TNCN Beer legend Melissa Cole joins TNCN to talk beer and cheese. Discover why bitter beer is the drink of choice for many of the older British cheeses, and taste along with Charlie and Melissa as they try a few.
Streamed live on Oct 20, 2020
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Cheese & Beer Episode Video Transcript
Yes it’s me it’s Tuesday Night it’s Cheese Night I am back in Cornwall uh this is where it all started you might remember back in when did we first do this march, february or something uh and tuesday’s tuesday was start on a wing and a prayer that david would end really quickly it didn’t as we all know very disappointing so we’ve had six eight months whatever’s getting us into october and it’s been wonderful reaching out and starting this little thing called tuesday night’s cheese night now i’m officially on holiday i’ve got four days off but that’s the reason no bone hat no apron i am rocking like this shirt it’s very good but even better than that even better that i have the most fantastic company tonight to celebrate uh the oldest tradition in the uk of food and drinking action and that’s beer so let’s get Melissa on
Welcome Melissa Cole how are you i’m fine how are you i’m absolutely inquiry i think i’ve mentioned this editor i’m really pleased you’re actually moving because this has got a whole site weekend with bernie’s vibe so you know with that even wrong side this bit of hair isn’t i don’t know what’s going on here that’s a lot more if ever i saw one there’s the amazing lustrous hair that’s amazing how i wish i had half your hair i wish i had a quarter of your hair in fact i’ll take your off yeah come on right melissa enough chat you are a british beer legend so you’ve got the elevator pitch tell us who you are what you do so introduce yourself to cheeseland uh so i’m melissa cole i’m a beer writer international beer judge um i also have just um in a moment of what can only be called covered crazy um gone into partnership with some folks to open a bar small bar restaurant in borough market i know i didn’t tell you that you’re going to spring some things on me wow cool um so for those of you who know borough market you might know the rake and right which is a little speciality beer bar and right behind the rake is um the jubilee kitchen which they’ve built a lot of kind of static market stores one of the better phrases yeah yeah yeah um and all that sort of a bit of a small car parking kind of place yes exactly yeah um so we’re right by the amphitheater seating and we’re doing great um international and uk beers and also some nice hearty food so we’ve got a bit of a bit of a german vibe going on at the moment and we’re going to be playing around are we going to have knock first and all that kind of stuff yeah there’s all that kind of stuff we’ve got the most amazing pretzels and curry versed and special and all sorts of fun at the moment um and we’re just going to keep on mixing it up and then we’re going to focus very much on uk producers and uk produce producers so it is open or is about to open it is open it’s been open a couple of weeks now so and we’re outside and we’ve got lots of lovely warm blankets and we’ve got lots of planters around the place to keep the wind off you and you want to come and snuggle up we’ve still got rule of six of course which is a bit of a blessing yeah yeah what’s that only six beers is that what they’re running yeah yeah if you come you have to order six beers yeah that’s a very good rule very good rule which which which is which we’ve broken tonight because well it depends how you count really because i’ve got four beers how many of you got one okay that’s that’s more than four i’m gonna get i’m about to get beer envy yeah in fetus if you’ve seen the show a little bit i’m reading the wrong way you’re seeing i’m guessing this is your spare room except your spare room looks like a bar uh it’s it’s my office actually it’s more my husband’s office so the moment seeing as he has to work from home and uh he has to be on calls 24 7 pretty much so yeah so uh it’s more my husband’s office than mine but it is a lot of my cold beer shelf storage is over there okay well that’s the kind of office we like i i’m very pleased to welcome you here because as you know i’m a huge believer that beer and cheese go way back way back lately food in the uk would do that you know there’s the french word terroir which i don’t think we really have a such a snappy word for in the uk but um it really does it comes down to roots and it comes down to territories and areas and local and all the things that have become easy to dismiss as buzzwords really and i think that’s a real shame because we actually are a nation of people with regional foods and regional drinks and regional produce and we’re lucky enough to have a food network now that connects us to be able to get that kind of stuff pretty much all over the country we’ve become a little bit marvel about it i think we have got blase about it but i i am of the generation that believes we the group people who thinks we have lost it because i do think that although the geography is still there and the climate is still there and the geology and the maybe even the