Mushroom foraging

Searching for chanterelles and pied de mouton in the gorgeous Foret des Andaines

France: more Le Brewery fun

More fun at Le Brewery

Our lovely American Bretzle arrived at Le Brewery sporting a shaved head and moustache and looking somewhat scary, after a little beer and gentlish persuasion we managed to convince him to allow me to shave it off...

Revealing a damn handsome face and fine set of gnashers.

More bottling of fine fresh ale

Peter relaxes after a hard days work

Its been a long day brewing...

Peter teaches us how to make his perfect Yorkshire puddings

Bretzle experiments with bread recipes

A night of apple pie and poker - homely gambling

Dan and Smudge

An outdoor bread oven at a food festival

Pete, Steve and Juliette man the stand

Pete and his yoghurt cake

One of our meals at Le Brewery, good times!

Mimi and Rocky

About to hit the road again as the adventure continues, au revoir Le Brewery its been a blast

France: lots of lovely apples

Normandy in October smells of apples and fresh air, misty mornings and crisp afternoons. We visited a number of cider and calvados producers in the local area. 

Apples from the orchard ready to be chopped

The process of cider and calvados making is explained to us

The fermentation tanks holding the pressed apple juice

Some ancient oak barrels which are used to store the Calvados during the ageing process

A food festival in Carrouges displays hundreds of varieties of local apples

....and pears

Piles and piles of lovely apples

One of the numerous apple orchards near Le Brewery

Mondial de la biere

Mondial de la Biere festival 2001 in Strasbourg - the first time Le Brewery had exhibited and 4 days of beer tasting, networking and meeting fantastic people.

Bretzle, Rigas, Steve and Dan get ready for the public

The Le Brewery beers were a bit of an anomaly at the festival. English style ales, brewed in France by an Englishman and served on a traditional hand pump by Scottish, Greek and Americans!? 

After working at Le Brewery in Normandy I have developed a real love of beer, not your average boring pint but lovely flavoursome exiting beers that have been made with passion. In order to appreciate great beer you need to get your head around what makes it taste like it does - hopps/malt/types of water.....there is a lot to learn! Alex Barlow has developed a website called All Beer which helps you to understand the type of flavours that you might like and links to other beers with similar characteristics.

The range of Le Brewery beers

We found out on Sunday that we had one a gold medal for the Stout - Odo. This was really a fantastic achievement as with around 400 beers only 10 received medals.

The winning brewers.

 My favourite brewery of the competition Dieu du Ciel! came away with 2 gold medals for their unusual and tasty concoctions. It was almost like they were chefs, creating beers as you would create really exciting recipes - unusual flavours, great rounded mouth feel, moreish mmm and excellent party hosts!

Steve with his gold medal and the winning Odo

An exhausting but brilliant festival, finished off with a German/Turkish kebab outing

Three in stripes, we met a lot of wonderful French Canadians including the fantastic Serge Noel