Platinum Pints: BV's best beers of the 2010s

This year hasn't started well. I've consumed more pints of Lemsip than of beer, and wallowed in so much self pity and so little alcohol that I might as well be doing Dry Fucking January.

But it's not just a new year, it's a whole new decade... or is it?!?

There's a compelling mathematical case that 2020 is actually the last year of the 2010s and therefore the new decade won't commence until January 1, 2021. The problem is that if you accept that logic then you also have to believe that the Millennium didn't begin until 2001.

And that is an argument I had a problem with at the time, because going from 1999 to 2000 felt like an absolutely massive psychological shift, whereas 2000 to 2001 was a teensy little incremental feather that you'd barely notice. And given that time is ultimately an abstract concept, measured against fairly arbitrary starting points, the psychological effect - the way we feel about it - is arguably the only thing that matters.

So, there's my working out in the margins of the page. 2000 was the start of the new millennium, and therefore 2020 is indeed the start of the new decade, like it or not.

Which all means I can now pick my 10 favourite beers of the 2010s. Or, more specifically, of the 6850 new-to-me cask beers, because that's how I do these things. That's a lot of beer records to trawl through. But let's Lemsip up, open the spreadsheet and get the fuck on with it...

The Battle of Quality Street

Christmas always seems more Christmassy when viewed through the prism of nostalgia. For me, that'll be mainly Christmases of the 1980s and possibly early 90s, though the magic was beginning to wane by then. 
 
"Ooh, I got a blank E-180 VHS cassette in my stocking! Thank you, that'll come in handy for recording Juliet Bravo." That sort of thing.

Things aren't the way they used to be. Even Quality Street isn't the same any more. But is it really demonstrably worse, or just different?

A big jar or tin of QS has been a part of my family's Christmas since long before I was born, and I have fond memories of eating them. And asking sheepishly 'Can I have another one please, Grandma?'

So, on what would've been Grandma's 90th birthday, I'm going to rank the current Quality Streets from worst to best. Here we go...

Why does this always happen?

Chocs away!

12. The Strawberry Delight. Why, oh why are there always more of these bastards than anything else? Why are these never 'swapped out' from the assortment to give new varieties a chance? Too sweet and synthetic without any kind of flavour that even remotely resembles an actual strawberry, and they're sticky as fuck - little tiny bits of foil always seem to get stuck to the chocolate and have to be either picked off or spat out. Ick.

Some people like them, mind. Grandma, for one.


11. The Milk Choc Block. Sorry, but it's the most pointless Quality Street ever. It's not like it's nice rich chocolate either. Bland and boring.


10. The Orange Creme. It's better than the Strawberry version in every way, but at the end of the Boxing Day, I just can't get excited about 'fruity' soft centres. Still, chocolate and orange is always a winning combination.

9. The Toffee Penny. Once you get chewing it, it's just like the other toffees in the tub, but lacking the chocolate coating, I know Christmas is probably the only time of year I'll actually feel like eating a piece of non-chocolate-coated toffee, but even so, I can't get excited about the penny.

8. The Fudge. Yes, it's fudge. Next.

7. The Coconut Eclair. This one has gone up slightly in my estimation over the past few Christmases. A nice bluey wrapper, and like a sort of chewy bounty, it's a good choice when you feel like something a bit different.

6. The Toffee Finger. It ain't that unique or interesting, but a reliable sweet that may be few folks' favourite but nobody loathes them either. You'll never see a QS tin in the middle of January with these left at the end.

5. The Caramel Swirl. When I was young, the Toffee Cup - a direct predecessor to this sweet - was amongst my favourites, but it's not as good these days. Either it has changed, or I have. Probably both. For a start, the modern day caramel doesn't look as attractive - there was something appealing about taking the band of paper off the old Toffee Cup - and it's just a bit dull. But we all eat them.

4. The Orange Crunch. One of the few relatively recent introductions that has actually lasted the course. Chocolatey, orangey and crunchy. What's not to like? Unless you don't like orangey, crunchy things? Or chocolate, obviously.

3. The Toffee Deluxe. My favourite of the toffees, with the right sort of texture and a good chocolate/toffee ratio. No messing about. These tend to go early.