breeds um the knowledge is not and the knowledge needs to overlay those things to bring cuisine to life because cuisine in my opinion is the understated half of terror so is the the physicality of the geographic geography whereas cuisine is the sociology of the geography and that is and i bang on about this till the cows come home or come in second time for milking or whatever the phrase the day is that is about what happens in the kitchen the decisions made by the people in the kitchen which historically has been the women when they’ve gone right we’re having this dish and it go and we’re using those herbs because they’re coming on this time we’re using their lamb because it’s like whatever it is and this wine or this cider or this beer makes the flavor complete it completes the picture and that sort of social decision making that gets handed down from mother to daughter to mind yeah well also you’ve got to remember the the women were the brewers as well so up until the industrial revolution women were the brewers so in exactly that same way that you’re talking about in the in that you would have used these herbs because they were in season and so on and so forth that would have exactly applied to beer before the 15th century because that’s when when the dutch started bringing hops over so okay i’m feeling you needed to give the 101 in british beer start at the beginning and take us through you have 50 seconds okay well probably the oldest as far as i’m aware um um example of brewing settlement that that we’ve dug up is actually in ireland it’s not in the uk but our islands obviously always interconnected and what you used to have was gruit so gruit would have been made would have been ale uh which would have been made without hops so it would have used things like yarrow ale cost bog myrtle anything else that was aromatic um it would have been probably spontaneously fermented probably from a starter a bit like the way that we think sourdough nail and up until the 15th century when the when the um dutch started bringing in hops and that was when beer and ale it actually became two separate things because beer coming from bier the german the germanic dutch the hot drink and ale would have been the unhopped drink so that’s pretty much that’s you that’s your that’s tonight you think that you’re telling us that hop drink which is a really strongly british thing this bitter beer kicks off in about 1450 something of that order yeah it’s about that yeah a bit later so i’m gonna i’m gonna go out on a limb here all right that’s what tudors tutors step back please don’t ask me okay well let’s go with tudor someone out there will practice so so the bitter beer that we think of as uniquely british is about 500 years old well you’ve got to bear in mind that for example um yarrow and ale costs in of themselves are extremely bitter plants so that bitterness would have been there to balance out the sweet liquid in the beer so so it’s it’s very difficult to tell whether fermentation would have gone all the way through whether it’s whether it would have had wild uh synapse say bretonomyces for example which makes things very dry it’s very difficult to know that you you can’t yeah it’s difficult to extrapolate that but beer is always inherently relatively sweet in some way shape or form so you need to balance that so you balance that by using bitter herbs okay let’s face it a hop is just a climbing plant with cones on it that you can use like a herb i mean it is it is it’s a it’s a it’s a readily available flavor you know without using e numbers i mean if we if we look at the development of taste we see the climb of sugar in the last well basically since you know we’ve started bringing sugar in the last production from east the west indies and the old flavor profiles would have had a much lower appreciation of sugar than we would and things like bitter and acid were very prevalent in some of our cheshires and that kind of thing as distinctiveness yeah yeah yeah right and i mean again as i said it’s very difficult to tell but it’s quite likely that a lot of these beers if they did have wild yeasts in them probably did what we call a tenuate which is fermented um to virtually negligible i mean you don’t there’s not a sugar in beer full stop there’s no sugar and cheese either you know people go oh i’m a bit lactic intolerance well there’s no bleeding lactose in cheese you know so what are people now hey right so we’re gonna we’re gonna start i i was gonna go for cheshire because cheshire is possibly along with the glasses our oldest british [ __ ] i want to start there but i haven’t because we featured that quite recently we’ve got sarah applebee coming on in a couple weeks i’ve not been on that i’ve gone with curcums lancashire one of the oldest cheeses so a classic like that melissa where would you go with beer and why now i’ve actually got because you know it’s my thing um i’ve actually got two okay right one thing i’m aware this is going to be like swearing at you one thing i want people to be aware of is that now you can get genuinely good sorry it’s really difficult with the light because it’s got a shiny shiny label there we go um really good non-alcoholic beer um sell it