The Next Gluten-Free Food Opportunity
Yesterday’s visit to the cafe at St. Paul’s has got me thinking. What is going to be the next gluten-free opportunity. I was served gluten-free bread there and I suspect it might have been something like Genius. So perhaps the opportunity in a large metropolis like London is the supply of a range of quality GF bread and rolls. They will be a premium product as they will be aimed at restaurants and quality food shops. Get the product right and no self-respecting restaurant will be without its GF bread probably delivered almost daily. Remember in the late 1800s, virtually every part of London had their own craft bakers. Most incidentally were German.
Would the same also apply to beer?
I don’t know, but in probably ten years time, the market will be very different.
An Objective in Life!
Last night, I was writing to a friend about the pubs near to my new house. I said the following.
My local is just four doors away, but it needs educating. All it serves is crap upside-down lager and chemical cider. But there are a few Adnams pubs within a few minutes walk. And most Adnams pubs serve the best cider in the world, Aspall, which has been crafted in Suffolk since 1728.
Perhaps my first objective in life is to celebrate their tri-centenary. I’ll only be 81!
I used to worry that because my father and his father died so young, that I might suffer the same fate. But now I’m more optimistic, especially as I’e found out that most of my grandfather’s brothers and my mother and both grandmothers, lived either well into their eighth decade or even into their ninth.
So perhaps, it’s an objective I stand a chance of fulfilling. I’m certainly going to give it a good shot!
My Gluten-Free Diet
I think it is true to say that as time has gone on, I’ve cut out more and more manufactured gluten-free foods.
Take tonight after a trip to London to look over my new house, I needed a quick supper, so I warmed through a Moroccan chicken casserole and cooked some rice. None of the ingredients are specifically processed to be gluten-free and most of the basic ingredients can be obtained in most good food stores. So I did use rice. chicken and apricots that were organic from Waitrose, but that has nothing to do with being a coeliac.
I got to thinking today, about obtaining my gluten-free supplies, when I move. The nearest shops to where I will be living are in Kingsland Road in Dalston.
So what specific gluten-free food do I buy?
- Genius bread
- Greens gluten-free beer.
- Doves farm pasta and flour.
- Waitrose gluten-free cakes and biscuits.
- Life free-from Worcester sauce.
I suppose you can include St. Helen’s Farm goats milk and yoghurt, Wilkins jams, marmalades and tomato sauce, and Aspall cyder, but these are a matter of personal taste rather than a strict diet.
In a quick recce of Sainsburys in the Kingsland Road, I found that they had a free-from section, that was even selling the Greens beer, which is something my local one in Haverhill doesn’t. So for some products, I may need to go on an expedition to Waitrose in the Holloway Road or at the Angel, but it will be nice to have some basic products within ten minutes walk. I haven’t lived close to a supermarket, since we lived in St. John’s Wood in the early 1970s. Although we were close to Whitecross Street Market when we lived in the Barbican.
Blast! I Just Broke a Glass
I like to document all my clumsiness, so that I try harder! I was looking for something to drink and found a bottle of Green’s Premium Golden Ale. it’s not my favourite, but I try to like it. Perhaps these thoughts made my hand slip with the opener and the bottle fell over on the tumbler and broke it!
I must be more careful, next time!
Adnams Doesn’t Put the Gas in the Beer
When virtually everybody thinks of real ale, they think of Adnams, brewed on the Suffolk coast at Southwold.
When I was starting to drink, they had just thirteen pubs, but they did supply a good part of the club trade in Suffolk. Now their beer is found all over London and the South East, and I’ve even seen it as far north as Newcastle and Edinburgh.
Not bad for a small family company, albeit one that makes a quality product beloved of beer connoisseurs everywhere. But their proven route to success now seems to be being followed by Aspall, the cider maker.
Adnams now have a new venture, called Adnams Bio Energy, which on the face of it is as far from brewing as you can get. They are diversifying into the production of biogas from brewery and food waste. The latter comes mainly from Waitrose.
The scale is only small at present, but it would seem that properly developed it could be a valuable addition to our energy resources. National Grid have said that by 2020 about 15% of domestic gas could be produced in similar ways to that at Adnams Bio Energy.
The Brewing Capital of the World
Milwaukee in Wisconsin claims, this but they don’t produce beer, but some form of pasturised chemical fizz, that has about as much in common with real beer, as CAMRA would know it, as petrol has with the finest Scotch or Irish Whisky.
I should say though that a Suffolk friend, once claimed that the sign on the outskirts of Milwaukee, proclaiming the city to be the brewing capital of the world, had been painted with a Chad and the phrase “Wot About Southwold”. I suspect, if it had, he’d done it himself.
Southwold is a sleepy seaside resort on the Suffolk coast, with a pier, a nice beach,a lighthouse, proper beach huts, restaurants and pubs and of course Adnams brewery.
After Dunwich, we travelled a few kilometres up the coast and parked by the pier, before walking along the front and having a coffee.
Adnams
Brewers seem to have been doing badly lately. But this report from Adnams seems to indicate that if you sell real beer you do better.
They also distribute Aspall cyder; my long drink of choice!
Drinking and Driving
There seem to be quite a few trikes in Holland. Typically, they are all noise and chrome, but this one was slightly different.
Beer-Powered Trike
Notice the barrel and pump!
The Anonymous Widower 