Some of these are much missed...

2. The Purple One. Who doesn't want a mouthful of caramel and Hazelnut? Mmm. I reckon, on a National scale, if we exclude people with nut allergies and brain injuries, this is probably the most popular one. And 'popular' in ancient Hebrew is 'Purple'. OK, it isn't, but everyone agrees that these are good. Just not quite as good as...

1. The Noisette Triangle. Obviously. It's the best one. It's one of only a few that still looks, feels and tastes like it did when I was a kid. Ground-up nuts are good in chocolate. Maybe it's a poor man's praline; a grubby interpretation of a gianduja. But by Jove, it's the Qualitiest of Quality Street, and they should put at least twice as many in. At the expense of all those fruit cremes. Obviously.

Now then, where other QS rankings might call it a day after counting them down, I've got a little something else for you in my notably-smaller-than-it-used-to-be tin...

Yay, nostalgia!

Over the years a number of sweets have been removed from Quality Street - here's where some of them might've fitted into the rankings today:

The Honeycomb Crunch would go somewhere around 5th-6th place, I reckon. They brought it in a couple of years ago when the Toffee Deluxe was ditched, but now they've pulled a reverse switcheroo. It's a shame because it wasn't a bad sweet.

The old Toffee Square was probably a toffee too far, which is why it disappeared about 30 years ago and, unlike the Toffee Deluxe, it has never come back. From what I can remember, this particular toffee was extremely hard and brittle but always looked rather attractive and regal in a shiny crimson wrapping. I'd probably rate it near the bottom of the top ten. Apparently the official name for this one was 'Caramel', which makes no sense whatsoever.

The Truffle Chunk, or whatever it was called, disappeared around the same time. And this one was actually brilliant. Unwrapping the little brown-gold treasure chest was a joy. It's a long time gone and I can barely remember it, but I'd rank it firmly above everything else, Green Triangle included. There was another one which was similar in appearance that I seem to recall was pretty good too. Possibly coffee, possibly another soft caramel, but this is going way back to when I was a tiny tot. 

At the other end of the scale, the Apricot Delight was a short-lived mystery. And not so much a 'delight' as an abomination. Supposedly apricot-based, yet the wrapping was inexplicably blue while the actual colour of the filling was a sort of minty jizz. With a texture to match. It would rank near the bottom of the league - I didn't like it at all and I'm not sure anybody else ever did.

The Montelimar - now, this would probably be top five. Chocolate-coated Nougat, a bit like a Marathon bar. The texture was not unlike the modern Coconut Eclair which I guess must've eventually replaced it.

And finally, the Cracknel, which has come and gone a couple of times in my lifetime, in various different colour wrappages to boot. I liked it. A bit like a Dime bar, a bit like a Butterfinger, and, crucially, very different from everything else in the tin. I'd rate it top three, possibly even top two. If it were still with us.

So readers, what is your favourite? Which ones would you bring back? What do you completely fucking hate about Christmas these days?

Oh, and Merry Christmas, obviously!

Montezuma's Chocolate Lager - a rare review

OK, so it's fairly uncommon for me to post reviews of a single beer.

Like most beer writers, I sometimes receive samples from breweries for my earnest consideration, but the reality is that I prefer to do most of my drinking at the pub, and these bottles (and more recently cans) can be left lying around for months to the point where they may not be in optimal condition, and any assessment would be coloured by that.

I also feel that if I review one of them, I should probably review them all, which creates a lot of work for me, and ultimately a series of fairly samey reviews about fairly samey beers. I'm not a bottled beer expert and there are plenty of other writers keen to work in this fashion, so I'll leave it to them.

And while I'm grateful for the freebies, if a beer is good enough for me to write about, I'll probably be buying it myself.

(Occasionally, I do make exceptions if a beer is particularly good, bad or just noteworthy - like Brewmeister 'Snake Venom' and Brewdog 'Nanny State', neither of which, incidentally, were free!)

Montezuma's Chocolate Lager is a collaboration between the Hogs Back brewery in Surrey and Montezuma's, a fairly small time chocolatier based in West Sussex. In all honesty, I don't think I've ever tried one of their chocolate bars, and while Hogs Back beers have been around for as long as I've been drinking, they're not a brewer that has made much of an impression, at least until now. The beer was developed last year, but I've only discovered it in the last couple of months.

