Jo found a recipe for beer-braised pork chops in a magazine she was reading this week. Sounded good, so I gave it a go yesterday evening, with a few twists and refinements of my own. The original recipe was German in origin, so called for using pilsner to do the braising, but Jo’s never too keen on lager. Enter a bottle of Irelands’s finest ubiquitous cooking stout, stage left (although I’m sure that blue-starred Geordie cooking brown ale would have worked just as well).

Very easy indeed to prepare:

1. Refinement #1 – The recipe calls for pork chops, but I prefer shoulder steaks for flavour and tenderness, so a couple of those were used instead.
2. Refinement #2 – According to the recipe two table-spoons of olive oil should go into the pan to fry the pork. Wrong. Rub olive oil into the pork and season to taste, then bring the pan up to temperature (bloody hot) and add the pork. Incidentally, I used a steep-sided, small-based pan, with the next step in mind.



3. When the pork has been fried to a lightly caramelised golden colour on each side (see right) reduce the heat and add 350ml of the beer of your choice. I added a few cloves of garlic at this stage as well. I also drank the other 150ml of cooking stout. It was okay (but only okay…)
4. Bring heat back up until you’ve got a rolling simmer going (bubbling gently, but not boiling) and braise the pork for about 5 minutes more.
5. Remove the pork steaks from the liquor and put them in a warm place to rest (which, in case you’re wondering, allows the fibres of the meat to relax a little, improving the tenderness of the steak).
6. Put two heaped teaspoons per person of gravy powder in a measuring jug and add hot water to make a thick paste. Gradually add cooking liquor from the pan until you have achieved your preferred gravy consistency. (You can pour the rest of the cooking liquor into a mug and drink it, if you like – tastes a lot like bovril, unsurprisingly).
7. Serve the pork steaks with your sides of choice – we had baked spuds, broccoli and a healthy dollop of apple sauce (the recipe included instructions for deep-fried apples, but I didn’t fancy those).

Of course, the choice of accompanying beverage is an important one. Jo went for a bottle of M&S own-brand stout, and I decided to crack open the Kernel Porter (lovely, lovely stuff – more on that at another time…) that I’d been saving for just such an occasion.

The pork was deliciously tender, the gravy one of the richest and tastiest I’ve ever made and it all went down extremely well indeed. Highly recommended, and a recipe I’ll be re-visiting again in future, I’m sure.

I found this bottle lurking in the back of the overflow Beer Cupboard (formerly known as the Wine Cupboard and still housing the Single Malt Annexe) when I had a clear out a few weeks back.

I picked this up back in 1998 at the first of the British Fantasy Society’s annual Fantasycon events that Jo and I had both gone along to. One of the Fantasycon traditions is to hold a banquet (or, as it’s come to be known by attendees in recent years, the “rip-off chicken dinner”) before the announcing of the British Fantasy Awards.

The banquet that year was sponsored by Millennium Books (who are no longer around as they later merged with Gollancz). Millennium had just published the first book in Stan Nicholls‘ Orcs series – a fantasy saga about a squad of Orc warriors – so everything at the table was Orc-themed. Instead of going for the more obvious “elf-blood wine” they put complimentary bottles of “Orcs Black Ale” out on the tables and, being a compulsive souvenir-collector, I grabbed one to take home with me. I stuck it away at the back of the drinks cabinet (at the time all we had was a much smaller, much less beer-oriented storage compartment) and it’s been there ever since.

I think it’s pretty obvious from the bottle-neck which factory-produced, widely exported Irish “black ale” they re-labelled for the occasion. That, plus the lack of best-by date means that there’s a racing certainty that this one will remain unopened and unsampled for a great many years to come…

Brewery: Guinness
Location: Dublin, Rep. of Ireland
Style: Black lager
ABV: 4.5%
Version: Bottled

Guinness have had mixed success with experimenting on variations of their famous stout, with probably more misses than hits. With this new 4.5% Black Lager, currently undergoing a trial period in Northern Ireland and Malaysia, they are looking to attract the younger lager drinker to the brand, giving them the flavour without the heaviness. Priced at £1.25 for a 330ml bottle it’s at the lower price bracket for those of us used to paying premium prices for our beer, but to me it still seems a bit on the expensive side for the average lager drinker used to “stack-em-high” supermarket deals. The draught version likely competes better but I’ve not had a chance to sample that version of it yet. And other than write-ups in various newspapers, such as this good one on the Times Online website, there hasn’t exactly been a high profile marketing campaign (or maybe because I don’t read local newspapers or watch much local TV I just haven’t seen any of it).

So how does the product rate? Well, it’s a black lager so it is, unsurprisingly, black in colour with a lot of fizz, and very watery looking with no head. There’s very little aroma as well, some faint coffee and chocolate maltiness lingering in the background, but then the average lager drinker probably doesn’t pay any attention to such things. So not off to a good start so far, and to be honest, the taste is the disappointment I was expecting as well – not much to it, with a very thin and chewy texture, but not in a good way. It’s also very dry, which I could see putting off a lot of their target market. I’m struggling to find anything positive about this beer, it’s below average for a black lager, I see no reason for it’s existence and it fully deserves to go the way of previous failures. But that’s only my opinion, what do I know, it’ll probably go on to be a roaring success. Although a couple of reviewers over at Beer Advocate do seem to agree with me.le: