Wycombe Bites - Red Squirrel Brewery Shop Emporium

My last Wycombe Bites blog started with an adage comparing new bars to buses, this time I'm beginning with one about the levels of precipitation. And, with the Brewery Shop Emporium following hot on the heels of the stylish Heidrun, lucky Wycombians now find it’s the craft beer that’s pouring. 

Opened as the flagship branch of the Berkhamsted-based Hertfordshire brewers Red Squirrel, the Emporium is a split level part bar/part bottle shop/part pizzeria. And if that doesn't fulfil all your worldly needs, there's also fresh coffee, wine and snacks and even a cold room - where you can pick cans and bottles, to drink in or takeaway - where the beers are stored at perfect imbibing temperature. 

A fun (if bijou) space to browse when they first opened, back in the dog days of summer, it's something more of an endurance, standing in what is essentially an oversized fridge, now the cold weather has set in. Luckily you can see everything through the glass windows, to save yourself getting frostbite while you dither. The lovely staff are also always on hand to help with a suggestion or have a chat about what they're drinking.

Fortuitously (or not) I have to walk past on my way home from work, so have become a bit of a regular. And while all the beer has been reliably decent, one thing that does set it apart from most local hostelries is the quality of their cask offering. 

Sometimes you just want a ‘boring brown bitter’ - which, kept properly, is still one of my favourite beers - or a refreshing golden ale or a warming ruby number. While the cask here it’s probably served a touch too cold for the purist, I far prefer this to the lifeless, syrupy stuff that’s sadly often the norm in this neck of the woods. Even better, it’s often cheaper than the keg version of the same beer (a subject that's recently got everyone a flutter all over again thanks to Cloudwater's recent blog).

As well as their superior cask - their Green Hop, brewed with hops grown in Berkhamsted, was one of my beers of the year - the keg and bottle selection is also sound. The taps regularly showcase beers from Cloudwater, Chorlton, Magic Rock and Anarchy among others, alongside a big range of (mostly) British bottles and cans at pretty fair prices.

As with the cask, the keg beers I've most enjoyed drinking here are Red Squirrel numbers - brewed under their experimental 'Mad Squirrel' umbrella. My two favourites being their creamy milk stout, a roasty dark beer brewed with lactose, and their DAPA, a 7.8 percent incarnation of their original american pale ale that has become the traditional nightcap on work nights out and a traditional regret the following morning in the office...

Snack wise – a critical part of any decent bar's offering - they have a reasonable selection of Pipers crisps, posh nuts and the very good Billy Franks jerky, made by the fab @billyfrankscouk in a railway arch on Druid Street in Bermondsey. If they had pickled onion Monster Munch or grab bags of Quavers they would have my heart forever (frazzles for me please - TE), but it’s a good start and there's always the garlic bread (get it with cheese, obviously), which is perfect to tide you over when you’re trying to work out which beer to order next.  

Following on from the garlic bread, they also have pizza, which is prepared from scratch in the small ‘kitchen’ area behind the bar upstairs. If you’re a purist, you may want to look away now as flavour combos include pastrami, olives and pesto; smoked salmon, dill and cream cheese (very good); ham, hop oil and star anise-spiced pineapple; pepperoni and pickled jalapeno, pulled pork with bbq sauce and, rather surprisingly, my favourite pairing of jerk chicken, peppers and pine nuts. 

In (my) ideal world it would be fired in a wood-fuelled brick oven and bought to the table blistered and crispy with a slightly charred crust – but, back in HP11, it’s cooked in an electric oven and arrives looking more like a frozen pizza that you’ve tried to pimp up at home by adding the contents of all the half-finished jars in the fridge.

From a pizza-fanatic this isn’t a criticism - far from it, frozen pies have got me through some difficult periods of my life -and, for oven-baked pizza, this is really very good. The polenta-dusted crust has a nutty sweetness that pairs well with the bold toppings, while it's crisp structural integrity means toppings can be piled up while the base remains robust. Perfect drinking fodder.

From your morning coffee to your late night night cap, the Red Squirrel is the perfect all-day one stop shop. And, as the long as the beer is flowing and the pizzas are being flung, I'm very happy to make another home from home in my adopted home town.

Pints and Pancakes, Chesham Style

Recently, at the fifth time braving the concentric circles of hell, aka IKEA - I did get to eat lots of meatballs, though – we bought a new bed. This turned out to be rather more fortuitous than I imagined, as two weeks later I was consigned to it with a rather nasty bout of ‘flu.