This is a very good beer, a very different beer, and at 4.5% a very accessible, drinkable beer. And the good news is that it's widely available in supermarkets, at least around here.

Final meal 2014 - Black Forest Churrasco

The super-sharp amongst you will recall that, when Italy faced Spain in the Euro 2012 final, I created an awesome new recipe - Gnocchi Bravas - combining the respective cuisines of the finalists.

The super-curious will now be wondering if I've done something similar for Argentina vs Germany in the World Cup, and the answer is: Yes. Yes, I have.

The super-cautious can probably look away now, as it's a bit, well, left-field. Think of it as an inspired tactical substituion.

Tuck Off

Nobody believes me when I tell them about five finger KitKats - there's even misinformation on the internet denying their very existence - but in the mid-1980s they were as real as Feargal Sharkey topping the charts and Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea. 

Designed to fit in the old-fashioned mechanical vending machines that my late grandad serviced for a living, the five fingers were shorter than on the normal model, giving the KitKat what we'd call a 'landscape' orientation these days.

They were one of only two sweet items available from my schools very limited tuck shop - the other being little boxes of chocolate-filled discs, sort of like giant Smarties but much bigger. Bigger even than Minstrels. But I can't for the life of me remember what they were called because I always had a five-fingered KitKat.

The vending machines were always out of order (grandad never came to repair them) and the tuck shop was only open for about 20 minutes a day, which probably added to the allure. When, in 1989, I moved to a massive Secondary school with a permanently open canteen that sold all kinds of crisps and chocolates, including normal 'portrait' KitKats, it just wasn't as special.

Drinking beer out of an Easter Egg

Some people might argue that my blog posts are often a little too long; too verbose; too banging-on-about-shit-for-2000-words etc.

So, in a 'fuck that' sort of a vein, this one is just some photos of me drinking beer from an Easter Egg.

Yeah, I know I could posit that this is 'the future' and that brewers could introduce a range of chocolate egg-conditioned ales, but I won't. It's just some wanky photos'n'shit, but quite possibly a world first.

Oh, and the beer was LBC Oyster Stout, at the Tap East. 

Enjoy.

Chocolate digestives and black pepper - in beer

When I first started properly drinking beer, Batemans were one of my very favourite breweries. Valiant, XXXB and Salem Porter were all music to my teenaged tastebuds, and the one-off Jawbreaker, brewed with hard toffee, was my favourite beer of 1996.

I even immortalised Batemans XB in a rather ghastly poem I wrote as a student:

"'Quintuple rum and black', said she.
It came to twelve pounds twenty-three
Including, of course, a pint for me
(of Batemans XB)"

The only other verse I remember is:

"Said he, 'this bird's with me tonight.
We'll settle this outside - ALRIGHT?!?'
And out of me he kicked the shite
(I lost the fight)"

I like to think that the quality of both my writing and my nights out have improved since then!

Easter Egg Hunt

The early part of Easter Saturday was a fucking nightmare. (The evening wasn't, because we went to see Steeleye Span and they rocked, but the daytime was a bit of a shitter and no mistake.)

We must've been into 20 shops in various parts of South London, looking for Easter Eggs to give to various family members. Spent about three hours solid, so we did.

There's nothing for you here!

Nothing. Absolutely fuck-all available anywhere. (Except for Cadbury Creme Eggs and bags of mini eggs). From the tiniest local shops to the big Sainsburys and Safeways (I refuse to call them Morrisons for the same reason that I refuse to call a Marathon bar anything other than a Marathon bar!) there was not a single proper egg available to purchase.

The shelves were bare, apart from the occasional solitary badly broken egg in Tesco with the cracked chocolate exposed to the elements that staff had inexplicably failed to remove, perhaps deliberately leaving it there to taunt people like me.

The twats in the shops said things like. 'Ooh, you should've come earlier', which as well as being singularly unhelpful is also indicative of the widespread acquiescence of a flawed culture.

Shrove Tuesday isn't as Shriven as it used to be

My ‘giving up chocolate for Lent’ plan proved spectacularly unsuccessful, lasting as it did a mere three days. (Although on the 'being able to eat chocolate again' scale, it's actually been a roaring success, obviously!)