to me sell it to me oh this is the woodcutter brownells so brown nails actually you don’t see a lot of now which i think is quite a shame i’m thinking that’s like you know what magnus is to cider in newcastle is newcastle brown is to brownell so would that be fair pretty much yeah so well i mean newcastle brownell unfortunately over the years has successfully been um killed by its owner um so um so this is this is a really rich rounded it’s got little hints of a little bit of sort of cocoa powder it’s got a lovely hazelnutty character to it and it’s got a little bit of that sort of camp chicory so the fake coffee kind of thing and it’s really really nice and the great thing is it has got some roundness in it because actually in venice sorry lactose intolerant it has got some lactose in it so you need you need that sometimes put body back in where the alcohol has taken it where the lack of alcohol doesn’t give it so well i’ve got to match that but pretty much only in color is something called connor’s stout imperial smoked stout it’s not the same is it you’ve got him big for a cheese that is what much as i love mrs kirkham’s and i will say that i think it is a beautifully complex cheese but it’s not a big cheese no it’s very light and you’ve gone for a big beer and i would normally recommend that what you do is you try and have parody of flavour okay harrison one nil to you is what no didn’t work quite as well delicious beer great cheese yeah beer is rolling over the cheese on my side yes it will it will absolutely stampede over it so i’m being very cocky i haven’t actually tried this yet well we talked about this earlier you cannot guarantee a cheese and beer match you can you can you can say it likely or less likely but the cheese is going to move in its flavor profiles day to day month to month so you can never be quite sure which one’s going to tip the ground funny enough speaking of which i assume we have probably pieces from the same chuckle this is this is a little fudgier than i’d normally expect kirkland it’s a little tiny bit sweeter it’s a little bit round or red it is it is um you’ve got that the double texture you’re getting from the multi-day curd so it’s got the key of the not give the give the not give in in the now but the softness has got it’s got a much more milkiness but um it’s not a lactic milkiness we’ve not got high acidity at all and it’s not delicious actually it is it’s really it’s actually that’s the that’s probably the i hesitate to use this word sweet and that’s why i sort of said fudgy no i’m with you uh that sort of almost finger of fudge kind of cut flavor to it it’s not it’s not sweet in that it’s not sweet in a sugar a cream sense a sweet cream scent texturally it’s very good we eat quite a lot of mrs kirkham’s language here because my husband’s actually from liverpool his parents moved um later on in his life and also we actually had um mrs kirkham’s as part of a cheese and ham terrine at our wedding so oh okay hey i’m now mrs kirkham’s helped us find the recipe for because it was um it was one that my husband remembered he’d had with his parents at a restaurant down the road from the dairy oh so this really is a proper old friend i literally well long history of beer and cheese so i’ve got a pansto ipa now where i am is is this is my nearest brewery by which i mean it’s no more than four miles away from where i’m sitting we have this a fair amount yeah um and this is absolutely fitness spot on yeah absolutely i mean it’s it’s getting some what i really love about really good beer and cheese or any match um is you get springing up flavors that you didn’t really appreciate in either previously yep and i would say i’m getting a bit seaweed strangely enough i’m getting a little bit of green moss it’s really it’s really delicious okay yeah that might be a bit of minerality they might have treated the water um in order to in order to make the beer the style that it should be just getting the minerality i’m going with the minerality it’s so delicious it’s giving a bit of body to the beer and it’s giving an effervescence to the cheese yeah i mean to be honest a lot of spiked beers have to tend to have a bit of a stringency from that smoked malt so what it actually might be is it might help be helping to balance out and also the dark roasted malts as well because they have like when you eat them raw when you eat them in their raw state before they go into the brew they do they almost like taste like crunching on a coffee bean and of course we know that coffee is naturally bitter and astringent yeah so that hopefully the cheese will be helping to balance that out a little bit so let’s go back to beer as a historical you know effect of british cuisine so i was always told and i’m sure you can fill this out that for a long time the water in this country was frequently particularly in the cities not good to drink and beer was the go-to processed liquid that meant a lot of people were drinking beer because the water was unsafe is that true mainly no oh man i know it’s an interesting one it’s one that i’ve challenged um it was kind of one that i challenged reading i was reading i don’t know i can’t even remember what it was it was