Beer Belly Jellies

Anoth­er guest post from Heath­er at Food­ie Gems of Wel­ling­ton. We love guest posts. 

For all you crafty beer fans out there, an innov­at­ive new product – Beer Belly Jel­lies.

Inspired by a sim­il­ar product in Canada some years ago, Lindy McLen­nan has partnered with the Par­rot­Dog boys to hand craft these delights.

So as loc­al as loc­al gets.

Most obvi­ously for use with cheeses, meats or lavosh, Beer Belly Jel­lies can also be used as extra fla­vour in bak­ing, soups, cur­ries, salads, on ice cream, and in a seem­ingly unend­ing array of oth­er food situ­ations (and you thought beer was just for drink­ing…).

I’m espe­cially keen on try­ing the Sticky Pecan Date Cake and White Cheese­cake Truffles.

But back to the jel­lies.

Craft beer with sug­ar, lem­on juice and granny smith apple pec­tin, the chal­lenge is appar­ently in the set­ting, with dif­fer­ent beer batches hav­ing slightly dif­fer­ent set points (no wan­der­ing off dur­ing the mak­ing!).

There’s a range of fla­vours to please all pal­ates – blonde (milder like quince, so a good place to start), pale ale (a little spi­ci­er), malt (rich­er and per­fect with blue cheese), and hot out of the kit­chen, a new chili blonde (spicy and tingly).  Nice.

Paired with Lindy’s fresh-made lavosh, a dreary after­noon was imme­di­ately elev­ated to anoth­er plane (she tells me they can’t fig­ure out the lavosh use by date as it gets eaten too quickly!).

Found at New World Island Bay, the Popup Design Shop (cur­rently on the corner of Tory and Wake­field), and from this week­end Ontrays in Petone.

Def­in­itely a pro­du­cer to keep an eye on.