Farmhouse Cheese and Ale Soup
For Craftwork Brewery, it seems only fitting their Souper Soup Sipper offering is made from beer.
But brewery co-owner Lee-Ann Scotti wants to reassure people, their Farmhouse Ale and Cheddar Soup will be alcohol-free. “The alcohol is cooked off, if folks are worried about that.”
She describes the soup as creamy, and having a sort of a “rarebit flavour” - like cheese on toast, but sort of mustardy with worcestershire sauce.
It is made using Whitestone Cheese’s Totara Tasty, and Craftwork’s Citron Soleil beer, which is a Saison-style farmhouse ale.
“So a farmhouse ale is beer that is made from all the grain that farmers had left over. So a couple of hundred years ago when water wasn't safe to drink, and beer was, farmers would make these beers to quench the thirst of their farm workers. And they were around about 2% (alcohol), so, you know, people could still operate.”
It is a pilsener malt with oats and raw wheat, “which gives it a really lovely creaminess”, Lee-Ann says. The beer also has pepper and lemon zest in it.
The soup is made using a roux base, and vegetable stock - so is vegetarian-friendly.
Lee-Ann and her Craftwork co-owner Michael O’Brien, pride themselves on their traditional brewing methods, and so the Farmhouse Ale and Cheddar soup is a perfect choice, as a “very trad soup”, Lee-Ann says.
“So it comes from Europe, probably Germany in medieval times, and was taken to America. So it's a big thing in Wisconsin, and those kind of states where a lot of people came from that part of Europe.”
The soup will be served with locally-made rye bread.
The couple’s new business has been open in its new, bigger Harbour St premises just over a year now, and they are loving it.
“We're loving being all under one roof, and being able to do our production. We can get quite a lot of work done, because we're not going to all these different places. It's really great.”