something about a historic battle um and i suddenly thought you always see all these things in books so you know whether it’s whether it’s fictional or or historic everyone everybody’s looking to be by water for two reasons one the men and the horses need water and two it means that it’s very difficult to if you camp with your backs to a bloody great river it’s unlikely anybody’s going to attack you from behind and i suddenly thought in a minute weren’t all these supposed to be absolutely untenable and awful and all that sort of stuff and i spoke to um dr annie gray um i asked her a question on twitter and she’s a fantastic um food historian and thank you thank you finally you’re asking the right questions and all this kind of stuff is she the ladies on kitchen cabinet quite a lot yes yeah she’s she’s very good humid i mean she’s great to listen to yeah and so um and so she said the whole point actually is that where this assumption has come from which is a which is an understandable and logical assumption to me is that where this assumption has come from is actually because water doesn’t cost anything or certainly didn’t cost anything then things now um it never went in the household accounts yeah now i can sort of see that there’s a lot of thing if it isn’t written down it didn’t happen which is we see this in the cheese history of the uk um because it was done by women and often consumed where it was made it’s invisible yeah oh there’s a good there’s a there’s a one on that um i got the lady who wrote i can only see her first name right now judith it will come back to me in a minute great children’s writer she wrote a she wrote a very interesting uh book on the history of alewives um in medieval times and here’s something that say that that shows you that it’s uh the same different century same [ __ ] um when women got men to sell their beer for them they got roughly the same they the men got more and it worked out in all the records that she looked at as roughly about the same as the gender pay gap today okay same [ __ ] different century [Laughter] so there you go i i’m an equal opportunist opportunity consumer i drink beer from men and women i drink eat cheese from men and women i i’m not going to discriminate okay so mrs kirkham graham kirkham who’s making it now awesome but let’s move on because that is a really early example of british terroir but as of the middle of the 19th century we had the rise of cheddar obviously chad predates that but at that point cheddar begins to be the japanese knotweed of british cheeses and starts popping up all over from scotland down to cornwall um and so we better do a matching with cheddar say again japanese knotweed tastes like bit like rhubarb when you cook it when it’s young oh wow suddenly i like it a bit more okay okay this isn’t a typical um uh cheddar we’ve got um one of the reasons we’ve chosen this is because this is this is old in a different way this is the um uh hafod which is uh the holden family so right up against the atlantic well not the rc um up the edge of wales um it’s i’m not pronouncing this right langabee fling beat neal emperor um and uh patrick holden makes this now one of the oldest proponents of organic cheese making vanilla organics and so one of the i think the oldest volcanic dairy in wales but also we’ve got a cheese here that they started making relatively recently leans on lincolnshire poacher lincoln poetry obviously leans on the cheddar tradition but i’m not going to remember this lady’s name but um somebody wrote a book from way back which the holden family decided we are going to recreate this cheese or make it a new um and it’s created a real thing and the other thing about this cheese is i want to make the point is it’s with air chakaos and this is the big misunderstanding of our british cheese making is so much of it is with holston friesians very impactful of flavor very impactful of production but wholesome fruitions only hit the uk in about 1950. so so we’re talking about in the history of british cheese making we’re recreating acres of british character full cheese yeah using a dairy cow we’ve been using for two and a half minutes and air shares are one of the short horns probably short ones longhorns the ones with horns probably the oldest british breed but in the meantime we tried airship which is why i find this interesting so airship cheese a way of making cheddar that is in some ways older than some of the great cheddar makers i’m gonna get shocked the it’s the aroma on this that’s really getting me there’s something incredibly fresh and almost green about it i’m sorry i’m one of those weird people that kind of smells slightly in colors um no there’s something there’s something almost spicy almost almost brick green pepper corny it’s lovely actually we got that i i don’t smell in colors i’m smelling currents as in the flow of currents if that makes sense yep it goes and it comes it ebbs and flows and it grows and it minimizes it i definitely see what you’ve got that greenness and i actually going with your green peppercorns although i wouldn’t have said it if you hadn’t if you know what i mean i’m going to take these glasses off now i think we’ve had enough of the