Top o’ the afternoon to you, my hungry friends. Welcome back to our Philly food chat and Happy St. Paddy’s Day! I can only imagine the joy Philadelphia’s publicans are feeling now, having just wound down a rockin’ Beer Week only to turn the taps back on full blast to quench today’s celebration. What are you all planning to do (or not) in honor of the day? I’m hoping that my order of Irish whole meal flour shows up in the mail today from King Arthur so I can make the Ballymaloe brown bread recipe with molasses that I got years ago from Simon Pearce. Great, earthy stuff, and dense, too! Doorstop material, for sure, if there’s leftovers, which there rarely are. Advanced planning for cooking projects, though, has never been my forte. We may be having our own private SPD this weekend.

 

In the meanwhile, I’ve had an interesting few days of eating "out there", as you can tell from this week’s Crumb Tracker quiz. Name in order all three places that I ate these dishes, and win a prize: 1) Grilled pork neck; 2) iskender “kebap”; 3) Guinness-battered fish & chips (boatloads better than last week’s tracker fish & chips)…. Ready, set….start crumbing!  

Speaking of Beer Week, I’d be curious to hear some of your highlights. The best thing I drank? A pint of “Backwoods Bastard”, a wee heavy Scotch ale from Founders being featured at the Sidecar Bar (22nd and Christian) that tasted like a fizzy glass of bourbon-with-a-spritz-of-beer. Really bold and balanced, like all of Founders’ brews (we also loved the coffee-flavored Breakfast Stout and the spicy Red Rye).

 

On the topic of St. Paddy’s themes, though, I also had the intriguing opportunity last weekend to meet up with one of Ireland’s greatest beer rock stars for a pint: Fergal Murray, the brewmaster from Guinness. He was here on tour in between appearances on the Jimmy Kimmel and Today shows, and I found him at the tail-end of a one-day eight-stop Irish pub crawl  through Philly. I have to say he looked a wee bit numb from the rigors of his journey as he perched against a railing inside the Black Sheep Pub, flanked by a posse of kilt-clad Guinness girls and local distributors, with a glowing green Guinness trinket dangling around his neck.  He was in charming spirits, nonetheless, and politely gave good marks to the pints he’d sampled in town – though he noted with mild pique that the Black Sheep had served him Guinness in a Harp glass. Between his 11 p.m. brogue and the din of the bar, our brief chat was  uneventful. But it was still one of my highlights from Beer Week. It also made me realize that with all the great local and international craft brews coming into town over the past few years, including Sly Fox’s O’Reilly’s Stout, which might my favorite dry stout of all, that I’ve pretty stopped drinking Guinness of late. ‘Tis a shame. For an industrial beer, it is still a remarkably good product.