Guinness Beef Pie

And you thought Guinness, the heavenly gift from Ireland, was just for drinking, shampooing, brushing your teeth, and gargling.  As the Irish say, fook no.  You gotta keep some spare cans in your kitchen.  Tuck a couple of cans away where your thirsty wife won’t find ‘em. I’m about to give you just one reason why.  Guinness Beef Pie.

But, first I have to let you in on a secret.  Yes, I know I’ve blogged about going to the Guinness Brewery at St. James Gate, Dublin, and told you most of what you need to know about this Irish legend.

http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2013/08/a-little-bit-of-ireland-lot-of-guinness.html

But, in my haste, I left out the part about crowd-pleasing cooking.   I’m going to rectify that omission, right after I give you a hint about using Guinness for either cooking, or drinking:  buy Guinness in a can.  It’s marked ‘draft’ and that’s not just an expression.  Normally, if I can’t get real draft, I go for a bottle, but in the case of Guinness, I make a rare exception.  The Guinness cans contain an agitation ball and when the can is opened and poured, the brew is aerated automatically, giving you very, very close to a true draft taste.  Ok, now that you’re enlightened, let’s move on to the long anticipated, lip smacking recipe.

Guinness Beef Pie

2 ½ pounds (approx.) beef chuck roast, most fat removed and the beef cut into spoon-sized cubes.

2 tablespoons oil

4 ribs celery, diced  (I use the leaves as well)

2 cloves garlic, diced

3 carrots, peeled and diced

1 onion, diced

1-2 teaspoons powdered cinnamon

1 can Guinness (14.9 Fl. oz., Draft)

2 heaping tablespoons undiluted beef broth (not granulated or normal strength.  I always use Bovril)

3 tablespoons butter, mashed together with 3 tablespoons of flour for thickener

1 sheet of packaged, frozen puff pastry crust, thawed

1 egg yolk

salt and pepper to taste

Salt and pepper the beef.  Put the oil in a large pot, or Dutch oven and turn heat to medium high.  When the oil is hot, add the beef chunks and stir to barely brown.  Don’t worry that the meat is only partially cooked.  It’ll get a lengthy cooking very soon.  Don’t pour off the extra liquid from the cooked meat.

When the beef is barely browned, add all the vegetables/garlic and stir.  Add the can of Guinness and the undiluted beef broth.  Add the cinnamon.  When the mixture comes to a boil, lower the heat to a simmer. Partially cover and let the mixture cook until the meat is tender, about an hour.

When the meat is tender, add the flour/butter mixture and stir.  Cook another 5 minutes or so until the gravy thickens, and also to cook away any raw flour flavor.

Meanwhile, let the sheet of puff pastry thaw.

Heat the oven to 350ºF, or 180º C.

Pour the pie

mixture in a casserole dish, cover decoratively with the sheet of puff pastry and paint the puff pastry with a beaten egg yolk.

Bake for 30 minutes or until the pastry is light, golden brown.

You’ve deprived yourself long enough.  Pop the top on another Guinness and let’s discuss your favorite Irish writers.  On the other hand, we can concentrate on drinking and eating and just say ‘fook it.’

A Little bit of Ireland, A Lot of Guinness

If you don't acquire this taste, you'll never forgive yourself.

Dublin.  Only one thing you need to remember:  Guinness.  Oh sure, there’s a castle, a cathedral, a history that dates back to the murdering, marauding, plundering, pillaging Vikings.  There are the uprisings against British rule that led to independence.  Sorry, no time for all that, once I get beer on my mind.  Speaking of historic dates, only one of those you need to remember:  1759. 

Barley

Guinness and 1759.  They dovetail.  It was 1759 when Arthur Guinness purchased a run-down brewery at St James Gate and took out a 9,000 year lease, at 45 £ per year.  That’s what I call confidence.

All began over some burned barley.  Ever seen barley?  Ever tasted barley?  Know what the hell barley is???  Let’s set the record straight.  First off, you undereducated inebriate, barley is a grain and to see it growing, you wouldn’t know whether you were looking at barley or wheat.  Secondly, you swilling swine, you only need four ingredients to brew beer and barley is one of them.  The other three are hops, yeast, and water.  Guinness adds a bit of a twist, using both malted and un-malted barley.  What does malted mean?  It means the barley was drenched with water and allowed to sprout before being dried. 

