will go off on odysseys to get them. I think knowing more about beer and appreciating it has actually contributed to me drinking less. I'll have a few really nice beers and because they are so full of flavour I'm happy at that. It's hard to go back to bland beer once you've tasted the decent stuff so in most pubs I don't even bother if all they have is the same old same old.