Boston returns!

I can now add two more things to my list of “Stuff I hold to be absolutely true”.  One is that a Boston Brewery Beer event is always worth it and the other is that the locals in my village won’t notice a good a thing if it bit them in the arse and started burrowing.  ⁽¹⁾ All this from a single event at the country club attended by all of 10 people.  Sages I should say.  A food and beer pairing event hosted by Boston marketing guy Russell Meyer and food from the club’s restaurant. 

1^st pairing a smoked salmon mix on a toasted bread, (They called it a canapé.  I call it lovely.)  With the Johnny Gold Weiss. ⁽²⁾ The idea is that classic German Weiss pairs well with seafood.  As a fan of the former and not the latter I think that this Weiss pairs very well with air.  This pairing worked nearly as well.

Up next the nearly incomparable in SA Whale Tale Ale.  I used drink quite a lot of this, but have been logistically constraint in my intake lately.  Here paired with sosaties of boerewors and cheese griller on baked mash.  Just look at it!  Maltiness paired with proteins the idea here and it worked very well.  Consensus around our table was that this was really good to drink, lowish alcohol and why the hell don’t we drink this more often?  Luckily Boston delivers in Cape Town.

They make 9 different beers and also brew some beer for others on contract, but it was a school night, so they stuck to 4 beers.   

The first brewed commercially, and flagship, Boston Lager, served with a steak pie and chips.  The cow that ended up in the steak pie died an honourable death and completed it’s use in a delicious pie served with the lager.  A good beer and a good match.  Really, the only way you can go wrong with this lager is if you washed your hair with it.  While it is probably good for your hair, it would be wrong not to drink it. 

 

Previously I’ve encountered stout and chocolate cake and generally it makes for a good match.  The darkly roasted malts echoing something in the cocoa.  So the Coffee stout (with actual coffee beans added to the boil) was a little rough on its own, but formed a lovely duet with the chocolate cake. Russell made this match, but added a wild card in the form of the Van Hunks Pumpkin Ale. This ale with butternut, pumpkin, cinnamon and coriander works extremely well with Thai green curry.  And with most curries come think of it.  It also worked here with the chocolate cake.  I wish I knew why, but that’s why they pay Russell the big bucks I guess.  

 

(1)    OK, maybe this is not a good idea, but I liked the analogy.

(2)    And if that joke has to be explained to you, your Google skills suck.

pictures of the food by myself and the logos from Boston's website

Baby’s first wine tour

It has become customary to record the firsts in your live.  But for a lot of these you are too infantile to do the recording yourself.  Like many things early in life therefore, it falls to the parents to do the recording.  Luckily with the ubiquitous cell phone camera, this is now easy.  Let me as a non-parent do it with words.

The Ghanaians (He, she and baby⁽¹⁾) went wine tasting in the Riebeek Valley and I tagged along. 

First stop Pulpit Rock.  This remains an easy stop.  The tasting room staff is invariably friendly, knowledgeable and on this occasion good looking.  We tasted on two tracks. The He-Ghanaian went his usual red route and I went white.  Both directions yielded pleasure and bargains here.  Their reserve range sells at around R70 a bottle and is nearly a steal at this price.  As Baby-Ghanaian packs a lot into the boot we were forced to buy bottles and not cases. 

Down the road to an all time favourite Allesverloren.  Happily long gone are the days when one encountered a reluctant seller.  I should not use the word Battleaxe behind the counter for it would be rude.  Accurate, but rude.  So let me postulate that she liked to drink the wine so much, she hated parting with it even for money.  Such a big difference these last few years.  Amanda, the transplanted Gautenger who helped us on the day, doesn’t like the product, she gushes with enthusiasm for it.  She shared knowledge, anecdotes and tasting techniques.  Well worth a visit.  I hope I heard correctly they make 150 000l of port and somewhat less of the excellent Mrs A’s chutney.  Yes the A is for Amanda.

