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Haggis and Kangaroo Crisps for Tickers?

Seems like Walker’s Crisps have learned something from many microbreweries — give the same old product a new, gimmicky name and people will queue up to buy it for the novelty value.

For the World Cup Walker’s has introduced a national range of crisps based on World Cup qualifying nations (mostly!). They are listen on Wikipedia but also listed below:

  • England-Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding
  • America-Cheeseburger
  • Argentinean-Flame Grilled Streak
  • Australia-BBQ Kangaroo
  • Brazil-Salsa
  • Dutch-Edam Cheese
  • France-Garlic Bread
  • Germany-Bratwurst Sausage
  • Ireland-Stew
  • Italy-Spaghetti Bolognese
  • Japan-Teriyaki Chicken
  • Scotland-Haggis
  • South Africa-Sweet Chutney
  • Spain-Chicken Paella
  • Wales-Rarebit

    • While these flavours may be completely honed to resemble their inspiration dishes, there’s a certain similarity between various ingredients — a few cheese (Rarebit, Edam, the cheeseburger, etc,). Also the meaty flavours: English Roast beef, Flame-Grilled Steak, Spaghetti Bolognese, Haggis, Kangaroo and so on aren’t probably very different from each other.

    It reminds me of the microbreweries that produce a differently named brew every month which are so beloved of the CAMRA ticker tendency. Surely their beers are not that radically different from each other once around half a dozen styles have been covered. I’ve never understood why the novelty seekers are so easily taken in by a gimmicky name or pump clip design. If I drink a decent beer I’d like to be able to go out and find it again — not for it to disappear into the oblivion of a few tickers’ notebooks.

    It might be a good business opportunity for Walker’s to get the kind of multiple hand pump pubs beloved of tickers to stock the full range of these crisps — perhaps rotating them through the run up to the World Cup — and see if the beer lovers start ticking them off too.

    Talking of beer that’s worth seeking out again, ‘Trashy Blonde’ from Brewdog was on at ‘The Angel’ — a Wetherspoons opposite the eponymous tube station in Islington. I would have had a pint but I’d already ordered a ‘Dark Rider’ from Kelham Island — which was strong and rather nice so I had another pint.

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    A Majestically Local Selection

    I had a pleasant surprise on going into my local Majestic. Large quantities of locally brewed

    Majestic Cases
    A Selection of the Interesting Ale at Majestic

    beer were piled high at the back of the store behind the wine. They had beers from Tring (Side Pocket and Death or Glory), Loddon (Ferryman’s Gold and Hullaballoo), Rebellion (Blonde plus another one I’ve forgotten) plus others from within fairly local distances like Hook Norton. There are other unusual small breweries represented, such as Bath Ales, St. Peters and Hop Back. Bigger brewers’ beers are also there — Fuller’s London Porter was a nice discovery (if you forgive the pun).

    I was talking to the manager there and he was saying that Majestic don’t want to compete with the 20 cans of Wifebeater for £10 at the supermarkets (loss leaders that our government seems so reluctant to curb) and so they really want to push the local beer angle — and that this is what their customers say they want. He’s hoping to get beers from Chiltern soon (that’s really LocAle to them) and Vale as well. He’s also wondering about stocking minipins and similar.

    There’s a photo of a lovely selection of ale, not all local but I’m one of the people who still drinks local beers in the pub. There’s the exquisite Summer Lightning (still the hoppiest and best golden ale), Loddon Ferryman’s Gold, which is almost as good as Summer Lightning and a little less hoppy, Fuller’s London Porter, which is completely different (I don’t know it so well in bottle but it’s great on the occasions you can get it on draught) and a selection of Bath Ales beers, which is a consistent micro. I’d like to see Rebellion and Tring follow suit and do a selection pack like that as I like their beers but would find it difficult to opt for 12 of one (as you have to at Majestic) — particularly if it’s something like Tring Death or Glory (who says real ale brewers go for macho names?).