charity on holiday to be honest i was beginning to messed up and it was like okay let’s get rid of that okay so we’re back okay um so what would you say is the classic combo with with cheddar um do you know i i don’t think you can be that sweeping with cheddar okay okay well you can’t i mean you you you just can’t because this is entirely different to for example i making some jack potatoes this evening for dinner so i grabbed some dumb though 18 months europe my 18 month old you know got the crunchy bits in it totally it’s completely 100 different cheese so you can’t be sweeping so i took a i took a punt on this because i have had this cheese before but it was actually a lot colder um because i just stolen a slice in the shop um and i took a punt that actually that the new wild beer co um mixed fermentation ipa would work with it it’s really difficult sorry i’m so sorry because of the lighting no no i guess problem all the time the light doesn’t pick it up very well it looks you look great but when you bring something up to the thing oh yeah so there we go hopefully you can just about see that so this is actually a brand new beer um they developed it very much as a as a beer to go on the table um they tried to make it as broadly pleasing as possible um well that concept makes me very slightly uncomfortable but i do think the beer is absolutely stunning um it is it’s got beautiful rounded peary pear lovely soft quincy apple flavors it’s really quite dry however which is where that commentates so different types of yeast um will carry on eating more sugars than the last sort of yeast of you know culture which i’m sure that actually is is something you know mixed cultures is probably something that’s used in cheese making i would imagine that you yeah it’s um cultures are a complicated thing because it hits that whole raw milk versus pasteurized milk debate so in raw milk you’ve got 40 odd berries enormously but let’s go with 40 odd strains of bacteria and whereas in pasteurized milk with an introduced starter or or non standard style you’re looking maybe four or five so that process which you’re talking about is successive cultures taking over where the last one left off is much more complex and interesting in cheese when you’re using raw milk doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get big fat flavors because actually the the minuscule contribution of each level can actually fall below the recognition level go yeah i’m sure it happened can’t taste it whereas the four big starter bacteria using in your starter cultures but like yes i saw that one and yes i saw that when you do you see what i mean so so it’s always an interplay between can you taste it and complex i think an element of symphony even even at non not even specifically detectable levels i think there’s a there’s always a bass note that runs through the that would make a difference so you can say that for example that the saccharomyces cerevisiae the kind of universal fermenter that you you will buy as a bread yeast or a beer yeast um or even as a wine yeast as your initial starter that probably people would say well it doesn’t really matter in this but it does because it will have a signature and it will have a signature that will weave its way through even if it’s just a little tiny piccolo on on the palette and i do think i do think that there is an element say that just because it falls below the scientific level we say we can taste things i don’t i don’t believe that it doesn’t it doesn’t doesn’t impact in some way yeah yeah i mean i i interested you raised use the word piccolo because it’s often used to describe this cut this construct of orchestra as a metaphor for um for complex food construction so you know can you pick out that third violin no does it sound worse without it yes explain that contradiction yeah you know and that is that is what you get with really complex flows and actually it’s a similar thing in french food construction the italian get four awesome ingredients let them all speak job done right yeah go to france no this sauce has 27 ingredients take 48 hours to make and i only showed it in the direction of the pan in the first place and the various elements of that you know so so i i just because you can’t explain it doesn’t mean it isn’t right do you know what i mean um don’t speak to um so you know this is this isn’t you know science is real it’s important um but but science hasn’t even scratched the surface you know i i’m i’m a firm believer that for example that both fats and sort of kokumi that that sense of carb heartiness that you get the japanese word for it um will you new one on me what did you say um and you faded out on me i don’t know i think it’s pronunciation i’m sorry if i’m murdering it yeah and it’s the sense of sort of that that heartiness that you you experience when you eat carbohydrates or why you crave carbohydrates sometimes and it’s not specifically a taste because if you think about it sometimes when you bring when you really want carbs you can use whether it’s pasta or potatoes or bread or yeah just carbs yeah and there’s a and there’s a real sense of when it hits your mouth now that’s not wholly fully explained by by the actual