2012 February » Pete Drinks

A guest post from my wife Kavey, author of Kavey Eats.

I know very little about rice wines and had certainly never heard of Vietnamese rice wine liqueurs until invited to try them at Pho restaurant.

Unlike (grape) wine, made by fermenting the juice of grapes, rice wine is made by fermenting the starch in rice. It’s actually a little closer to how beer is brewed rather than how (grape) wine is made, but whereas the malting process naturally develops the enzymes necessary to convert beer grain starches into sugar, a mould called Aspergillus oryzae is usually added to rice topromote the starch to sugar conversion process. Incidentally, the same mould is also used to create miso and soy sauce by fermenting soy beans.

Although different varieties of rice wine are made and enjoyed throughout East Asia, in China, Korea, Bali, Laos, Burma, the Phillipines, even parts of India… like many in the UK, I had previously only encountered sake – Japanese rice wine.

On their most recent trip to Vietnam, Stephen and Juliette Wall, the owners of Pho restaurants, fell in love with Vietnamese rice wines and rice liqueurs, and decided to bring a range made by Son Tinh to the UK.

Son Tinh make their rice wine products using a traditional process, as described here.

Usually served as an after-meal digestif, you can choose from plain light or dark rice wine liqueurs, fruit liqueurs in plum, passion fruit and apricot flavours, and a red sticky rice wine liqueur, said to be reminiscent of port.

Plum rice wine liqueur – dark fruit flavours, a smoky aroma and taste, smooth, the sweet and sour are nicely balanced.

Passion fruit rice wine liqueur – the fruit aromas and flavours are far more subtle than the plum, and the sourness packs a much bigger punch than the sweet. This was one was too sharp for my tastes.

Apricot rice wine liqueur – the sharpest of the three fruit wine liqueurs, but with more of a fruit flavour than the passion fruit, though it tasted more like citrus than passion fruit to me.

Red Sticky Rice Port – for me, this one had a distinctly fishy smell, perhaps a trick of the mind brought on by the strongly miso and Marmite umami flavours? That savoury taste, along with the sharp sour notes that seem intrinsic to these rice wine liqueurs meant that this one was definitely not for me, though it’ll likely be popular with those who embrace bitter flavours.

With my sweet tooth, the plum flavour was definitely my favourite, and my friend picked the same choice from the four above.

If you are looking for a different drink experience, and want to try something new, do consider checking out these Vietnamese rice wine liqueurs.

Kavey was a guest of Pho.

This week’s review is something of a last minute rush, as I left everything to the last minute (as usual!) and then found myself in an excellent pub instead of at home with my beer supply.

Happily, The Bull has a wonderful beer list, including plenty of tasty monsters. And so, with apologies to the crappy phone photograph, here is today’s offering.

This is Brooklyn Brewery’s Black Chocolate Stout, a 10% extra strong imperial stout from the US. It sits jet black and guinness-like in the glass, with a deep tan fine foamed head.

The beer has been served chilled, which cuts the aroma back initially. It has a sweet rich nose which is quite malty, and with a hint of molasses. There’s not much in the way of alcohol, and I’m not really getting chocolate either.

In the mouth, it’s very thick, syrupy and big bodied, just as a stout should be. There’s a sticky black treacle taste, with quite a big belt of bitterness at the end which cuts that sweetness back – although its almost overdone. There’s a hint of roasted coffee but I’m still not seeing any real chocolate to the flavour. The alcohol is still understated and that bitter tail is slightly overpowering but overall it’s a tasty beer.

It’s thick enough to be a monster but surprisingly lacking in punch and complexity. Overall, it’s a nice beer but there are better imperial stouts to be had.

After mentioning it in last week’s post, it only seems right to give the bottle that re-introduced me to bourbon a post of it’s own.

A couple of years ago we were on holiday with a friend who had spent some time in the States and on noticing this in the local supermarket, he excitedly bought a bottle for us to enjoy that evening. Perhaps the best way to describe our reaction is to admit that the next day, we emptied that supermarket and when they restocked, we emptied it again.

I came home with three bottles, and I’ve had to refresh my supply since. It’s that nice.

This is Woodford Reserve Distiller’s Select, their entry level offering (and often on special offer in your friendly local supermarket, it seems!). It’s a fairly gentle 43.2% ABV, and comes in a very pleasingly shaped, flat rectangular bottle.

The first thing that strikes you on the nose is the sweetness; there’s a real hit of rich, sweet toffee balanced out perfectly with the alcohol. There’s also plenty of vanilla and a nod to the wood of the barrel. Water, to be honest, doesn’t have a huge impact other than to soften up those sweet notes a little.

In the mouth, the sweetness is right there on the tip of your tongue. The warming alcohol quickly fills your mouth, slowly fading to let the rye push through with rich, almost rum-like tones dancing all the way through. The finish is a long, lingering warmth with plenty of alcohol dryness to it as well. As with the nose, a splash of water doesn’t drastically change the taste – the alcohol is less in your face but it remains deliciously sweet and smooth.

This isn’t the most complex whisky you’ll ever encounter; but it’s a perfect drinking whisky – smooth, sweet, surprisingly alcoholic given the relatively low ABV and if you’ve not dabbled in bourbon you could do a lot worse than start here.

A guest post from my wife Kavey, author of Kavey Eats.

As a novice ice cream maker, it’s probably not that wise to start inventing completely new ice creams.

But having launched a new ice cream challenge on my blog and set the theme for the first month to custard-based ice creams, I really wanted to do something a bit different. Having also promised Pete a recipe guest post for Pete Drinks, it seemed a great opportunity to double up, and I got it into firmly into my head that I wanted to make a beer ice cream.

