The Surgery - Put cooking with beer on the menu

Put cooking with beer on the menu

 Dear Surgery:​ Cooking with beer seems to be an increasingly popular trend and I'd like to raise the profile of this in my pub. How do I go about it?

 The Surgery says:​ As regular PubChef readers will know, cooking with beer is a very hot topic, with our regular writer Richard Fox soon to publish a book on this very subject (see pages 14-17 for more suggestions from him). More and more chefs are using beer in their cookery, and many name the beers. One of the most ingenious ways of promoting this has been the regular Saturday morning Cooking With Beer sessions at Welsh gastro pub Illtud 216 in Llantwit Major. Owner Andrew "Pugsley" Davies is a beer expert who also runs the real ale gift box service the Real Beer Box Company (www.realbeerbox.com​). At Illtud 216, he stocks up to 30 Welsh bottled and bottle-conditioned ales, and the large increase in beer sales resulted in the weekly Cooking With Beer sessions.

 Interestingly, these events have been more popular with women. Davies says: "What we've found is that ladies who have been shopping or meeting for coffee on Saturday morning now come to the pub for our cooking sessions, and we've been getting about 20 people each week. It's all very informal and people get a chance to sample the ales during a brief talk about the beers and the breweries. During the week, we publicise what the beers are going to be and what the recipe will be. Our chef, Andrew Buckley, then serves small ramekins of that week's dish with wine glasses of the beer. "There is always beer on our menu and Andrew uses a lot of Welsh beers in his cooking - in the stocks, the gravy and even in the batter for our fish and chips. We've also got a special offer on a Welsh steak and Stilton sandwich with homemade chutney. It's a bit like a grown-up version of the McDonald's meal deal in that it costs £9.95 with a free bottle of Welsh beer of your choice!"

 Andrew says that matching food with beer is a growing trend and these sessions have made people think twice about drinking beer with food and cooking with it. He adds: "These events have increased lunchtime trade because the ladies who attend often go shopping afterwards and leave their husbands in the pub, or they both stay and have lunch with us."