February brought with it Valentine’s day and a lot of SHWI beer love as the long-awaited beer tasting meeting came around. Members had been asking for a beer tasting night for a couple of years so when my former colleague Sean Clarke, a former College teacher, set up a craft beer shop in the new Moor Market I knew we’d found our man!
Di and Lindsay enjoy their bottles with Beer Central’s Sean Clarke
Sean’s shop, Beer Central, stocks all manner of local, national and international beers, real ales and ciders, and he, along with colleague Tommy, brought along four of these for us to try at our meeting.
From Bradfield Farmer’s Blonde to Saltaire Triple Chocoholic stout, Timmerman’s fruit beer to Maisel’s Weisse, we mostly enjoyed them all, although I felt let down by the chocolate stout which tasted nothing at all like chocolate! Afterwards, to check we’d been listening (the teacher in him coming out there!) Sean gave us a quiz on the beers we’d tried and some other beer trivia…plus a cheeky question on Tommy’s age – we all guessed too low, much to Tommy’ delight! There was tension as the quiz went to two tie-breakers before the ultimate winners bagged a bottle of Farmer’s Blonde each, which incidentally we also voted as the favourite beer of SHWI.
Saltaire’s Chocolate stout had mixed reviews from our members
SHWI has within its ranks some proper beer fans, we even have a beer ticker on the committee, but I’m not a big beer fan myself – give me a cocktail over a beer anyday – so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the evening. Sean is a great speaker who I’d recommend to other groups in the area and I even bought a couple of bottles of Timmermans to take home…maybe Beer Central will make a beer lover of me yet!
Members enjoy tasting the beers
We also voted for our 2014 charity at this meeting. Many worthwhile charities were put forward by members but the winner was the Young Women’s Housing Project, as nominated by Kat.
It was great to see so many new members getting involved at the February meeting, remember you get from the WI what you put into it so we always love to see enthusiastic people enjoying meeting new people and doing new things.
See you at March’s meeting for a talk on Cuban women and cocktails from Blousey’s Bar. Lindsay
President, Seven Hills WI