Last week I spent the afternoon at Newlands Brewery, taking the tour and sticking around for beer cocktails in the rather awesome staff bar, now housed in the old malthouse. If you’ve never done the Newlands Brewery tour, I would highly recommend it. It’s really something to see brewing on this scale when you’re used to visiting microbreweries who put out 500 litres at a time. And the bottling line is hypnotic. But the main point of the visit – and indeed of this blog post – was to showcase SAB’s new range of beer cocktails developed with local mixologist Owen O’Reilly. Now I’m gong to be honest – I’m not generally a huge fan of beer cocktails. I like my beer unadulterated and I don’t have much of a sweet tooth when it comes to beverages. But I’m always keen to give something new a go and of the six cocktails we tried, I dd find one that I finished (the sweetest of the bunch, strangely enough).

The cocktails featured four of SAB’s newer products, some of which – Flying Fish, Chocolate Milk Stout and Castle Lite Lime – you might already consider something of a cocktail. Some cocktails featured other booze – the Castle Lite Flower uses gin, the Blue Label Jam Jar has whisky and the Chocolate Stout Coffee (my second pick of the day) features whisky as well as freshly brewed coffee and whisked egg whites… My favourite though was the Flying Fish Apple Pie. This was the first time I had tasted the apple flavoured Flying Fish and some might say that the best thing you could do with it is to turn it into a cocktail that tastes exactly like alcoholic liquid apple pie 😉 . Here’s the recipe:

Turns out real women drink cocktails as well…

Ingredients

25ml fresh lemon juice

50ml cloudy apple juice

15ml cinnamon syrup

25ml brandy

Flying Fish Green Apple

It’s a simple cocktail to recreate at home – no shaker or fancy equipment required. Simply add all the ingredients to a pint glass full of ice, stir gently to avoid making the Flying Fish go flat, garnish with sliced apple dusted in cinnamon and serve with a straw. It’s actually pretty tasty, though I could only manage one before reverting back to beer.

If you’d like the recipes for any of the other cocktails, let me know. Here’s the list:

Chocolate Stout Coffee

Castle Lite Flower

Blue Fashioned

Chocolate Malt Julep

Carling Blue Label Jam Jar