Beer & pancakes

It's Ash Wednesday, I'm ready for a beer and I need to give up something for Lent. After due consideration, I've decided to give up pancakes, so I better enjoy the batter while I can. And splash some ale into the pan at the same time.



My darling mother-in-law fed me a bellyfull of pancakes yesterday so I'm ready again for a plate of crepe-related goodness: you can't have enough of it in your life, can you? A quick trawl of the tinternet for beery pancake recipes brought up a couple of possibilities; the Black Sheep batter looked interesting though I wasn't too sure about the Greene King version.

But as luck would have it, that rock n rolla beer n food blogger Mark Dredge had some great pancake ideas over on his site, Pencil & Spoon. So I hatched a plan; make up a batch of batter using Mark's recipe, try them with a couple of beers and then make another batch using the beers themselves.

Mark recommended several beers to try and, by sheer luck, I had a couple of them to hand; a Great Divide Yeti Imperial Stout that I picked up a few weeks ago and a bottle of Innis & Gunn Oak Aged that a PR agency had just mailed to me. First off, a batch of pancakes.

I can't remember the last time I made pancakes, so this was going to end with either a tasty batch of goodness or a fiery pan of death. So I was more than surprised when the first one ended up all crispy and moist and tasty. Superb with a squeeze of lemon and a hefty pinch of sugar. And with the Innis & Gunn?

Better than I expected, to be honest. I'm sceptical about beers that hint at sweet complexity but insist on being served 'well chilled'. In this case, it worked; the honey, toffee notes of the beer worked well with the sharpness of lemon and the palate-softening pancake.

How would the pancakes fair with the Great Divide Yeti? I was unsure; the dirty tan head and matt black body belied an unseemly hoppy feel. Yes, there was freshly cracked dark chocolate and cold coffee in there, but the hops kept bouncing back. Against the pancake, mind, it worked surprisingly well. At first. Liked the initial coffeeness - if you've ever gorged yourself at breakfast on a stack of pancakes and as many coffee refills as the waitress will serve before she lamps you, you know how the inside of your mouth feels just wonderful - but that creeping bitterness needed a gum-wincing sugar sprinkle to even begin the balancing act.

Then there was the pancake-beer batter. I never convinced myself that the Yeti batter would work. In fact, it wasn't bad - better around the crispy edges than the rather blobby middle, coffee flavours came to the fore, but the beer unbalanced the dish.

The Innis & Gunn batter, though, was a revelation. That nutty/honey sweetness shone through with just enough alcohol still lurking. Even Mrs Reluctant preferred this pancake to the all-milk version.

So: Yeti is a great beer to drink after pancakes, Innis & Gunn is a great beer to put into pancakes. And pancakes at home are lovely but not as good as when a top-heavy blonde brings you a full stack with blueberries and as much steaming Java as your lower colon can take.