Alco-Shops part 2: The Chinese Supermarket

Slightly early post this week, since I’m not going to be around tomorrow to post it, so here’s part two of the [going-to-be] regular Alco-Shops feature.

I visited the Chinese supermarket near work the other day to pick up some cooking supplies, and while browsing the myriad different types of soy sauce I realised that I had found an interesting new resource, for out of the corner of my eye I noticed there were several different types of Japanese Sake. They were of various sizes, styles and prices, and just like that I’d found something to brighten up my day. I certainly wasn’t intending to buy any booze that day, but for £4 a little bottle of sake (300ml, 15% abv) would do very nicely. And I can always pick up a different one next time.

Kylie is eyeing you up from behind the bottle

 Shopping at the Chinese supermarket is fun for a while, but once you've seen all the chickens' feet, rabbits' tails and donkey noses, it kind of loses its novelty appeal. This was just the kind of thing to move the Chinese Supermarket from the Not to the Hot column.

Once I’d selected my various fish-vinegar-soy-sauces I saw some other weird spirits near the checkout, too. I was tempted, but figured I’d investigate that at some future time. I don’t really know why I was so surprised – where else would you expect to be able to buy sake? It is the Chinese supermarket, after all – Tesco sells booze, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, there you go; try out some proper far eastern booze without having to use your passport – unless you look young, and need it for ID.

Ruby isn't interested in Saki

Well, I was fairly excited about trying the bottle of saki that I bought, so I only waited as long as the weekend. My one previous experience with saki was a good few years ago when I had gone up to Newcastle for a friend’s birthday. His housemate had a bottle that had never been opened, and my friend said it would be fine to try it. I read the card that was included in the box, and learned that saki can be drunk cold, warm or hot. I drank it at room temperature.

Made in the US of A!

It was dark in the house, but I seem to remember the saki was a kind of pinky colour – like sherry. You can see from the pictures that the Nigori brand that I bought last week is very different. I think I was drawn in by the bottle, the alcohol content (which was 0.5% greater than all the others), and the fact that on the back it boasts, “one of the oldest and most traditional of all sakis”. What I didn’t notice was that it said, “made in Berkeley, Ca”.

Now, I have learned that saki is made from rice in a manner that is similar to how beer is made, so it is like rice beer more than rice wine. The rice is scrubbed to leave the starchy element, and after brewing it is usually filtered out. Blah, blah, blah, have a look at Wikipedia if you want more detail.

It looks like they’ve put the ricey stuff back in mine, such that it ends up like Orangina, and you have to shake it ‘before use’. Also, it should be chilled and in general consumed within 2-3 hours of opening. It was only a 300ml bottle, so I figured I may as well drink it in one sitting – which I did, but it was hard work.

Shake it, baby - YOU won't break it!

Despite being a very different type of saki from the one I had tried previously, the flavour was exactly how I remembered it – just with chewy bits. I can’t really describe it for you, I’m afraid, but it convinces me that saki isn’t a taste I need to revisit all that often – until I’ve fully acquired it, I suppose. With so many other interesting beverages out there, I can’t say how long that might be.

Before I go; a word about the weekend. Those of us in the UK who have good employers, and who don’t work in the retail or service industries have an extra long weekend this weekend -  because it’s the Queen’s Jubilee.  Four days off for free! Woo-hoo! Thanks, Queenie! I’m certainly not a royalist, nor will I be partaking in any Jubilee celebrations, but I will be celebrating inwardly at the prospect of (hopefully) three nice lie-ins - only three because my brother-in-law has booked us a round of golf at 07.24 on Sunday. I like playing early, but this is ridiculous. The bacon’s still frozen at that time! I suppose the idea is to get there before there’s anyone else around to see how crap we are (I am), so I appreciate that much, at least.

Also, yesterday was pay day. It’s been an especially long time coming this month, so yesterday I celebrated by finally buying a (hopefully) nice bottle of brandy. I went for Courvoisier VSOP, which is a blend of cognacs, some aged up to 10 years, though in general the designation “VSOP” or “Very Special Old Pale” [that’s not very French, is it?] means the brandies are aged at least 5 years. So we’ll say 5-10.