flavor it it’s almost certainly an actual sense of taste so five recognized ones sweet sounds well yeah i’m about to write some big piece on some thesis on taste for keys and all i’m doing at the moment is going oh [ __ ] this is a hard b gonna get me a lot of trouble you know i’m okay we’re gonna do it we’re gonna get shot down trust me it’s fun um and i think fat’s going to be there as well because there’s a there’s a there’s a definite element that fat brings to the party that cannot just be down to flavor and the way that the body responds to it is actually in the same centers that we’re looking at that you look at potatoes the other thing about flavors you have to take into account is flavor is not there just for our enjoyment okay flavor there is there to guide our health and well-being you know it’s essentially there to make sure we eat the right stuff so that we can have sex have babies and die you know um as long as we have enough time for that flavor has done its job which is which is weird right now i want to stop you i want to stop stopping stopping stopping stopping i want to tell you what i’m having the cheddar okay i’ve gone with pads dough extra pale ale now i’m not really a fan of what i think of the citric hops which i’m assuming this is one of um this is a single hot tub you know um but i’m re when i went for it because i wanted because um cheddar loves pineapple cheddar loves apple cheddar loves perry you mentioned perry in the description of the one that you cheddar loves that so i figured okay we’re going to go hop and we’re going to bring a bit of fruit in and see if that works and i have to say it is working nicely it would actually style again i would normally generically avoid when i’m when i’m talking generically about cheddar but this is so soft and it is not as acidic as i as i personally know batteries yeah and and so therefore yes that will that will work the more is that i find the more acidic the cheese gets the more you want to err away from highly hot beers very broad brush and as we were saying earlier we’re going to be horrible teachers and tell everybody to go away and keep on tasting and enjoying and eating and drinking but it really is but this again as you said there’s always going to be an exception that proves the rule generally the more acidic the beer the more i’ll earl away from bitterness yeah we in the academy we we teach the idea that the five mouth flavors you’re looking for contradiction or another way of putting balance so if if if food a is big in sweet salt and acid or something then drink b has to come in with bitter and whatever other one i missed savory do you have balance there but in the complex flavors you’re looking for harmony and and reaffirmation so so so so it’s not the acidity of fruit but you want that fruit to sort of melt otherwise they can be passed out if that makes sense yeah absolutely i think i think that probably applies a little bit more to i think you can you can write off the contrast um as the well you can put the contrast down as the easy one um and but actually really for me um and uh my waistline will tell you it’s been through a lot of a lot of a lot of sampling um is that uh it really actually my my number one tip to people is again going back to what i said to you earlier is level of intensity versus level of intent and i think you can actually have a lot more fun in that arena and you can also have discover some absolutely astonishing pairings so the day that somebody introduced me to beanly blue with an erdgers which is a really super funky belgian style like bone dry absolutely bone dry it’s quite farm yardy and i tried the two together and it was my eyes rolling back in your head kind of territory and it’s really but you get that you do get that kind of like oh that was not supposed to work it’s beautiful there’s a beer i’m gonna but one of the wild beers i was using when i was working on piano cruises to match with a really straight down the line um smoked red leicester and then on paper they shouldn’t have worked yeah but the regular stuff all its smoked and genericness black president just came to the beer it says no no no that none of that now we want that bit oh perfect yeah thank you for being up last this is cohen adams this is again over against the irc side of wales so up on that beautiful welsh whale side of the world and it’s briefed as a kind of rebel shot slash across the one i’ve got most definitely is at the rebichon end of the spectrum we’re hardly getting any breakdown oh that really isn’t i’m going to turn that down right that’s better for me yep yeah so you’ve got that slightly open texture but i don’t know if you can see that there is no gooeyness going we’ve got a small breakdown just under the skin you can see that sort of half centimeter and the whiteness now the the rind it’s got the dry orange but not that tacky kind of super smelly character and it’s smelling of wet laundry and uh mold kind of um but not pungent slightly like it’s been it’s like it’s been spring cleaned um it’s like a very clean wine yeah it’s a so i was expecting this to be the wild card it’s like a substantial flavor but in fact it’s not so i’m gonna turn down my expectation