Whist I had all the extra cushions I had ever craved, a fluffy duvet and a memory foam mattress that pushed sleeping right back up to the top of my list of recreational activities, I was also undeniably ill. This was proved when I didn’t even venture downstairs into the kitchen for a whole weekend and even turned down dinner. Twice. 

It wasn’t all bad news, however. After a week of consignment I had dropped a notch on my belt, and although we had to cancel plans to visit the London Brewers market at Spitalfields, a trip to the supermarket to restock the cupboards took us perilously close to the Brewery Shop in Chesham…

Before my fortifying and well deserved drink, we popped in to the main reason for this blog post, Poppins. Poppins is a Southern-based chain of restaurant/cafes whose Canterbury branch retains somewhat legendary status in my mind as a regular place of salvation, providing fry ups and strong tea after nights on the tiles whist at uni.

Inside is formica heaven. In fact everything is shiny, from the laminated menus to the fried eggs. It’s the comforting kind of place that you don’t really see any more – the sort of place where you can have a deep fried burger with your all day breakfast (chips are pretty much compulsory) or mash-topped shepherd’s pie with a baked potato on the side, or toasted teacakes and beans on toast, and everything, well most things, come with lashings of squirty cream. My kinda place.

My first choice, lamb chops with all the trimmings, was off so I switched to the pork instead. It’s not actually an exaggeration to say that Poppins’ lamb chops are some of the best I have eaten, although I wasn’t holding out the same hopes for the porcine variety. Thankfully, whist being a little dry, they passed my stringent, Homer Simpson-esque, test. 

If there's any sight more comforting than grilled tomato, fried mushrooms, chops chips and peas, especially when one has crawled off their death bed to eat it, I haven’t yet made its acquaintance, and this was my perfect plate of comfort food. Oh, yeah, and it's all yours for £6.45.

The Ewing, unsurprisingly, was in her culinary heaven, choosing the three egg omelette with cheese and mushroom as a paean to the homely cooking of her Mum, whose childhood offering of ‘yellow fish with mash and peas’ remains her favourite dish, regardless of how many Michelin stars are on the menu.

With a pudding list like the one above, how could you resist (although I'm not sure if the Ewing's look is joy or trepidation)? Of course, we couldn’t and soon we were staring down a silver platter of pancakes heaped with hot cherries and a can of cream. If you want to look at the reasons behind the hole in the Ozone layer, Poppins is probably a good place to start.

CFCs aside, this is England set in aspic, the kind of place everyone remembers visiting with their grandparents - and still does, judging by the clientele. Come for lunch, stay for heart disease and diabetes, although they do have an on trend smoothie menu and even a selection of salads (prominently featuring cheese, mayo and coleslaw, obviously). The staff are also lovely, although the music – Muse interspersed with Nat King Cole – was possibly an acquired taste.

Next up it was time for a fortifying beer at The Chesham Brewery Shop, the Brewery tap for the Red Squirrel Brewery in Berkhampstead. As well as there own brews they also offer a selection of other ales, beer, cider and wine to drink in or take out.

While you can’t move around Bermondsey, Beavertown or Brixton for fear of disturbing another nest of beer drinking bead wearers huddled in a railway arch somewhere, this is a little piece of beer geek heaven transported to the end of the Metropolitan line.

They have a decent, regularly changing, selection on keg, including the lovely Gadds number 3 on our visit, of which I sampled the sweet and creamy Red Squirrel Milk Stout, an appropriate choice as the extra lactose in the brew meant it was often given to convalescents. 

We also grabbed a few bottles of the Red Squirrel Best Bitter for Christmas alongside a trio from Great Heck - the Amish Mash, a heavily hopped weisse hybrid, being particularly good – and a couple of oyster stouts from Redemption and Arbor.

No trip to Chesham would be complete without a visit to Darvells and Sons the bakers which, like Poppins, remains a place preserved time. Here you can buy old fashioned delights such as the barrel loaf - round toast anyone – wonky-eyed chocolate chip footballers, lardy cake, bath buns and cream horns. There’s even a nod to the contemporary with whoopee pies, and Syrian onion loaf, macaron and chia bread.

Our haul contained Viennese whirl topped mince pies, the gold standard of mince pies, a seasonal stilton and pear cobb and, my favourite, the ‘Battenberg Bookend’; a slice of strawberry jam filled cake covered in marzipan and then dipped in chocolate. As the lady behind the counter said, ’we can’t have that sponge drying out…’ 

Needless to say, after a week of snuffling, coughing and ineffective pill-popping, the best way to aid my recovery was with a slice of this chocolate covered delight and a cuppa - that good old English panacea - when we got home.