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    Pub of the Year Time

    It’s time to vote on our local POTY (Pub of the Year). Despite the hostile economic climate and the particularly vindictive and cynical attitude from the government, it’s amazing that we had so many good pubs to choose from when we did our recent Good Beer Guide 2011 selection (yes, we think it’s crazy too that we have to select them so early — and no, I can’t give clues as to which we chose — although the list is likely to change due to landlord changes and so on before the book goes to press).

    We had something quite unexpected turn up in the middle of last year when the Cross Keys in Thame, formerly mainly known for being a forbidding looking place to enter (you never really knew if it was open) and also for its occasional strippers, suddenly became a six-real-ale beer paradise. It then followed up by opening a brewery in its outhouses. However, as it only opened in its new incarnation halfway through the year then it might not be fair to the other pubs to include it in the running for POTY. An award of Most Improved Pub would be well-deserved, although it’s latterly had competition for that from the Bootleggers’ (formerly Flint Cottage) near High Wycombe station.

    We had a worthy winner in the Whip at Lacey Green last year — a pub that had been runner-up a few times and so especially deserved its win. Last year’s runners-ups are still going strong.

    The Wheel in Naphill is a great example of a community local — running several beer festivals a year and having four good real ales. It also has some of the best provision for smokers in the local area. It’s rumoured that Mark, the landlord put a sign up last year saying ‘Local CAMRA Pub of the Year’ and in small letters ‘Finalist’!

    The Eight Bells is a picture postcard village local — and as the village is the incredibly photogenic Long Crendon then it’s very much the sort of pub you can picture Inspector Barnaby from Midsomer Murders visiting (although, to our knowledge it’s not one of the many local pubs that have featured in the programme so far). The pub is 400 years old and has plenty of ancient features and associations with the likes of the Morris Men. However, the landlady, Helen Copleston, has done a great job in promoting real ale. A stillage has been built behind the bar from which three beers are normally dispensed on gravity and two regulars on handpump — Wadworth Henry IPA and their own house brew — Hell’s Bells (get it?), brewed by Ringwood.

    The 2004 winner, the Shepherd’s Crook in Crowell, was in the running again last year and it will be joined this year by the 2005 winner — the Three Horseshoes at Burroughs Grove, Marlow, which is the defacto brewery tap for Rebellion. We’ve canvassed the membership by e-mail for any other pubs which may be worthy of consideration.

    The winners for the last four years are all ineligible:  the Royal Standard, Wooburn Common; the King’s Head and the Hop Pole in Aylesbury; and the above mentioned Whip. Many other CAMRA branches don’t have this type of re-election rule and, consequently, tend to make the same pub their POTY year after year, which seems most unfair to the rest of the pubs in their areas. It’s probably politically motivated in many cases in order to get that pub through to the regional and national POTY competitions. If so, one imagines that the landlords concerned might scratch the backs of the local branch committee for the persistent publicity and exposure. Rest assured that, as far as I’m aware, all our POTYs are chosen completely on their merits — though I must declare that Helen at the Eight Bells gave me a nice cup of tea when I surveyed it for the GBG 2011!

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    A Welcome Report Against the Tide

    The tide of scare stories in the press about alcohol has been temporarily stemmed by reports, first mentioned in the Sunday Times, of a study in Boston (the US one) that suggested that alcohol isn’t actually as fattening as commonly assumed — for women anyway. Alcohol contains a lot of energy and it had been assumed that any excess in the body was converted into fat, as with any other foodstuff. However, it’s now hypothesised that regular drinkers’ livers process energy from alcohol in a more complex way than previously thought and that much excess energy is turned to heat, not fat. So the argument goes that alcohol is not as fattening as its calorie count might suggest.