At Het Vlock Kasteel they have more olivy things that I knew existed and the wines were better than I remembered.  They have jams, oils, dukkah and olives.  Garlic olives, chilli olives, smoked olives, balsamic smoked olives and sometimes in a dark corner, just plain olives.  I liked the smoked balsamic jobbies and not just because a pretty blonde presented them. Make a plan and get here, even if like me, olives are not amongst your favourite things.

The only disappointment at lunch venue, Cafe Felix, was that there were no cats on the menu.  Between the four of us we had pork belly, lamb shanks, Norwegian salmon and puréed vegetables with pasta.  Only one of us disrespected the food by a) Spitting it out, b) playing with it and c) concentrating on the bone rather than the meat.  I’ll leave it to you to figure out who had what.

After lunch we went for a tasting arranged at Platter’s winery of the year 2014. Mullineux family winery where a charming and infotaining Samantha awaited us.  Their Kloof Street range of red and white is nice enough and more importantly; affordable.  A step up is the Mullineux white blend.  Made, like everything else, from leased older vineyards scattered around the Swartland.  Stock rose.  Mine, not theirs.  The Syrah was very good indeed.  Some went to the Ghanaian home.  I declined only for reasons of too much red stock.  Highlight of the tasting was the straw wine.  Grapes concentrated by picking and then hanging on effectively a washing line before making a sweet wine.  This stuff is brilliant.  You should get as much of it as you can.  Leaving me a few bottles a year of course.

By now Baby Ghanaian had had enough.  Clearly annoyed that we dragged her to several wineries and never allowed her to taste.  Thus it was a very quick pop into The Wine Kollective where on the staff’s recommendation for “White blends, mid priced” I bought the very good Nativo and Wildehurst Velho Blanc.  Also spotted the bubbles Christiaan Eedes wrote about here.  Let me say that I do not share his enthusiasm and thought the wine way too acidic and now feel stupid for spending R266 on an untasted bottle.

Just before we left the charming town I accumulated two packets of coffee beans from Beans about Coffee.  The towns remain a favourite destination of mine with the only drawback the disgustingly low density of breweries. 

(1)    Did you really think I was about to write the It-Ghanaian?

Boston beer tasting at Langebaan Country Estate

I have driven many kilometers to get to Boston’s beers before.  This time I walked all the way to the local golf course where once again I realised THESE ARE NOT MY PEOPLE.  Not only did very few try the free beer on offer, but even fewer bought it.  Thus proving that their lack of taste in clothes extend to beer as well.  It was also someone’s birthday party.  Couple a birthday to a golf day and boring speeches are inevitable.  This turned into somewhat of a conflict. 

The beer tasting turned into a Kalmer Karma (now closed for renovations) reunion.  So the younger part of the usual gang of idiots ⁽¹⁾  gathered for the beer.  Brought together by the Barefoot Bartender, who ironically, does not like beer.  As we worked our way through the beer on offer the speeches droned on in the background.  On several occasions some of the golfers tried to silence the good mood.  Mostly, it has to be said, the greyer members.  Nothing wrong with surviving until your hearing goes, but in that case either stand closer or ask the guy with the %##$%#$ mike  to turn the volume up.

Had a taste of the newest Boston baby.  The Honey Blonde Ale.  A wheat beer made with more neutral yeast than a Weiss and with added fynbos honey.  Very drinkable beer, not overly flavoured.  Not one that will get the hop heads excited, but I can well understand why it is turning out to be Boston’s fastest growing new product.   This makes for a great introduction to craft beer.  No point in going on again about the excellent range of other beers. 

In an excellent piece of writing Pete Brown, eminent British beer writer, wrote “With great beer comes great responsibility”.  Sadly, this responsibility doesn’t rest easily on the bar staff at the Country Estate.  One of whom took to tipping himself.  I would have given him the R10 anyhow, but it is my job to tip him, not his.  Bad service can spoil good beer.  Boston being so good I might give the staff one more chance.  Or one can hope that the local Pick n Pay will start stocking it if one nags enough. 

When the golfers left, the beer tasted even better.  The evening ended on a high when the Barefoot Bartender brought us Oktoberfest and Cape of Good Hops from CBC.

(1)    On the masthead of MAD Magazine the contributing artists were referred to as The Usual Gang of Idiots.  So it is a term of respect.

Meet the brewers Woodstock

The road to Damascus is often the road less travelled by⁽¹⁾ Sometimes it is a tortuous route, sometimes meandering, seldom straightforward.  I do not know which is the one taken by Andre Viljoen, but going from banking to owner of a brewery and restaurant seems a less than obvious path.  We met about 4 years ago at a SouthYeaster’s meeting where he expressed great enthusiasm for the brewery he was starting in Woodstock ⁽²⁾  He would have been the first of the new generation of brewers in that part of town.  Despite various obstacles he finally succeeded in being the (at least) 4th brewery located there. Devil’s Peak, Gallows Hill, Garagista and now Woodstock Brewery.  Also coming is Woodstock cooperative brewery,  Riot Factory might be before them.

We remet (is that a word?)  at the excellent Meet the Brewers event on 22 September 2014 and I am glad to report Andre hasn’t lost his enthusiasm for the beer world.  Woodstock’s location makes it a good location for a small manufacturing business. Distance to Cape Town central, access to main transport arteries and I guess the zoning helps.⁽³⁾Woodstock evokes images of Sex Drugs and Rock and Roll from the 1968 music festival.  Images of parking problems, dodgy part of town in connotation with Cape Town also appears.   Therefore the naming convention of the beers sort of leans to Sex, Drugs and Boerie Rolls.

Beerhouse resident chef Roy McAskill returned from Scotland (where he was just a spectator in the voting) just in time for the Woodstock tasting.  First off was the Bing's Bru .⁽⁴⁾  pale ale pared with a McAskil regular, 12 months old Klein Rivier Gruyere this time in a Welsh rarebit guise with green fig.  A combination that worked for me.   

Another McAskill regular is the smoked mackerel pate.  This time pairing with the Belgian amber ale.  I expected more from Belgian Amber ale, but then Mr Viljoen steered me in the direction of De Konick.  Known in it’s homeland as ‘n Bolleke.  My disappointment with this beer was a result of the words Belgian Ale and Amber Ale.  It evoked memories of strong, flavoured beer, but the regular De Koninck is neither.  This Amber Ale is a well made beer, nothing wrong with it.  It is a bit bland compared to the others, but that makes it a great crossover.⁽⁵⁾   beer.

 

At 7.2% an IPA can be daunting, here paired with a Mango curry pie, it sort of worked.  Called Californicator it links to a West Coast IPA and Woodstockian activities (the festival).  The aroma hops is local, a design decision based on cost and provenance.  It is dry hopped with IBU score of about 65.  For my distinctly non hophead palate it tasted very good.  Plans are to lower the alcohol a smidgen. 

“We must have a session beer”.  Session being industry speak for beer you can drink a lot of before losing gross motor skills (fine motor skill being long gone). That was Andre’s take on the unfiltered Happy Pils.  Paired with berries and what I call custard (Chef McAskill , more specifically  calls it Sabyon Glaze. Go look it up, I had to) made with the beer, it made for a good dessert.  This is a very good pilsner.  So confident was Mr Viljoen he brought tasters of Pilsner Urquell and CBC Pilsner for us to compare.  Stylistically very different beers and I liked all of them.  The Woodstock and CBC at a better price point.

Once again well worth the 240km round trip.  Give the guys at Woodstock brewery a shout and visit the brewery, drink their beers.  Tell them I sent you.  Not that it would make a difference, these guys love to share their work.

(1)    Pompous sentence right out of the blocks.

(2)    A part of Cape Town I still consider to be dodgy

(3)    Beer is considered to be a manufactured product, thus needs industrial zoning.  Wine is somehow agricultural.  Hello regulators “Get a @#@#$$%#@$$% life.  And brain while you’re at it”

(4)    Named for Cape radio and surf legend Deon Bing

(5)    Crossover from standard mass market lagers that is.