We’ve got a new beer in our range and it’s just perfect for this time of year! Our Gingerbeerble spiced beer has three different preparations of ginger in it, along with a blend of other spices, and is just the drink for cosying up by the fire on a cold, dark night.
Now, what if we said you could get even cosier? Right from the start of developing Gingerbeerble, we thought it would be great for mulling. Yes, mulled beer. In the UK, it’s not that popular these days (although it is undergoing a little bit of a renaissance as we brewers look for ever more interesting things to do with beer), but it was very popular at least as far back as the 17th century and is still popular in some other European countries to this day – that’s particularly true in Belgium, where Kriek is turned into Glühkriek (the beer equivalent of Glühwein), as well as in Germany and Poland.
At one time, drinking warm beer, or “flip” as it was known in the UK and the USA, was so popular that various different tools and vessels were made to help in its quick preparation, including flip irons, which were put directly into the beer to warm it and it had a reputation in the UK for being a drink of the lower classes or ne’er-do-wells.
These days, we think everyone should at least try flip. In mulling our Gingerbeerble, we’re going to be making use of modern technology, relatively speaking, and we’ll be leaving our flip irons in the museum. There are lots of different things you could put in flip, and the proportions are certainly not set in stone – if you like it sweeter, put more sugar in; if you don’t like brandy, try rum or bourbon instead.
Ingredients:
2 x 500ml bottles of Beerblefish Gingerbeerble spiced beer
5 tbsp dark brown sugar (or more or less to taste)
1 cinnamon stick (or ½ tsp ground cinnamon)
½ tsp ground nutmeg
4 tbsp orange juice
90ml brandy (or another dark spirit if you prefer – rum works well, so does bourbon) (optional)
Orange slices to garnish
Method:
Heat the Gingerbeerble in a 1.5 to 2 litre saucepan on the hob.
Stir in the sugar and add the cinnamon stick, nutmeg and orange peel.
Bring the mixture to a simmer for 2-3 minutes (do not boil it!) and stir the mixture to help the sugar dissolve.
Remove the mixture from the heat and add the brandy if you want to.
Serve in mugs with an orange slice, a mince pie on the side and cosy slippers on your feet!
You can keep the pan simmering on the hob for as long as you need before serving (but keep an eye on it, of course!) – remember that the alcohol will decrease and the spice intensity will increase the longer you leave it.
If you try this recipe, please show us what you made using #beerblefish – we love seeing how you get on!
This weekend sees the changing of the clocks (we like to think they’re changing from Beer Summer Time to Gin Maybe Time) and the journey to the darkest part of the year is well underway. At Beerblefish HQ, we reckon it’s time to cosy up with something delicious to drink by the fire or snuggled up on the sofa under a nice warm blanket.
We’ve got plenty of beers in stock or coming soon that fit the bill. We’ve a fresh batch of our 1892 IPA bottled up and ready to go – that will be on our online shop later today – as well as 1820 Porter. Both of these beers go really well with hearty autumnal dishes like stews and roast dinners, and the porter is especially good with a rich, chocolatey pudding.
On the horizon, we’ll have our new Gingerbeerble spiced beer into bottles and onto the shop pretty soon too – you can’t get much more cosy and autumnal than that – and a new batch of its Blackbeerble stout cousin is also coming soon!
We’re also in the midst of getting our Christmas offerings up and running. We’ll have gift packs going live on the webshop over the next few days which you can have sent directly to whoever you want (within the UK) – we can help you to spread a little Christmas cheer, even if you might not get to see everyone you would want to this festive season.
The answer to this age-old quandary depends on a number of factors, including what type of beer it is, how good the beer is, and what the ambient temperature is where you’re going to drink it, but I think we can all agree that “2C” is never the correct temperature unless you’ve just run a marathon in a desert or something! However, one thing to remember above all is that the “right” temperature to drink a particular beer at is the one at which you enjoy it the most. If you prefer drinking your favourite beer at four degrees Celsius even though the brewery recommends 12 degrees Celsius, then go for it, it’s your choice – but it’s probably wise to at least consider the recommendation before dismissing it out of hand.