    A couple of pieces of anecdotal evidence might support this. One is that while there are many CAMRA types who have large beer bellies, they’re probably not as large as their calorie intake might lead one to believe. A moderately heavy ale drinker might drink twenty pints a week — at a couple of hundred calories a go that’s four thousand extra calories — almost the equivalent of two days worth of energy for an adult male — or about 15 Mars bars a week. Most drinkers in this category take a surprisingly long time — several years — to develop a belly. I’ve also been on an alcohol reduction drive recently and have expected the weight to fall off. Even allowing for my new found substitute of chocolate digestives, I’ve not seen my weight plummeting to the extent that the shortfall in calories might suggest. And also there are plenty of women wine drinkers, as the study suggests, who aren’t anorexics but don’t put on the vast amounts of extra weight that the calorie content alone of the wine might suggest.

    However, I don’t subscribe to the point of view that’s current in some drinking circles that beer is entirely unfattening and it’s the fondness for curries and takeaways that it creates which is wholly responsible for bellies.

    This article in the Daily Mail summarises the various healthy effects that have been scientifically proven for a number of drinks — from red wine to beer via Baileys, gin, cider and others. It has to be added that the overall negative health effects of alcohol aren’t included but these generally tend not to be pronounced at moderate levels anyway. Beer is revealed as being a particularly nutrient-rich drink, with four pints giving an adult’s complete daily intake of folate.  There’s even a study that purports to dismiss the causative effect of beer on large bellies.

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    See Lindeman’s Tollana Shiraz/Cabernet Being Bottled

    Ever wondered how Asda and Tesco can sell their supposed £6 a bottle wine for 3 for £10. One trick is to cut the distance between the manufacture of the glass bottle and the place where it is filled with the unctuous liquid. In the case of Lindeman’s Tollana Shiraz/Cabernet the distance is probably about a few hundred yards.

    If you look very carefully at the label you’ll see the wine is bottled at CH2 4LF — doesn’t sound very Australian as it’s not. It’s actually on an industrial estate, not near South Australia’s Barossa Valley, but next door to the picturesque Stanlow Oil Refinery on the plains of the Dee outside Chester (yes, in Cheshire). You can see an aerial view here.

    It’s a long way from the old French ‘mise en chateaux’ guarantee of quality as the Aussie wine is transported in bulk to its export markets and bottled close to its eventual consumers. There’s a sound environmental reason for doing this — it prevents carbon being wasted by unnecessarily transporting the weight of glass bottles around the globe (and it also means the recycled bottles don’t need transporting back again.) However, it’s an interesting reminder of how economics and globalisation have made the wine come to the bottler and not vice versa.

    The concept is taken to its extreme in Chester as the bottler is also the glass maker — a company called Quinn Glass. They even have a video on their website of the 400 bottles per minute production line where your Aussie plonk is put into bottle — get to it via their filling page.  They also operate a bonded warehouse which means they can hold their customers’ stock so they don’t have to pay duty until the wine leaves the premises just before delivery. It’s a clever and lean operation with the cullet (smashed up recycled glass) arriving at the factory and conceivably being turned into a full wine bottle within hours. There’s no doubt this ingenuity must knock a substantial amount of the cost of a bottle of wine — which makes the con of something like Hardy’s Crest being retailed at an RRP of £9.99 even more ridiculous than most people already realise when they see it perpetually ‘on offer’ for £4.99.

    Quinn don’t just do wine. They do beer, spirits, alcopops — the lot. One interesting page on their website exposes the manufacturing process for a lot of drinks: ‘Product can be processed at sales gravity or high gravity product then diluted and carbonated. Flavoured Alcoholic Beverages and soft drinks can be made from concentrate or from a recipe.’  That is to say that a lot of commercial drinks are watered down on bottling. Again, it might be an economic and environmentally smart idea to produce alcopops or even beers in concentrated form although it makes the stomach churn to think of what some concentrated version of WKD or Smirnoff Ice might be like.

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    Beer Better for You Than Food?

    Well, in this particular case, I picked up a leaflet from the Moon on the Square in Feltham last night with the nutritional breakdown of everything on Wetherspoons’ menu (there’s a version on line). The large mixed grill Dave Roe had in Shrewsbury was 1885 calories, 168% GDA of fat, 211% GDA of Saturated Fat. It was the most fatty and second most calorific item on the whole menu. So in his case all the beer that he consumed throughout the day probably had less calories than the food. My ham, egg and chips was 683 calories.