A factoid:  Guinness uses 100,000 tons of Irish barley every year.

How about the water?  Legend has it that Guinness is brewed with water from the River Liffey, which flows right through the center of Dublin.  Legend has it wrong.  The eight million liters of water that flow through the Guinness Brewery each day comes from the Wicklow Mountains, right above the city. Wicklow water has a low mineral content, which is another thing in its favor.

Factoid:  Water, in brewing terms, is called liquor.

Then there are the other two ingredients:  Yeast and hops.  Unlike barley, hops grows in fifteen foot strands of greenery.  Harvested by cutting off great ropes of the stuff, it’s then fed through a machine that separates the little cabbage-like balls that will add spice and bitterness to the brew.

Yeast adds the magic.  The little yeast beasts multiply and feed off the sugar of the barley and hops to produce alcohol.  The Egyptians, of pyramid fame, first used yeast and no beer (or whiskey, for that matter) would be complete without it.  Different types of beers generally use specific strains of yeast, although frequent readers of my blog will know that the Belgians are content to use whatever yeast happens to drift in.

See how quickly you can graduate to being a well-informed drunk?  Education is everything.  Well, you also need confidence and foresight.  Those two got me stumped.  I can only do so much.

But, forget about me for the moment and get back to Guinness.  Arthur heard about a man who had over-roasted his barley.  But, instead of throwing it away, the man went ahead with the brewing.  That led to a solidly dark beer, sold inexpensively to porters working at the Dublin docks, hence the name for dark beer:  Porter.   Arthur did the brew one better and called his creation Stout Porter.  At St James Gate, they brew about three million pints ever day.  The porter part was later dropped and now in over a hundred and fifty countries people happily raise a glass of Guinness Stout.  It’s not for nothing that the saying goes:  There’s a little bit of the Irish in all of us.

The self-guided tour is a wonder in itself.  The old part of the brewery, with equipment dating back to the turn of the 19^th Century, is rearranged, with huge photos and videos, running waterfalls, numerous descriptions of the brewing process and something I found particularly fascinating, a video of barrel makers at work.  Sadly, Guinness is no longer stored and taken to market in wooden barrels, but for centuries, men chopped and shaped oak, all by hand, and almost without measuring.  At the height of wooden barrel usage, 300 artisans turned out a thousand barrels a day.  A few decades ago, Guinness graduated to steel kegs.  Easier to produce and store and much easier to ship.

So, you’ve had your tour and are ready for the tasting.  Best place to do that is the 7^th floor, offering not only a delicious pint, but also a panoramic view of the brewery’s 50 acres, and the entire city of Dublin.

50 acres of brewery....And Beyond!

 

Ok, I admit that Guinness, as black as ink and spiced with the bitterness of hops, is an acquired taste.  Matter of fact, it took me almost 30 seconds to acquire it, about half the time it takes to pull a pint.  The dark brew washes into the bottom of the glass and bubbles rush to the top, so tiny it’s almost like watching a dark kaleidoscope.  The barkeep adds a bit more.  You wait.  Then there’s the top-off and you’re ready to become a devotee of one of the tastiest and most storied brews on earth.  The Guinness team likes to say, besides everything else there’s a fifth ingredient in their brew, a little bit of


Arthur, who dreamed big in 1759 and
bequeathed his dream to all of us.

So here’s to you Arthur, and here’s to your creation.  Cheers! Or, as the Scots say, Slainte Mhor!

7th Floor Tasting Room

Pulling a Pint

...patience now...

Down Tha Local – a tasty British institution

The Salisbury - a Victorian Pub

The Nut Tree - smallest pub in England  

fish and chips

Pubs are still the great equalizer in Britain.  Working blokes and financiers, who fancy a pint, rub shoulders in what has always been a sharpened axe to the English barriers of class, the Pub.

The first time I drank Brit beer, in decades past, I’d been warned with the standard poppycock.  “They drink their beer flat and warm.  Terrible stuff!”

Yeah, it’s terrible to sit your bottom down in an historic and infinitely comfortable place, warm yourself at a fire while sipping a bit of liquid history and chatting with the locals.