Note that we’re looking at serving temperature here, not storage temperature – that’s a whole different topic that’s become a talking point recently, and we might cover it in the near future – but in the meantime, let’s look at how cold (or warm) your beer should be when you take that first sip.
There has long been a friendly rivalry across the Atlantic Ocean between the Americans on the one hand, who tend to drink their beer cold and can’t understand why the British drink “warm” beer, and the Brits on the other hand, who assume that American beer is best served cold because it means you don’t have to taste it.
Now, both of these points of view are based on an outdated impression of each nation’s beer culture and don’t take into account either the cross-pollination of styles and techniques that has happened in the last thirty years or so or the massive boom in independent and craft breweries in the USA that has seen a bit of a shift away from macro-produced light lager towards a varied range of interesting and tasty styles.
Traditional British (cask) beer is typically designed to be at its best when served at “cellar temperature” – around 12-13 degrees Celsius (about 55 degrees Fahrenheit). Older British pubs were built with cellars that would be at around that temperature and, when they were built, there wouldn’t have been much that a publican could have done about the temperature. It would have varied a bit with the weather, but it would have been assumed that beers would generally be served from a cask sitting in a cellar at 12 degrees Celsius.
As refrigeration was invented and then became accessible to ordinary folk, the possibilities for beer expanded until we developed some unofficial rules for the temperature at which beer should be served. Generally, lighter (in colour) beers should be served colder than darker ones, weaker beers should be served colder than stronger ones and lagers should be served colder than other beers. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, including the golden rule above – drink it at the temperature you like it.
There are different schools of thought on just how cold the coldest-drinking beers should be served. Our view at Beerblefish is that four degrees is the absolute lowest temperature a beer should be served at, and that should be reserved for macro lagers that have little to no hop flavour. A tasty lager or a very pale ale should be a little warmer than that – maybe five to six degrees – and then other types of beer should get a little warmer from there.
The problem with serving beer very cold is that it inhibits the release of carbon dioxide (i.e. you don’t get as many bubbles rising to the surface and popping), and it’s the carbon dioxide that helps the aroma of the beer to escape into your nose as you go to take a sip. Aroma makes up a huge part of our beer drinking experience, so if we lose that part, it impacts our enjoyment of the beer as a whole. On the other hand, it can be difficult to regulate the pressure of a well-carbonated beer if it’s too warm – if it’s on draft, it will fob, and a bottle is likely to gush out like a Champagne fountain. So, that leaves us needing to find the happy medium between these two perils.
At Beerblefish we recommend that our Heritage Ales are served at British cellar temperature (12 degrees Celsius) – they are based on nineteenth century recipes, so the British pub cellar is their natural habitat. If it’s a very warm day, we might put a bottle of 1853 ESB or 1892 IPA in the fridge for a short while before drinking, but we’d rarely chill our 1820 Porter even when the sun’s shining.
Our contemporary beers have more varied needs. Our stouts and milds, particularly the imperial varieties, and Edmonton Best Bitter should also be at cellar temperature – as should Beerblefish’s new baby, Gingerbeerble – but many of our paler beers need a bit of chilling. We recommend that our Hoppy Pale Ale series, Cashmere Brut IPA and Pan Galactic Pale Ale should be served at around five to six degrees Celsius. That’s probably a little warmer than your fridge, so either don’t put them in for too long, or make sure you take your time in pouring them and finding your snacks to go with them! And don’t forget that your hands will warm up the glass, so there might be no harm in slightly over-chilling.
At the end of the day, we all have our preferences for beer temperature – some of those are based on expectation from our beer cultural experiences, and others just because we like something a certain way, but we at Beerblefish believe it’s important to keep an open mind when drinking beer because we might just learn or try something new one day that massively enhances our beer-drinking experience!
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