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    Duty Increase Filters Through…And More

    Fuller’s seem to be confident enough about the economic climate to push through the New Year increase in beer duty — at least in The Euston Flyer near St. Pancras station and on their London Porter. A good pint,and a nice pub with lots of pleasantly available tall blonde barmaids (I got served twice by the old bloke, of course) but I probably paid the most ever for a pint of real ale — a whopping £3.70.

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    Boots Ales for Gene Hunt

    I’ve been given a gift box of beers from  Boots that, is slightly in keeping with their Salvation Army roots. I originally subliminally thought the box was from M&S perhaps because the beers were more widely seen in the time of ‘Life on Mars’. It’s marked as ‘Regional British Ales’ but three of the four are light ales — and three of the ales are admirably from small breweries. The full list is: Cotswold Farm Ale (3%); Young’s Light Ale (3.2%); Ridgeway Thames Valley Ale (3.4%); Ridgeway Bitter (4%).

    Boots British Regional Ale Box
    Boots British Regional Ale Box

    I guess Boots is also making quite a profit on this because they probably didn’t price the gift pack according to the relative amount of duty they would pay on these light beers — and the bottles are half pint size as well. Nevertheless, it’s good to see light, delicate beers with sensible names being put in the nation’s Christmas stockings rather than some syrupy 6% Old Fetid Gonad type brew.

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    ‘I Grew Up Watching This’

    So said ‘shocked’ BBC Sports Personality Winner of the Year 2009, Ryan Giggs, in his genuinely unrehearsed speech. Ironic then that most of the generation that will succeed Giggs were growing up watching the X-Factor on ITV. What sort of values the X-Factor implants into impressionable minds we might not know until it’s too late, when any genuine creative talent in this country has finally been snuffed out. The lessons of the X-Factor seem to have been predicted by the Pet Shop Boys song ‘Opportunities’ nearly 25 years ago — ‘I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money.’ In fact the principle of grooming some nice boy singer to croon other people’s songs pre-dated the Pet Shop Boys by another 25 years — it was the way ‘Tin Pan Alley’ worked up until the early 60s when the Beatles broke the mould (at least for the next 40 years or so) by both writing and performing their own material. How ironic then that who should pop up on the X-Factor final but Paul McCartney. I was quite pleased to see him — at least two of the songs were performed by the person that wrote them. I would doubt whether any X-Factor winner will ever write, or more to the point be allowed to write, their own material. It was quite nice to see McCartney performing live on the biggest TV show this year but it throws up an interesting question — was Paul McCartney unwittingly bookending the era of innovative pop music that he largely started?

    The most annoying thing about the X-Factor is the ridiculous hysteria in the audience. The sound mixers on the programme must realise that the judges rarely contribute anything other than vapid platitudes so the whooping and yelling of the idiots in the audience is mixed high. I speculated whether audience members for the X-Factor had to take an intelligence test and only those that failed it would be eligible for tickets. This is unlikely to be true as the pass mark would need to be set so low that only people who had yet to learn to hold a pencil would have a realistic chance of getting tickets . Whoever manipulates the audience seems to be peddling the absurd New Labour notion (especially in the context of a talent show) that everyone’s a winner and everyone deserves to win and be praised by the judges. If everyone could win then there would be no show — that’s the whole point of it. It seems to be an extension of the Blairite Lady Diana ‘People’s Princess’ self-conscious emoting.

    It was odd for Giggs to be selected for the shortlist this year — he must have been coming up for a lifetime achievement soon anyway. However, he showed in his speech that he did have a real personality — a far more genuine set of comments than those rehearsed with PR advisers in advance.

