Tip Top Taps - This Weekend's Beer Selection at Atlas

Atlas Beer of the Week: The Goldpanner's Profit

Goldrush

We've got some more of Altitude Brewing Studios Goldpanner's Profit back on the lines at Atlas as our beer of the week.

The Goldpanner's Profit is a crisp and refreshing ale named after the hardworking prospectors of Queenstown's iconic goldrush. Below are the tasting notes:

Brewed from all NZ ingredients, The Goldpanner's Profit is designed around a malt profile that gives a refreshing and characterful flavour with a very dry finish. It's rich and golden in the glass and had been subtly hopped to give a light bitterness on the palate and a pleasing nose of summer fruits. 

Colour: Rich gold
Nose: Tropical Summer fruits
Palate: Clean malts with a hint of toffee and biscuit. Mild bitterness with a dry wheat finish.
Hops: Riwaka, Nelson Sauvin
Malts: Pilsener, Wheat, Toffee, Biscuit, Chocolate
ABV: 4.9%

We recently caught up with the brewer behind the Goldpanner's Altitude's Eliott Menzies. If you missed the post click here to check it out. 

Altitude Brewing Studios The Goldpanner's Profit | 4.9% | $9 pint

Please enoy responsibly

Altitude Brewing Studios - The Posturing Professional Pale Ale

We're stoked to have the latest offering from Altitude Brewing Studios now tapped at Atlas. The Posturing Professional is a pale ale and is names after "the posturing mountain professionals the world over that are certain they are the pinnacle of human evolution".

Created as a session beer, The Posturing Professional is flavoursome and ideally enjoyed after a hard day on the slopes or on the trails. 

With a nod to New Zealand's brewing heritage The Posturing Professional is made with classic NZ Hops that haven't been cross-bred. The resulting beer has a dry palate with a sweet hop balance and clean spiciness on the finish plus sweet lemon and cut grass on the nose.

Altitude Brewing Studios The Posturing Professional | 5% |
$9 per pint

Please enjoy responsibly! 

Atlas beer Cafe: Tasty Beer Marinade Recipe

We are often posting about beer from the perspective of drinking it. Beer, however, is also a great ingredient in food so we thought that from time to time we could post some beer-inspired recipes. First up a nice beer-y marinade for meat.

You can used this marinade with chicken or beef. You could experiment with using a darker beer with beef and something paler with the chicken. We found an IPA gave quite nice results with some chicken! Whatever tickles your fancy. The enzymes in the beer will help to tenderise the meat.

Ingredients

1/2 pint of beer 
1/2 cup of olive oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
4 cloves of garlic crushed
A few splashes of good soy sauce
1tsp mixed herbs


Method

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl. Add your chosen meat to the mixture ensuring all the meat it well covered. Cover and chill in the fridge for at least two hours or better still over night.

You can use this for BBQd meat or if you are pan frying you can reduce the marinade in the pan after cooking the meat. It reduces to a nice sticky sauce.

Is it jus or is it demi-glace?

Especially for jus?

The delicious gravy that covers our succulent rump steaks has Queenstown locals salivating just at the mere thought of it. An Atlas steak served on a bed of golden fries with a crispy side salad, melting Cafe de Paris butter and demi-glace. 

Demi-glace. But what is demi-glace? It's actually a question that gets asked from time to time by our customers. An intelligible answer is that it's jus, but jus it is not. So being the helpful types that we are at Atlas we thought we'd write a quick post about it. You just never know when it's going to come up in a pub quiz...

Jus

Jus is pretty much the equivalent of "juice" in French. So jus refers to the the natural juices given off from the meat whilst it's cooking or roasting. Roasted meat juices can be put into a separate pan and reduced whilst the meat is resting to make a delicious accompaniment. Or, the juice and browned-on tasty bits from a steak cooked in a pan can be de-glazed with some red wine and simmered down. It's quite common to see jus on restaurant menus and there can be some creative flavours. In essence though, it's always the juices from the cooked meat that form the basis of a jus.

Demi-glace

Demi-glace differs as it is stock-based and has a much longer cooking and preparation process. Traditionally, demi-glace is made by starting off with some high-quality stock with high natural gelatin and thickening a portion of the stock with a roux, vegetables and some tomato puree (this is also know as a sauce espagnole).

The thickened stock and the clear stock are then combined and reduced down to half the original volume. Many restaurant chefs these days take a more uncomplicated approach to creating demi-glace reducing the stock alone to get the desired consistency. We take this approach also when making our demi-glace at Atlas. 

Whilst we can't divulge the exact ingredients we can tell you that our demi-glace is made from top-quality beef stock; lots of vegetables; some tomato puree; a very generous amount of red wine and seasoned with herbs, salt and pepper. The demi-glace then sits on the stove in the Atlas kitchen for hours as it slowly simmers away, becoming tastier and tastier.

So there you have it - a little insight into French sauces. Anyway, demi-glace? Jus? It doesn't matter so long as it's tasty and at the end of the day - it's all gravy!