February 21, 2019

Multiple Releases

This week we have two beer releases to alert readers to, and both are quite special as far as we're concerned.

First up, on Tuesday, comes a beer that we actually helped to make. To give credit where it’s due, this beer is very much the work of brewpub Fortune Favours, but our own Steven Wells made every contribution in ideas and labour that he possibly could.

So Steven and Fortune Favours brewer Dale Cooper set out to make a Brut IPA with as many of the innovations that have helped develop this style as they could pull off. Specifically those innovations were:

• An incredibly light malt base – to the extent that they replaced about 15% of what should have been barley malt with rice. Which puts this beer in some pretty interesting company – we’re thinking Budweiser and the category of beer known in Japan as happoshu.
• The use of enzyme-of-the-moment (amyloglucosidase) to make sure that every possible gram of starch in the grain bill got converted to a fermentable sugar.
• Making a single, but very large, hop addition, right at the end of the boil, ensuring that the hops contribute far more aroma and flavour than bitterness.

They’re pretty confident that they’ve come up with a magnificently dry, hoppy and drinkable monster of an IPA, weighing in at around 7%, but not troubling the senses with overt bitterness, sweetness or astringency.

This beer is being called Concrete Architect – a Brut(alist) IPA and we’ll be putting it on tap at 5pm on Tuesday.

A special occasion needs cake, so we’re going to offer rice cakes, a.k.a. mochi balls, to see if any of the rice flavour in the mochi reflects the flavour profile of the beer.
 

And A Chaser..

Meanwhile…. We were recently contacted by our old friend Mike Kush of Chasing Harvest. His company is mainly about wine, and every year they make a kind of slow, seasonal commute around some of the world’s best known wine-making regions, including Central Otago.

While in the Deep South, as well as making wines under their Chasing Harvest label, they brew a beer every year, blend it with Pinot Noir juice, then ferment it and age it in pinot barrels. The result is There Be Dragons.

We’ve been taking a small allocation of bottles every year and believe that these barrel-aged hybrids are unusual and very special.

This year Mike has offered us a keg of the 2017 vintage, which is the newest, so we’re putting it on tap next Thursday. We understand that Mike will be passing through Wellington and will be here! He and we are also making available bottles of a few previous vintages AND we’re even investing in a few Chasing Harvest wines to offer at the same time.

By The Glass

We recently received new stock of Ritterguts Gose, which is the nearest thing that there is to a gose from before the style died and had to be revived.

We also grabbed some stock of its stable-mate Urgose Märzen, which is another revived style (the Märzen-Gose), but with smoked salt, cinnamon and pine cones.

Intrigued? On Saturday we’ll offer 150ml of both beers for just $10. That will be from 3pm until 9pm.

La Bête

It’s going to be great to welcome gypsy jazz back to our lounge, for the first time since New Year’s Eve, when a lineup with some of the same musicians as this put on a performance worthy of the end of the year.

This time our guests are La Bête, made up of Adrian Jensen (guitar), Mark Sommerville (guitar), Dan Yeabsley (bass) and Mike Jensen (drums).

La Bête play from 10pm on Saturday, and our cover charge is still (STILL!) $0.

Guilty Pleasure Cinema

Sunday’s movie is another important and fondly remembered 80s piece – Streets Of Fire. While this Rock ‘n Roll, action flick has its critics, they’re officially in the minority, plus it has spawned some delicious descriptions:- “extravagantly stylized pulp burlesque”, “pinnacle of 80s guilty pleasure cinema”.

Streets of Fire screens at 7pm on Sunday on the cinema screen in our lounge. Here's a trailer. Soundtrack available on record and cassette!

Finally

Yesterday our attention was drawn to this tweet:

It's hard to let fighting talk about sexy ways to get real time ETAs go by without reminding everyone that our electronic menus, complete with real time bus info, remain sexily unique. But hey, sexiness is in the eye of the beholder.