It wasn’t my fault, mind, it was the beer.

Ilkley ‘The Mayan’, specifically, at the Cask in Pimlico. It’s a chocolate chipotle stout, and certainly the best beer I’ve had this year. (And I've drunk some good beer this year).

Chocolate beers can be a bit hit'n'miss, and I’ve never drunk a chilli beer that I could honestly say I really enjoyed, but Ilkley – one of my favourite breweries at the moment –  manage to get the combination just right.

It wasn't that surprising given that, in just a few years, the Yorkshire brewery has shown itself to be remarkably adept at experimental beers - like their Crafty Jane cranberry milk stout - as well as doing a fine line in big, hoppy pale ales, which, to my mind, should be any credible brewer's meat and drink

At 5.3% the Mayan had enough stouty weight behind it not to be watery, but was still staunchly in ‘quaffable’ territory. The cocoa on the nose was like an upmarket chocolate milkshake, while the heat only comes through at the finish and leaves a nice lingering burn.

It's worth breaking your Lenten fast for!

10 things you may not have known about Switzerland and York

I know, I know. I’ve not done a whole lot of blogging lately. Been out and about you see. Riding panthers, slaying  dragonflies, tormenting chickens, that sort of thing.

Actually that’s all a shower of vicious lies, apart from that last one, but last week we were in fact in York, watching the mighty Sky Blues winning 4-0, and the week before we took a little trip to Switzerland (no, not to the Dignitas clinic – things aren’t that bad!)

I’d never been to either Switzerland or York before and there was plenty to do and see and eat and drink. But given that I’m lacking the time and inclination to carefully sculpt vast blogs about either of these places, I’ll just shower you with a dixtet of factoids:

Is there anything left for me to eat?!?

So, Lent lasted approximately two weeks this year, as opposed to the more traditional 40 days and nights.

I started eating chocolate again, and that was that. Been eating quite a bit over the last few days too - since my monthly Hotel Chocolat Tasting Club selection arrived in the post.

Mind you, they are amongst the best chocolates money – lots of money! – can buy. My willpower and resolve are no match for the cocoa masterpieces crafted by the likes of Kiri Kalenko and Eric Desmet. I broke my Lenten fast with a rum glorious truffle-gianduja hybrid combination. It was worth it. Our Lord would probably have done the same.

Now, I know it’s probably not the best food choice for a newly-diagnosed diabetic and being a food blogger, there’s little point trying to hide things from the various doctors, nurses and dieticians who try telling me what I should and shouldn’t be eating.

I joked with an unsympathetic nurse the other day, ‘I don’t need to keep a food diary - just go and read Ben Viveur’. Well, I say ‘joked’…

The problem is that once you factor in all my ailments, the ‘eat’ list seems to be almost empty, while the ‘don’t eat’ list would fill ten trolleys and scoop the grand prize on Supermarket Sweep.

It’s an absolute minefield of contraindication upon contraindication. Probably with some co-morbidity if we’re doing medical-speak.

See, if I just suffered from, say, gout with no diabetes or high blood pressure or arrhythmia, it would be simple enough – though probably annoying at times – to try and stick to a low purine diet. And if it was just my BP that needed to be kept in check, there would be obvious rules to observe there too.

But having several interrelated conditions – and, not to ignore the big fat elephant in the room – being a bit of a, err, big fat elephant in room, makes it tough to know what I really should be eating. If anything.

And I don’t think my diet was really all that unhealthy to start off with – I avoid processed, instant and junk foods and always get plenty of fresh vegetables into my cooking. People don't think it to look at me, but I know for a fact my diet is healthier than that of people I know who are about half my weight and my cholesterol level is actually relatively low for a fatso.

Atkins is dead

A widely-held view these days is eating lots of carbohydratesisn’t brilliant unless you’re a pro athlete or some kind of narcissistic gym tosser. Or possibly a recovering anorexic. Carbs raise blood sugar levels and turn to fat in the body which isn’t something most people want to happen.

This is particularly true for diabetics – apparently a baked potato is the single worst thing to eat, worse even than pure sugar, because it turns quickly into glucose and opens a veritable sweetshop in your veins within seconds.