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    Carrick and Owen Do Their South Africa Chances No Harm

    For the next six months or so we can all play the game of second guessing Fabio Capello’s choice of his 22 or 23 for South Africa. Probably using up more column inches than anything else will be the fate of two players — Beckham and Owen. Interestingly, Owen’s rejuvenated career at Man Utd seems to be suiting him as his reduced involvement in matches seems to mean he’s got less chance of succumbing to the sorts of injuries that have plagued him between international tournaments. He showed tonight against Wolfsburg that he’s still incredibly predatory in and around the six yard box. He’s never likely to start for England but in a big match I think it’s worth having a fit Owen on the bench.

    Man Utd’s incredible lack of defenders (only Evra is fit) shows the squad aspect of international selection. In the 22 or 23 there should be a few players who are flexible and Carrick did himself no harm by his unlikely pairing with Fletcher. He wasn’t brilliant against Wolfsburg and you’d never want to start him for England there but at least there’s a midfield player available who’s played centre back in the Champions League (and looks likely to play there against Villa on Saturday). I wonder whether some colossuses of the England midfield, like Stevie G, would be quite so happy to play there.

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    Thornbridge Pioneer

    I’ve always rated Thornbridge Brewery for its superb Jaipur IPA but last night I tasted another superb beer from the brewery — Pioneer. This was in the Wetherspoons in High Wycombe (the Falcon) which usually has interesting beer but not always at its best. However, the Pioneer was absolutely stunning — an incredible hop intensity for a beer that was 4.5%. The aroma was exactly the same as one gets in brewery tours when the hop cones are handed out for visitors to smell. It was in superb condition as well. (Unfortunately I had to drink the pint in about 10 minutes as I had to walk all the way round Wycombe to the bus station to get the bus as there was some Christmas lights funfair on in the centre of town.) Sadly the beer is a one-off as it was brewed specially for Wetherspoons and their 30th anniversary. I found this out as I just phoned the brewery to ask if I could buy any.

    One thing I didn’t know is that one of the founders of Thornbridge left the brewery a couple of years ago to found another of my favourite new breweries — yes, Brewdog!

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    Roger vs. Brewdog

    I happened to see a link to Roger Protz’s blog on the Swan Supping homepage where he has a real go at Brewdog for behaving non-sensibly. (Actually it could be that he’s most put out that the Independent sent Oz Clarke — a wine writer who surely cannot be trusted to write about beer — to cover the story rather than, perhaps, a well-known specialist beer writer?). I don’t know what juvenile antics they got up to with Oz but I heard the brewer interviewed on the Food Programme on Radio Four and he made a lot of sense. No doubt their very hoppy and alcoholic beers with in-yer-face names and labels represent something of a generational conflict with the CAMRA old-timers. It’s odd how they like to celebrate 35 years or more of campaigning by reminiscing about how radical they were then while criticising some of the more radical, exuberant brewers of the present. Protz seems to think Brewdog will antagonise the anti-alcohol lobby further with their 18% or so beers but CAMRA policy is now starting to face the fact that the more militant members of the anti-alcohol brigade will never be appeased. I think I’m less in the mild and best bitter camp than the Trashy Blonde on this one.

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    Something Fishy

    There’s a fascinating article in this week’s Economist (it appears to be free for non-subscribers but perhaps only for the current week) on the reason why most red wine traditionally doesn’t complement fish. It’s all to do with the iron content of wine and how iron reacts with fatty compounds in fish to produce genuinely vile flavour combinations — it’s all scientifically proven. (The iron-rich red wines tasted ok when they were chelated i.e. had the iron removed by addition of a chemical to make it inert.)

    One thing this shows is the fascinating role of minerals in the taste of food and drink.  The amount of iron that makes it into wine, through the skins and stalks (and even the juice as it’s in some white wines), must be pretty miniscule but it’s enough to make it unpalatable with fish.

    Wine is thought to have a fairly low mineral content compared with drinks where the vegetable matter is more aggressively infused into the drink, such as the malt that is ground to make the wort for beer. It makes one wonder how much of these trace elements might be ingested by a regular beer or wine drinker compared with the tiny amounts of these elements put in the average vitamin pill.