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.