Carbohydrates are absorbed less quickly, however, and are therefore less likely to spike you’re blood sugar if they are eaten with fat, making chocolate and croissants seem like a healthier alternative, in a way. And a pain au chocolat would be even better, presumably...

I've never completely accepted the scientific classification of carbs anyway. I can just about buy the idea that chips, rice, bread and pasta are all the same type of food, but never that beer and chocolate are also both members of the family.

But, if we accept that having too much is bad, and lots of mine are going to come from beer, the alternative is eating a higher proportion of protein… only eating lots of protein is said to be bad for gout. Too much meat, seafood or mushrooms can trigger an attack – though I’ve never particularly noticed a correlation between my diet and the throbbing bastard pain that occasionally immobilises my joints. 

Mind you, I didn’t have any symptoms of diabetes either, even when stuffing my face with potatoes.

Fresh fruit, traditionally promoted as ‘healthy’, is very high in natural sugar which is bad from a diabetic perspective. Bananas are the most carby fruit of all, making them particularly bad, except that they also happen to be the best foodstuff for potassium, of which I’m trying to eat more because that can have a positive effect on the irregular heartbeat… What to do, what to do?

I’ve been told to avoid caffeine, because it could make my irregular heartbeat even less regular or something, but there are theories that caffeine stimulates the metabolism and promotes activity, which leads to weight loss, which is meant to be good for your heart.

Super? Yes! Food? Yes! Superfood?

So is oily fish, apparently, only that’s very bad for uric acid levels, which causes gout. And the oiliest fish, the anchovy, is also the saltiest and high sodium is bad for my blood pressure. We’ve come full circle.

Acai berries or pigskin?

A theory doing the rounds in the last year or two is that pork scratchings are some kind of superfood. No, really. Pretty much zero carbohydrate, and most of the fat – of which there is undeniably rather a lot in your average pigskin – is the ‘good’ type of fat rather than the bad, saturated kind.

But scratchings, delicious as they are, are also very high in salt, and the only time I’d want to eat them is while drinking lots of beer, something else I should probably cut down on.

Pound-for-pound they’re also somewhat calorific, which means I won’t lose weight, and being overweight makes me more likely to suffer from things like, ooh, I don’t know, diabetes, gout, high blood pressure… Full circle agian.

So, I’ve concluded that almost all foods are bad for something and good for something else, which will probably pretty much even itself out, so I’m tempted to carry on more or less as before but without any 'good for nothing' foods, if indeed there are any.

*Waves to the doctors, nurses and dieticians reading*

Not that I was really eating 'good for nothing' foods in large quantities anyway. As least not since I was a teenager. Oh welly-woo...

Pancake Days and Mondays never get me down

It struck me this week, while cooking the pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, that it’s the one day of the year when one's dessert usually takes up the greater portion of the meal as a whole.

This year, we only ate a very light supper of beans on toast, so as to leave plenty of room for a succession of freshly cooked pancakes. And things were much the better for that, I can tell you.

Tosser.

My blood sugar reading the following morn might have been higher than the doctor would have liked, but it was worth it.

I shan’t bother with a pancake recipe because it’s so easy. Eggs. Flour. Milk. Sugar. Sans lumps. In quantities such that the mixture takes about half a second to drip off a spoon.

And always fry them in good quality salted butter. And eat them immediately. Easy.

Insider Secrets from the world of Batter

I do have one little tip to share though: Add some maple syrup to the batter mix as well as putting it on your pancakes. You won’t regret it.

Oh, and take a risk-averse approach to the art of tossing. You might look cool if you manage too, err, pull it off, but it's better to use a spatula and ensure that the flipped fucker ends up back in the pan where it bastard well belongs.

It's also worth varying the quantity of batter and therefore the thickness of the pancake - thick Scotch style and wafer-thin French style are both good, as are all the varying degrees of girth 'that lie betwixt the twain'.

We had our pancakes with chocolate, banana, maple syrup (obviously), whipped cream and chopped nuts, which is possibly a tad on the hyper-indulgent side, and again not appealing to my GP, but they tasted awesome.

