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Focus on – The Beatroot Collective

This week we want to shout out one of our favourite local suppliers….

Put simply – The Beatroot Collective supply some of the hottest, baddest, most delicious chilli sauces and jams we’ve ever tasted.

We like their products so much that we use them in lots of our recipes at the Grimsby Cafe Bar, and our chicken & chilli jam Toastie is one of the most popular items we sell.

The Beatroot Collective is run by local boy Cadey, and every single bottle or jar is handmade in small batches, using the finest ingredients.

Cadey is hugely passionate about what he does, and we were delighted when he gained the prestigious Good Taste award for his Chilli Jam in 2021.

Casey’s fine products can be sampled in our Toasties and Sandwiches at the Grimsby cafe bar, where you can also buy some to enjoy at home.

They’re also available to purchase from us online for local or National delivery

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Our brand new ‘Hull Favourites’ Box

This week we launched our first ‘Collection’ – made up of beers from our favourite Hull Breweries. It contains a range of styles – both traditional and ‘new wave’, and we think it’s a great starting point to begin an exploration of Hull’s finest beer.

Over the last few years we’ve built great relationships with many of these breweries, and we’re proud to stock their beers.

Atom – Quantum State – 4.2% – 440ml

A soft drinkable pale ale packed with tropical fruit, zesty citrus and a west coast bite. Gluten Free

Raven Hill – Trail Session Pale – 4.2% – 440ml

A refreshing IPA, perfectly balanced and packed with the aroma of combination of American hops.

Bone Machine – Bonehead Lager 5.2% – 440ml

A full flavoured and unfiltered modern lager fermented slowly, cold-conditioned and delicately dry-hopped.

Great Newsome – Jem’s Stout 4.3% – 500ml

A traditional dark stout packed with aromas of roast malt on the nose with rich roast malt and liquorice on the palate.

Yorkshire Brewhouse – Ey Up – Best Bitter – 4.0% – 500ml

Refreshing real ale with a spicy hop aroma and malty bitter finish. Brewed with Maris Otter malted barley, Challenger, Golding and Fuggle hops and feeling reet chuffed!

Bricknell Brewery – Bosphorous Strong Mild – 5.6% – 500ml

Pale, crystal and black malts give the rich, malty, slightly sweet flavour with Fuggles hops adding a hint of fruity hop aroma.

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Focus On – Bricknell Brewery

Bricknell Brewery is one of the local Hull breweries we’ve build a great relationship with over the past few years. Richard who runs Bricknell is a frequent visitor to our bar at Hull Trinity Market (often to deliver beer, sometimes just to enjoy a pint), and his son Pete even used to work at the bar!

Bricknell Brewery is a small scale brewery specialising in the production of hand-crafted bottle conditioned beers. Since 2015 Richard has been brewing a wide range of beer styles, from pale ales to IPAs and porters to imperial stouts.

Bricknell features regularly in the annual CAMRA Good Beer Guide and the beers have been showcased at beer festivals throughout the UK.

A typical brew size is just 140 to 150 litres, so the emphasis is on quality, not quantity. Everything is done by hand, from the brewing stage through to bottling and adding the labels.

All Bricknell beers are vegan-friendly and use local adjuncts where possible. Richard even grows his own hops, which are used in some of the seasonal brews.

Many of the beers carry names with some significance to Hull, and in particular its maritime history – such as Slavanka, Bosphorous and Anchor Pale.

If you’re looking for a proper small scale craft brewery, rooted in Hull, Bricknell is a great place to start.

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Our New Favourite Lager

Schneider’s Landbrauerei (of Schneider Weisse fame) have launched a lager, and we love it. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a German lager – flavoursome but also crisp and refreshing with a distinctive hop bite.

It’s Brewed with 100% Bavarian ingredients and hand-crafted in the traditional method – by the sixth generation of the Schneider brewers family.

It also makes use of the brewery’s own well, boasting a water profile imitated the world over by brewers seeking to make perfect lager.

Barley from the extremely fertile Gäuboden region is malted to Schneider’s specification for a Helles with a nourishing breadiness.

The best Bavarian hops from the Hallertau region have been selected from farms that have worked with the Schneider family for generations.

If you like your beer with provenance and heritage – here it is

We have limited stocks of this, but we’re expecting a good sized top up very soon, so drop us an email if you’d like us to reserve you some.

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Fried Halloumi & Scotch Bonnet Chilli Jam Bao Buns

We know lots of you aren’t within ‘Deliveroo’ distance of our Grimsby Cafe Bar, but nonetheless we thought you might want to take a peak at our newest Bao Bun – Fried Halloumi with Chilli Jam.

We use Scotch Bonnet Chilli Jam from The Beatroot Collective, lather it generously over Halloumi (coated in flour & paprika and fried for 1 minute), and assemble in our buns with coriander, carrot, chilli, coriander cashews and sesame.

We highly recommend giving freshly steamed Bao Buns a try, but they are a bit involved, and we think this would work amazingly in a Pitta bread too!

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Grab a Warm Coat, Take a Seat in the Square & Grab a Beer.