Making custard from beer instead of milk was surely a wide spread phenomenon, I figured…

… until I Googled for recipes. I found plenty of root beer custards, made by making a regular custard and adding root beer flavouring. But I found only a single reference to making actual beer custard, and that in the midst of a rather odd video recipe of a traditionally-attired Oktoberfest fraulein demonstrating how to make beeramisu (yes, that’s a beer version of tiramisu and has been on my To Make list for at least 3 years).

I decided to chance it, using a standard custard recipe but simply substituting the milk and cream for beer! This make this a pretty unusual recipe – it’s a custard-base but it’s dairy free! (Most beer custards and beer ice creams simply mix beer with regular custard or cream).

I chose stout because I wanted a rich beer flavour without too much hoppy bitterness, and I wanted a dark colour to distinguish my ice cream from a plain vanilla.

To give the ice cream some taste and texture contrast I decided to add salty roasted peanuts – the kind you can find in any pub across the land.

The result was astoundingly good – a butt-kickingly strong beer flavour countered by the salty crunch of the peanuts. I couldn’t be more pleased with the results of this experiment, and hope you’ll give it a try!

Kavey’s Stout & Salty Roasted Peanuts Ice Cream

AKA Beer & Nuts Ice Cream

Ingredients
500 ml stout
125 grams sugar
5 egg yolks
50 grams dry roasted peanuts, chopped as you like or left whole

Note: I used Clarence Court Old Cotswold Legbar eggs which had very dark orange yolks.

Method

Put the beer into a small saucepan and heat.

Beat the sugar and egg yolks together in a large pan.

Place the large pan onto a low heat and slowly pour in the hot beer, whisking all the time.

Cook the custard on a low heat for 10 – 15 minutes, whisking continuously.

Take the custard off the heat and allow to cool.

Pour the cooled custard into your ice cream maker to churn.

Once the mixture has started to thicken (about 10 minutes, in ours), add the peanuts and continue to churn until finished.

Our machine creates a fairly soft ice cream, so we usually transfer the ice cream straight from the machine to a box and pop it into the freezer for half an hour, to solidify a little more. The alcohol content helps keep it soft scoop straight from the freezer.

So is this a flavour that’s got you salivating over your beer and nuts or running away screaming in horror? Let me know what you think and do please let me know how you get on, if you choose to make some yourself!

I’m entering this post into the new Kavey Eats ‘bloggers scream for ice cream’ challenge!

What’s better than a monster Belgian beer? Two Belgian beers, obviously!

This week I have a pair of beers from Brasserie Lefebvre, a family brewery in Quenast which is currently in it’s sixth generation. They have quite a selection of big beers in their traditionally Belgian range and the bottles I have are both honey beers.

First up is Barbar, a blonde beer at 8%. It pours golden into the glass with a big, fine bubbled, generous head that ends up looking more like a latte than a beer. There’s that traditional faintly wheaty, citrus tone that I associate with Belgian beers but it’s almost submerged in a serious waft of warm, sweet honey.

The taste is rich and complex; sweet, sticky honey and a surprisingly dark fruitiness combine deliciously with a medium full body while the foamy bubbles stop everything from getting too sickly. Right at the end there’s even a slight kick of dryness that only serves to make you reach for another sip. There isn’t a great deal of the alcohol in the mouth, but you can feel the warmth working it’s way down your throat.

It’s a properly tasty beer, and almost too drinkable to be a monster!

The other bottle is the Barbar Bok, a brown beer which also comes in at 8%. It’s a nice, deep brown in the glass – a little murky in contrast to it’s blonde brother, but that may be down to less competent pouring. The head is similarly fine bubbled, but noticeably smaller. The honey is still there on the nose, but less overwhelming – blending nicely with rich treacle and malt notes.

It’s a curiously lighter body than the blonde, with your mouth more filled by bubbles. The flavour is full of rich dark fruit, and a far more understated (although still very distinct) honey. The alcohol is much more pronounced too, the whole thing is stickily sweet with a gentle sourness lurking. Although there’s a slight bitterness it doesn’t cleanse your palate significantly, so you’re left with a stickiness and an alcohol heat on your tongue.

This pair of beers are fine examples of the Belgian art and the honey add a nice character to the flavour. The Bok definitely feels more of a monster beer but that shouldn’t take anything away from the blonde – great stuff!

Another step in my exploration of international whiskies takes me to the US, home of bourbon.

I have to confess that my introduction to bourbon was about as rocky as my introduction to scotch – in this instance it was a miniature of Jim Beam in a fresher’s pack at university. I obviously drank it because I was a student and it was alcohol, but it didn’t leave me with a lasting desire to try more.

A couple of years ago, after I’d grown to appreciate scotch, a friend introduced me to Woodford Reserve and I suddenly realised that good bourbon could be as smooth and enjoyable as good scotch.

So this week is Old Fitzgerald 1849, a bourbon from Kentucky. It’s a wonderful rich gold in the glass, with a nose full of sweet caramel, honey, vanilla and just the right amount of alcohol. A splash of water doesn’t make a huge difference, but reduces the sweetness a little.

The first sip is initially harsher on the tongue than I was expecting from the nose with a distinctly peppery spice to it. The taste quickly settles down into a long drawn out toffee sweetness, but the finish has a bit of a raw bourbon grain that I’m not particularly in love with. Water cuts back on that spice and smooths the whole taste out.

Overall, an interesting stop on my tour of bourbon – a little rough around the edges, but with some intriguing flavours in there too.

Pete Drinks

Vietnamese Rice Wine Liqueurs at Pho Restaurant

Monster Beer: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout

Whisky Wednesday: Woodford Reserve

Stout & Salty Roasted Peanuts Ice Cream AKA Beer & Nuts Ice Cream

Monster Beers: Barbar & Barbar Bok

Whisky Wednesday: Old Fitzgerald 1849

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