And given that I’ve joined my good lady wife in giving up chocolate for Lent this year, I feel my system deserved a fitting Mardi Gras blow-out.

I’ll give you one more seasonal tip: Savoury crepes are a doddle to make – just omit the sugar and syrup, and add some fresh Parmesan to the batter mix. Serve filled with chilli con carne. Or Boston Baked Beans. Or just some pancetta fried with onion, garlic and tomato. You can’t go wrong.

The wait is nearly over

I saw a great new festive product on sale this week.

It’s called ‘Bruce Forsyth’s Double-your-Ham’, and it’s brilliant. You just squeeze a couple of drops of the solution onto your Christmas ham using the supplied pipette, and within 30 minutes the ham will increase in size by 100%.

It's Ham-tastic!

Plus, it’s endorsed by the very crown prince of National Treasureland himself – what’s not to like?

For people who don’t like ham, you can also buy Brucie’s ‘Halve your ham’, which basically involves the chinsome octogenarian coming round your house and eating half of your ham.

I admit it, I’m talking rubbish again. He only eats about 40% of it then he gets full and wanders off to present Strictly, so the product is shit. I’m thinking of reporting them to Trading Standards actually.

Although, when you think about it, it does mean that if you keep using the product your ham will technically last forever, albeit in eternally diminishing quantity, because he’ll never take all of it. Hmm. I have some strange dreams. If indeed it was a dream.

Once, as a child I dreamed I was unhappy because I’d spent all my Christmas money on myrrh and didn’t know what to do. 



Chocolate, please
 
Anyway, I think I can safely ascribe my extraordinary mental state lately to a lack of chocolate. It’s now been over three weeks without, apart from a tiny one each day from my Advent Calendar, obviously, and it’s starting to take its toll.

For a start, I wish the calendar actually contained nice chocolate rather than manky Maltesers – and even then, just the chocolate without the crunchy, malty centre; you don’t even get the mini bag of Maltesers until Christmas Eve!

I had to change my dessert selection at my team’s Christmas Lunch from Yule Log (which looked really nice and rich) to the Christmas Pudding, which was far too light and cakey with a distinct shortage of fruit, nuts and alcohol as set-menu Christmas Puddings very often are.

A large box of Hotel Chocolat chocs – possibly the finest chocolates commercially available at the moment and certainly the most varied and interesting – arrived in the office and I couldn’t have any. Bah humbug! (Humbugs not containing any chocolate and hence permissible, of course)

And there was only one style of biscuit in the selection tin that didn’t have chocolate, and in normal circumstances it would have been my last choice. The plain Viennese sandwich – who chooses that for fucks sake?!?

When it was really cold last week I wasn’t even able to go to Paul and have their excellent hot chocolate – man, it’s been tough, I tells ya. Hopefully Bono will put out a charity single alerting people to plight of those who have voluntarily given up chocolate for Advent.

I even had to pass up the chance to drink a chocolate stout the other night - admittedly in the Market Porter where there were about a dozen other beers to choose from, but my hackles were already rankled by the preponderance of fairweather drinkers whose great numbers have rendered pubs horrendously crowded! Maybe landlords are using some kind of Forsyth-endorsed ‘Double your punters’ product?

OK, I’ll stop complaining now anyway. It’s been a good test of my willpower, and just about challenging enough to feel like an achievement. Go Me! And my wife!

There’s only a few days to go, and when we get back after Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve I’ll be up for an Augustus Gloop-style feast. 


A very chocolatey Christmas to all Ben Viveur readers too, I might add.

I’m determined to make my first Christmas as a married man as chocolatey as possible – after all, we deserve it, and if Brucie brings out a ‘Double your Yule Log’ product I’ll buy it. Twice.

The delights of Leather Lane

Some people give up stuff for Lent. Alcohol… meat… wanking… whatever.

My Lenten fasting tactics usually involving giving up something but relapsing half-way through, thus showing myself to be a man of admirable intention but with no pretensions to divinity. To try nobly and fail with serenity is the human condition after all.

Either that or I’ll wait until Passiontide or thereabouts, figure out something I just happen to have failed to consume during Lent, and retrospectively decide to give that up, with the finishing line only being a matter of days away.

And that’s not cheating, it’s just being clever.