I haven’t tried it yet, and I’m very much starting out on the brandy journey of discovery, but I can hardly wait. I’ve been meaning to buy a decent brandy for a while, but I always get distracted by the single malt scotch. That almost happened again, and I literally had to drag myself away before I bought something else as well.

So, I hope you have a nice weekend. See you next week.

Pub Crawl Fallout

Last week I hit you with a post about the art of pub crawling in advance of my first planned pub crawl since Drink it How You Like it began. I realised over the weekend though, that there was something important I forgot to include in my basic guidelines – something that I actually fell foul of this weekend, and that luckily didn’t result in disaster; don’t drink too much on the night before your planned pub crawl.

This is a very easy mistake to make, since excitement can be running quite high as the weekend approaches. As I told you, I had planned to tackle the famous Didsbury Dozen on Saturday, and had selected an experienced and hardy crew. However, being that my fiancée Brenda, would be out of town from Friday it seemed necessary to go out for some drinks on Friday, too. So that led to a mini pub crawl of Manchester’s Oxford Road area. Being all excited, I drank far too much, and didn’t bother having any food, so it all resulted in a fairly severe hangover on Saturday morning. By the time my first group of friends arrived at 11.30 I wasn’t feeling much better and still looked like I’d just woken up, though I’d actually been up since 7 feeling that the house was too hot.

Now some people (future alcoholics) will say, ‘hair of the dog!’ because that’s supposed to work, and I did consider having a can of beer at 9am, but it’s a fine line. Yes, a fine line. So I’m here to tell you: you can’t rely on hair of the dog – it’s still a lottery. Your second drinking session might be a success, or it might turn out that you peaked a day too early, the beers aren’t going to go down nicely that day at all, and you’re going to be tired and grumpy and might carry a headache with you the whole way.

Luckily for me, this weekend the gods of beer were on my side. A couple of cans at my friend Chris’ house for the early afternoon match soon led to three pints of Directors and lunch at The Didsbury, and we were off. We didn’t visit 12 pubs, but given that we did visit 8, had 3 pints in the first one, and 2 cans beforehand, it transpired that we drank enough to have visited 12 pubs.

And we had two meals! This is an unprecedented development in pub crawling for me. I’m notorious for not wanting to eat once I’ve started drinking, but it is essential for prolonging the duration of your crawl. It is useful to have pubs on your route that do decent food so you can take care of the food requirement without taking a break from the drinking. It’s also great if it means you can get the beers brought to you for a couple of rounds instead of having to go to the bar.

The Didsbury is an ideal starting point if you’re intending on trying a dozen Didsbury pubs one day. It’s situated between Didsbury Village and Parrs Wood, so it’s pretty much the first pub in Didsbury (coming from the Stockport side). It has a decent reputation for food, and tends to be very popular on Sunday lunchtimes, but then so are most gastro-pubs in this country. I have to say, the rump steak I had was all right, but given the pub’s reputation, I expected something a bit better. Nevertheless, beer was first class - the Directors was going down very well, and I’m not a food blogger anyway.

I don’t remember the names of all the pubs we visited, but we kept the venues fairly old skool, so it was traditional [read: old man pubs] all the way really. Fletcher Moss was probably the best stocked bar in terms of spirits but generally we didn’t have too much trouble making our various selections. 

I think I took the award for most expensive round with £27.20 when some of us decided to have Sailor Jerrys and some Courvoisiers. I think Gav had the cheapest round - £11, when he stole the round I was in the process of buying at The Didsbury.

Along the way I unveiled The Devils Breath which you can read about in an earlier post, and it proved very popular. Then we almost started a food fight in the Four in Hand before good sense reasserted itself and we finally strayed over the border into Withington with a pub who’s name I can’t remember, but it had a proper tiled floor, and seemed to have been lifted directly from a mining town in the 50s. Nearly everyone was really impressed with that one. Paul declared, “This is brilliant!” (see how I’ve italicised the word ‘brilliant’ there, but left the exclamation mark un-italicised? That’s exactly how he said it).

So I can categorically declare: a good time was had by all. They were probably the two best pub crawls I’ve participated in for a long time, so it was a bonus that they came on consecutive days.

I’m afraid I don’t have any booze porn for you this week, but here’s a picture I found on my camera from the pub crawl on Friday night. I can only assume that’s me silhouetted in there. I probably won’t be able to post again until next week, so until then have fun, and enjoy yer booze.