Expecting something akin to warm spit?  Got news for ye.  First, let’s get some things straight.  Brit beer is not served warm. They keep their kegs in the cellar, with a temperature of around 50ºF (10ºC).   That’s not going to get frost on your fingernails, but it’s not exactly bikini warm.  Secondly, Brit beer is brewed with top acting yeast, rather than American and European bottom feeding yeast.  What’s up with that?  Less natural carbonation remains in the beer.  I’m not going to go into malts and hops and how many monks can dance on the head of a barrel.  You can read about it yourself, well into the night.

When I say historic, what do I mean? I’ll give you a quick glimpse. The Mayflower Pub sits next to the dock where tradition has it that ‘the’ Mayflower sailed for Southampton and on to the new world.

Then there’s The Grenadier, a club for the Duke of Wellington (of Waterloo fame) and his regiment. 

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese has direct ties to Dr. Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Wilde, and Yeats, among others.

Blackfriar Pub, dating to 1905 and built on the site of a Dominican friary.  This architecture is simply outstanding.  All marble, inside and out.

Back to beer.  But, let’s stop calling Brit beer, ‘beer’, and call it what it is, ale.  Playing with linguists?  I don’t think so.  Ale has a different, heavier flavor and generally a darker color.  Even Bass Pale Ale has a deep amber glow.  In fact, to my well-trained taste buds, ale is a different beverage all together.  Comparing Brit ale and American beer is like comparing coffee and tea.  Both are warm beverages served in cups, but after that…

Time to cut the idle chatter and race into a pub.  Pub is short for Public House, meaning anyone 18 or older, with British Pounds and pennies, can walk in and order up.  I do urge one word of caution, order only traditional ales.  The rest are fizzy crap. Traditional ales are the ones the cute bar maid pumps when she pulls on one of the array of long wooden handles.  Check the bottom of the pull and you’ll see the name of the ale and the percentage of alcohol.  For my money, the lower the alcohol content, the smoother the brew.

When I first caught on that English pubs were God’s way of rewarding lechery and sloth, way back in the 1970s, I purchased a thin book called CAMRA’s Guide to Real Ale.  It had a sparse list of pubs around England that offered traditional ales.  CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, arose in the 1970s as a response to so many big brewers doing things the easy way and adding large squirts of carbon dioxide, to weaker and weaker cousins of what used to be.  A hue and cry (both of them at once, apparently) rose up from the throats of those in every Middlesex village and farm.  “Save our ale!”

The happy result is that traditional ale is now available in nearly every pub and the CAMRA Guide to Real Ale has expanded to the thickness of the London Telephone Directory.  But, alas, every sunny day has a lingering black cloud.  British pubs are disappearing at the rate of some 50 per day.  Why might that be?  Prices.  The cost of a pint has doubled in the past decade, mostly due to rising taxes on alcohol.  Without being political, there does seem to be a direct relationship between people having less money to spend and people spending less money.  It’s not just the tax on beer, but also the taxes on the pub businesses.  The ban on smoking has also taken its toll.

Still, there are some 57,000 pubs left, serving 2500 varieties of brew from about 500 brewers.  Here are some general styles you can find, all of them richly flavored:

Bitter – lighter amber colored.  Light head.  Usual alcohol content is about 4.6%.

Mild – definitely darker.  Creamy head.  Alcohol closer to 4.0% or a tad below.

Stout – Guinness is the most popular brand.  Darker body, with a thick, creamy head.  It’s said you can write your name in the foam and it’ll be on the bottom of the glass when you finish your stout.

Those are very general terms and brews vary widely.  Do what I do.  Forget all those tales of what other people think Brit ale is.  The detractors are flat wrong and not even warm.  Experiment.  Try a half pint of this or that.  You won’t be sorry.  If you’re lucky you may even find a pub that brews it’s own.  Now, that’ a place worth spending some time.

"If you took a guy from the 10th Century and brought him forward in time, the only things he would recognize in the world today are churches and pubs," said Peter Brown, the author of "Man Walks Into a Pub," a history of pubs and beer.

 

Inside Blackfriar Pub 

Entry to the Bunch of Grapes