As the country begins to open up, we’re delighted to be able to serve beer in Hull Trinity Square once again! We’ve been blessed with some beautiful (albeit a bit nippy) weather, and it’s great to be able to open the taps once again!

Fingers crossed we can get everyone back into the Grimsby Cafe Bar and Indoor at Trinity Market on the 17th May. We can’t wait!

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New in from Brass Castle

Brass Castle always seem to manage to keep a healthy new product pipeline flowing. It’s been a few short months since we last had any of their beers in, and they’ve got a whole brand new range of beers to choose from.

Last week we took a delivery of 6 new beers which we’d never tried before, and there’s something here for everyone. A couple of session strength Pale Ales, a strong malty Yorkshire Old Ale brewed with Treacle and aged in wooden casks, one DIPA, a Baltic Porter and their own take on a Belgian Ale.

Hailing from Malton, the foodie heart of Yorkshire, it’s hardly surprising they’re able to conjure up so many inspired brews, and we’re delighted to be able to bring them to you.

Available now from our Web Shop, and Hull and Grimsby bars.

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Some Local Beers Worth Celebrating

We’re privileged to be surrounded by some wonderful local breweries, and this month sees the arrival of some really exciting new beers.

Docks Beers – Clap clap clap clap clap clap Fish

First, we took delivery of a brand new Session Pale Ale from Docks Beers. Brewed to Celebrate Grimsby Town FC, and taking inspiration from one of their famed terrace chants. Sure to be a firm local favourite!

It’s a 4.4% hazy session pale ale, made with vast quantities of Simcoe, Hallertau Blanc hops along with an injection of Cryo Cascade which deliver a tropical fruit hit.

Raven Hill – Pocket Tin

An adventure worthy stout brewed in collaboration with Romney’s who’ve been making Kendall mint cake bars for over 100 years! They even powered the first ever Everest ascent in 1953!

They’ve got the balance just right too, with a flavour profile reminiscent of Romney Chocolate mint bars or After Eight Mints.

We’re proud of our local beer range, and it’s something we’re looking to continue to expand through 2021 – let us know if you think we’re missing anything!

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Champions of Local Food

One of the things we’re most proud of at Vittles is being able to showcase some of the outstanding local food & drink made right here on our doorstep. Wherever possible we try to build these foods into our menu too – it’s a great way to showcase the products and encourage our customers to try them.

Most recently we took delivery of some Traditionally Smoked Salmon from Alfred Enderby, who have been smoking fish for well over 100 years on Grimsby Docks. One of the few truly traditional smokehouses remaining, their ornate iron cowls atop their smokehouse are an iconic part of the Docks skyline.

One of the mainstays of our offering is the coffee we buy from The Blending Room. Based in Hull, James and Katie head a team with over 27 years coffee experience, and they’ve been instrumental in developing the coffee scene North of the river. We’re delighted to be serving their coffee here, as well as offering their bags for sale at the bar and on our website.

Probably the most popular single food item on our menu is our Chilli Jam & Roast Chicken Toastie, made using Scotch Bonnet Jam from The Beatroot Collective. Made by one of our favourite local home-spun businesses, these jams, alongside their hot sauces and chutneys, have proven extremely popular amongst some of our most hardened chilli lovers (and raised the heart rates of a few others!).

We also have the pleasure of serving, on warm bagels and croissants, some amazing local honey harvested in Bradley, a mere couple of miles from the Grimsby Cafe Bar. And no self-respecting local food range would be complete without some Jam, so we have Thorny Devils Sea Buckthorn Jams which deliver a unique sweet and sour experience, using berries harvested down the road on Cleethorpes beach.

Its our ambition to build a collection of local food & drink which showcases the full range of what our region’s local foodies are capable of, and we think these guys have helped us get off to a great start.

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Our Beers

Our Craft Beer journey began nearly a decade ago, when Richard started brewing at home, purely for the enjoyment of it. After 5 years spent as a homebrewer (and a fair bit of trial and error), he decided to build his passion into a business, with the launch of the micro-brewery and bar at Hull Trinity Market.

From here, we brew a range of our own beers on what is almost certainly the smallest brewery in the region / country / world! From day one, we set out to celebrate the wonderful link that exists between beer and food, and to this day all of our beers carry food pairing advice. This passion for beer and food is also evident in our choice of location, smack bang in the middle of a thriving food hall at Hull Trinity Market, and in our second business as a Cafe Bar in Grimsby Town Centre.

Contrary to the direction of many modern craft brewers, our beers follow a fairly traditional route in terms of recipe and style. In many cases, we’ve focussed on beer styles which we feel are under valued or have simply been forgotten amidst the myriad other beers styles on the market. One example is our Trinity Mild, a traditional beer style brewed for those customers of ours at Hull who often harked back to their pint of ‘Hull Mild’. Our Traditional Witbier is another style which we felt needed little extra than to showcase the amazing synergy of traditional Witbier Yeast, Saaz hops, Barley & Wheat, Coriander and Bitter Orange Peel.