beer

I tried the Samichlaus at The Draft House near Tower Hill last night. It comes with a nice story about how it's only brewed once a year on December 6th and ages for 10 months before it's bottled. It also comes with a very syrupy consistency. I shouldn't have had it with my burger. The brewery recommends having it with dessert, especially chocolates, and advises that the brew matures in the bottle for years. I imagine that's true, but it certainly wasn't what I was looking for yesterday evening.

I have a confession to make. I'm not a fan of real ales. I find them bland and lacking character. I find that generally true of most British beers. There are exceptions, of course, like Badger Ale and Abbot Ale and (my Brit friends will lynch me for saying this) Newcastle Brown, but by and large, I don't really enjoy them. I find they're too mired in tradition to dare anything truly interesting. To be honest, while I love Belgian and German beers, the innovation of trailblazing American micro-brews is where I feel the action happens. Even the smaller British breweries stick to the same old tired styles, trying to mimic the incumbents rather than show them up. So you may wonder why I would shell out 10 quid for a ticket to an exhibition dedicated to beer I don't really like.

I've heard a lot of the locals complain about Jamie Oliver and his proliferation of restaurants. "They're popping up everywhere." "They're not all that good." "He's singlehandedly ruining British cuisine." Poppycock. I've been to a number of his restaurants, and with the exception of Union Jack's, they've all been worth going back to. This week's excursion to Barbecoa was no exception.

I've lived in Austin for the better part of a decade, and it's one of the best food towns there is. I've held that to be true since before the recent influx of food trucks and gourmet chefs. The variety and number of restaurants is staggering, especially for a city of its size. New York compares favorably to this baseline. Sure, there were a couple misfires, but we're in unfamiliar territory, so that's to be expected. Here's a brief list of places to take a bite out of the Big Apple.

I knew I should have written this article just after we visited, but didn't have time before our New York trip (more on that in the next post). I'm post-dating this article to the day we went, but writing it almost two weeks later. As such, the details are kind of fuzzy. Maybe that's partly to do with the amount of beer we consumed that evening. I remember the food, though. It was fantastic.

We took a day trip to Manchester for PlayExpo yesterday. On the way back, we got to the train station early so we stopped by a local pub, where I stumbled across this. It's a very good red beer on its own, but the finish hits you with some very firm rum notes. It's pretty fantastic. Their website describes it as: