17 April 2010

Cave Creek Chilli Beer [By Spectre] (House of Fraser)


I had a good lunch out at Pizza Hut with some friends the other day where I had my usual favourite of Hot ‘n’ Spicy. I must admit on that rare sunny day I did get quite a healthy sweat up whilst eating it. I passed a couple of pieces around the table to formulate other’s opinions. There was a consensus that at some point in the past Pizza Hut had changed the flavour from a tomato base to a chilli / pepper base sauce. This has made the pizza a lot hotter to eat. However, I digress. When I first started writing these blogs way, way back a couple of months ago, you may recall me being pressured by Cinabar to taste various disgusting flavoured beers. There was *Bane of Banana*, *Cherry Catastrophe*, and *I’m Forever Blowing Raspberries*. You also may recall my distaste for anything laced with chilli or spice in my *Kit Kat Wasabe Whatever* debacle. Guess what? After hunting high and low Cinabar has found me a chilli beer! As if things can’t get any worse, it’s not actually chilli “flavoured” beer as such; it actually appears to be a normal run of the mill beer with a big fat chilli shoved unceremoniously inside the bottle. When I returned home from Pizza Hut I fancied another heat sensation for dinner, so I decided to crack open the beer.


Now I like beer, don’t get me wrong, not the liquid goo that I’ve been tortured with on this blog, but normal, everyday, run of the mill beer. I like chilli. Generally not chilli flavoured pap. But a good old fashioned short fat flaming hot chilli in a sandwich for lunch can really wake you up. So chilli beer or beer chilli, which one’s better? There’s only one way to find out… You guessed it, a Harry Hill style; FIGHT!! I first opened the bottle of beer, and after a quick whiff I can confirm, it is actually beer with a strong hint of chilli. I then poured the beer into a glass and fished the chilli out.


I finely chopped the chilli for a kamikaze beer flavoured chilli cheese and ham sandwich. I put on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme tune by Ennio Morricone. I stared at the sandwich long and hard. I stared at the glass of cool beer. I stared at myself in the mirror (tried to look serious, but ended up looking slightly constipated). I stared back at the sandwich and then took a bite. Where had the steaming hot chilli flavour gone? All I could taste was cheese and ham. I took a small piece of chopped chilli from inside the sandwich and gingerly popped it into my mouth. The beer clearly had sucked all the heat out of the chilli. I dejectedly downed the rest of the sandwich and moved to the beer. The beer had a lovely heat to it. It clearly had greedily nicked all the heat from the chilli and not left any heat for my sandwich. But let’s face it, it tasted like a regular run of the mill beer where someone had dumped a whole fat chilli inside the bottle. The drink was likeable, but there are better ways to get some heat in a meal. At this point I wondered off into the other room to break open a pack of Nando’s HOT flavoured crisps, and ogling the Dorothys on the box I settled down for a good hour of heat.
By Spectre

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