Tag: Guinness

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Beer Cocktail Day – Guinness Punch

Well, I will need to try this during the summer….

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A few years back, I was instructing at a summer school on the culinary history of the Caribbean. During the interactive workshop, students devised food rituals, summoned significant food memories, and crafted a Caribbean cocktail. They chose to make a Guinness Punch—a favorite on several British-colonized islands. This mixture of strong stout beer, creamy, sweet condensed milk, and a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg is a delightful fusion of flavors.

Guinness was known to me through both sides of my family. The Irish connection was apparent since Guinness was founded in Dublin, but why was it also known from the Caribbean side? As it turns out, in the seventeenth century, the Irish were engaged as contract laborers on plantations in the Caribbean. Due to their substantial presence in the area, Guinness decided to export beer there—with more alcohol and hops, ensuring it stayed good during the transatlantic journey. When I learned this, I felt a strong sense of connection: the unlikely merging of two clashing cultures had given rise to something beautiful and tasty and no, I’m not referring to myself!

Ingredients 

  • 1 bottle (500 ml or roughly 2 cups) of Guinness West Indies Porter
  • 1 cup (250 ml) (oat) milk
  • 1/2 cup (120 ml) of condensed milk
  • ⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • ⅛ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg, plus extra
  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 tablespoons overproof rum (high-alcohol rum; optional)
  • ice cubes, to serve

Instructions

  1. Place all ingredients, except the ice cubes, into a blender and pulse several times. Serve in glasses with ice cubes and a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg on top.

Heard this on the Good Food podcast. Which I highly suggest listening to.

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Beer-odrama

Haven’t been on Netflix for awhile.  Too busy catching up on shows on other streamers but they have recently announced an interesting beer series helmed by “Peaky Blinders” writer Steven Knight. Called House of Guinness (for now) it will tell the story of The Guinness Family. Yes, that one.

It “will be set in the 19th-century in both Dublin and New York, and will focus on the aftermath of the death of Benjamin Guinness, who is frequently credited with the brewery’s long-standing fame and success. The plot will follow Benjamin’s children Arthur, Edward, Anne, and Ben as they navigate the challenges of the business in the wake of their father’s passing.”

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Wish I Could Try – Luck of the Dragon from Guinness Open Gate

The Maryland outpost of Guinness has had some drinks that made me want to be on the East Coast and one such brew is Luck of the Dragon, brewed for Lunar New Year.  It is a “5.0% ABV ale is infused with dragon fruit powder and orange purée, giving it this stunning fuchsia color.”

If that wasn’t reason enough, sales of the lucky beer goes “to support the extraordinary artists at Baltimore’s Asian Pasifika Arts Collective, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using art to promote the representation of Asian Americans in everyday life and build connections across communities.”

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Guinness Day – Dark and Light

Right up front, if you want a story about the beer of Guinness, go elsewhere.  This is a biblical style survey of a LOT of the Guinness family from the first Arthur all the way to Guinness being family free under Diageo. You learn very little of St. James Gate.

This is also not a quick or fun read.  This is slow and in tiny print with a cavalcade of names being thrown at you.  There are helpful family trees sprinkled throughout the book but even with those guideposts, it is hard to keep track especially when titles started getting added and Edwards become Lords of this or that.

A third thing that made this hard was the money being spent.  Every Guinness it seemed had more than enough money to buy house after estate after castle.  Maybe in 2023, I am too aware of the 1% lording over the rest of us that reading about it happening back then just left me a little bitter.

Those three issues aside, Wilson introduces us to so many people who are worthy of books just about them.  Granted some of these Guinnesses would need to be looked at with a very critical eye but interesting politicians, sailors, bankers and writers nonetheless.  And the financial kerfuffle of the Guinness purchase of DCL Distillers is more than likely already a book about how not to run a merger and / or acquisition.

But if you have a Guinness in the fringe and a hankering for Irish history through the prism of one extended family, you will find some interesting stories.

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Leprechaun Beer Review – Guinness vs. Guinness 0.0

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I tend to stay in on the drinking holidays and today I am doing the same with a taste test. Guinness vs. Itself but its non-alcoholic sibling.

And to make it a little more interesting, gonna do this blind and see if the 0 is easy to taste. My wife laughed at the suggestion since most of my N/A experience boils down to “too thin.”

But this blind nearly fooled me. They both pour that familiar darl brown almost black. Both have the widget The 0 Draught has a more pronounced Guinness smoke and chocolate combo compared to the draught we know and love on this particular day in particular. But, the taste was noticeably thinner with a touch of wine sour as well. That lack of fullness was enough for me to semi-comfortably pick it out.

The aroma was probably amplified for the 0 to compensate and in that lies a lesson for others making N/A beers. Pull focus away from the thinness inherent in these beers with aroma and you can get close to the original.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!

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Guinness in the Yard

If there is a place more aptly named for a brewery than Old Brewers’ Yard, well I can’t think of it.

Guinness will be moving into that location in Covent Garden where beer was brewed back in 1772 and will house not only a brewery but restaurant, store and event space.

Now I have to visit Baltimore and London for the Guinness trinity.

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Guinness is Old Fashioned

Guinness and their Open Gate brewery in Maryland have done quite a bit of experimenting, most of which stays on their taps. This holiday season though, an Old Fashioned cocktail beer will have a bigger distribution footprint.

I am a sucker for a cocktail beer and this is the perfect time for this particular cocktail.

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Bubble Tea

Just when you think that brewers have stopped raiding other beverages, along comes the Maryland Guinness brewery with…

“In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and in collaboration with Diageo’s PAN Asian Network, we’re brewing a Bubble Tea Inspired Stout. The iconic black tea, vanilla, brown sugar and tapioca flavors meet our base stout recipe in the first Baltimore-brewed can release that we’ve ever nitrogenated!

A $15,000 donation is being made to the incredible creatives at Baltimore’s Asian Pasifika Arts Collective as part of this collab project.”

It actually sounds kind of good to me.