Don’t have any dinner plans tonight? Then check out this funky one-off happening at 65 Peel, where Yardley Brothers will be pairing three of its sour beers with dishes specially created for the event.
Those dishes include burned scallops with avocado, coconut cream and salmon roe paired with the brewery’s Thai Chilli Getaway Sour, an appropriately spicy and sour ale brewed with 900 (!) Thai chillies and 20kg of Thai basil in place of hops, giving it a smooth and aromatic finish. It’s a uniquely delicious beer that should provide an interesting contrast to the mellow seafood, coconut and avocado mix.
Both Yardley Brothers and 65 Peel have a penchant for pushing boundaries. The former has transformed from a homebrew shack on Lamma Island to one of the best craft breweries in Hong Kong. And 65 Peel has always supported local breweries while at the same time celebrating Hong Kong’s one-of-a-kind cultural mashup, from its foreign-inflected flavours to its ever-evolving street style. Not to mention that, apart from Blue Supreme, which offers beer pairing recommendations for its dishes, not many bars or restaurants in Hong Kong have branched out into beer pairings like this, either.
If you can’t make the dinner but want to see what Yardley Brothers is all about, you’ll have another opportunity to do so tomorrow night. The brewery will be giving away a bunch of free beers at the opening party for Once You Go Craft, a new and intimate (read: Hong Kong-sized) craft beer bar with eight taps out in Tai Kok Tsui. The beer, a single hop pale ale, was made with a new variety of hops called Strata, and we're told Yardley Brothers might be the only brewery in Asia to have got its paws on it so far.