Real Ale - a Natural product.

Posted by Barney on August 07, 2003

In Reply to: Real Ale - a Natural product. posted by Lewis on August 07, 2003

: : : : : : : : : : Another question from the Brit-coms on PBS: what do you get when someone serves a "full English breakfast"?

: : : : : : : : : The full heart attack on a plate - bacon, sausages, fried eggs, fried bread, tomatoes, mushrooms and anything else there's room for. I go for the vegi-sausage version myself so I'm not an authority, but I get the impression that the full English is easier to find in Ireland these days.

: : : : : : : : You forgot the black and white pudding, and the tinned beans!

: : : : : : : What's black and white pudding? Beans for breakfast?

: : : : : : Believe me, you'd rather not know, and yes, we eat baked beans for breakfast.

: : : : : That will get you going in the morning.

: : : : May I just say: "porridge and kippers"?

: : : These days it seems to be :
: : : fruit juice
: : : the core : bacon, sausage, egg, tomato, mushroom, toast
: : : often baked-beans (+ black-pudding - regional variation) also sometimes includes hash-brown type potato

: : : more toast and preserve/jam/marmalade
: : : coffee/tea

: : : makes one drool.

: : : I noticed that a mini-sausage equivalent to black-pudding is sometimes available in Belgium along with very streaky bacon and scrambled egg. White pudding is a northern addition - from the Borders/Scotland - never encounter it down Sarf.

: : Black pudding is revolting as is tripe, liver, kidney and all other offal. In my entirely biased opinion nobody should eat such rubbish. Equally why does anybody in their right mind eat or drink chemically coloured and flavoured drinks and other food stuffs when the real thing tastes better, is just as cheap and is less likely to cause long term damage to your health. As you can see I'm neither a food faddist nor fascist, just a humble seeker after the truth and an all round well balanced human being.

: In that case consider signing up for CAMRA and keep beer true to its roots. Ideally, beer should be made with good quality water, malted barley, hops and cultured yeast. Water (called "liquor" when brewing) provides the bulk, malted barley provides the sugars and much of the flavour, hops are the natural preservative (and another aspect of the flavour) and the yeast acts as a reagent to get the sugars to tuen to alcohol. It also produces cattle feed from the residue and yeast extract (marmite/vegemite). Youngs brewery in London has their reacted yeast go to Marmite for sure.

: Some foreign beers are even more natural - such as lambic beer from Belgium, where atmospheric yeast creates the fermentation. They are also quite sour naturally, so fruit is often added to make them more palatable. Cherries (kriek) and raspberries (framboise) are the most popular, but peach is wonderfully aromatic (pecheresse).

: Mead can be made even more simply, by putting honey/honey-comb in water and allowing atmospheric yeast to ferment it. Atmospheric yeast is not always available/appropriate as we have affected the air with pollution, so not many people ever make mead that way these days.

: Eating the offal of anmals is a question of efficiency - in the developed world, we often have more food than we need - but in simpler times, we did not want to waste any part of the animal. I'm not fond of offal myself, but that is a modern sensibility - a luxury that many people around the world cannot afford.

I'm a great fan of real ale and drink little else other than a little wine, water, whisky and brandy - not all in the same glass you understand. As to offal, well my family comes of a long line of very effective poachers who were seldom caught albeit there a branch of the family who were invited to settle in Australia about 160 years ago.