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?