uh what is this well i actually just switched beers you’ve switched beers okay tell us why you’ve gone for what you’ve gone and why i mean why not enough people know enough about lager and you can get some astonishing astonishingly different lagers from what you think of the bland fizzy euro orbit stick it out so here a very bad pattern it’s um it’s a style that actually comes from dusseldorf um so it is very specific to the dusseldorf area normally um and this specific um one is norm the style was normally only released by a very limited amount of breweries and only on tap at this time of year and the guys at orbit absolutely love one of the breweries out there and this is their homage to that style now this is also as you can see not the color you would necessarily associate with a lager so no no no i was just swore blind that’s my logo yeah and it’s also six percent so now this is all little bits of very slightly burnt currants on the edge of the cake got a little bit of that plummy pruning thing and again just a little dusting of cocoa powder and all of that is coming together in a beer that has been lagered and that’s actually the biggest misconception people think larger is actually a style in my eyes it’s actually a process it comes from the word largem which means to store and these beers are stored for at least six weeks at very low temperatures in order to let them mature properly so that is that is what that is what lager is that’s where we get the word from it’s how long really should be made okay and is it working oh it’s fantastic can i stop talking i’ve been through my four beers and um this chap my stout is rolling over the cheese again still a failure this one which was the by committee from paso brewery um i’m going to be honest the combination was awful a real sharp up the middle of the face kind of like um no i went through the fun stance but i work in a kind of sour better sense completely failed to make the most of each other i went back to the um uh the mayday central parallel just just didn’t so i’m i’m old faithful ipa pads though gentle pleasure working really well yeah i think um i think for me my two favorites i’ve actually definitely been the darker beers which is funny so i really did like the pairing but the two dark beers um sort of book ending there now the only only other one i would have really have liked to try i think we’ve run out of time we haven’t run out of time generally we ran out of time ten minutes ago just saying but you know it’s the little pomona dead flowers um cider from the lovely susanna at little pomona and i think that would have also gone beautifully um with the last cheese so so um uh before we finish before we finish um i have to say you’ve just written a book right so i’m going to tell people about that right whoa um so this is the new book um so the little book of lagas so this is just a romp accessible makes a lovely christmas present or present for any friends that’s not expensive there we go it’s all about it’s incredibly briefly in depth it’s where my uh journalistic training has definitely come to the fore to be able to tell a good story in a short time uh-huh um yes no i i had a lager today from the harbour brewery um which i believe is uh one of um it’s also to do with passive brown i’m not really quite sure um but at a local pig at one of the pig hotels absolutely delicious i’ve never been a man of lager um and i absolutely adored it very good people yeah okay so melissa that’s that’s not close enough thank you question it’s been a pleasure to talk to you thank you so much for your knowledge and we have to thank the fine cheese company for sending us both yeah the half-body is one of the great underplayed chatters of the uk and this kirkland is at his best he’s had an extraordinary year as everyone knows where he thought he was toast and then thanks to the naked naked beer drink or naked chef or whatever there is um it went tonto and he’s back in the game which is great um how’s your been you had a good year have you done all right covered permitting yeah i mean it’s been confusing and bewildering and the book was supposed to be out in may and then it was delayed until just now and ah um but yeah i mean to be honest i’m i’m you know i’m lucky i’m healthy my family my family have all been fine um and you know we’ve got roof over our head and all that sort of stuff um yeah at the end of the day can’t complain it really could be a lot worse um and any any stress i highly bought on myself really yes no me too yeah no i’ve managed to have a pretty awful year in every way except for the important ones which has been fine but it’s just like what is it about everyone has just tried to do everything this year twice as fast in four different ways um and it’s been been quite hectic which is why we all need a holiday yes right down the line i’ll see in the green room afterwards but in the meantime let’s get back and tell everyone learn about cheese learn about cheese learn about beer say thank you to melissa oh you are an amazing person i will see all you guys next week i can’t remember what we’re doing next week but i’ll be back off holiday it’ll be five times good as it always is happy cheese eating
