saturday kitchen Archives - Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog

A while ago, we thought aloud about whether there was anyone talking or writing about beer with anything like the ability of Jamie Oliver or Delia Smith to mention a product and immediately cause it to sell out across the country.

Though she’s not quite there, we reckon Sarah Warman (@sarahfwarman) might be the one to watch. (Literally.)

Back in 2011, we joined Twitter because we were frustrated by the BBC’s blank refusal to mention beer in any substantial way on its flagship weekend cookery show Saturday Kitchen and wanted to join in a campaign to encourage them to reconsider. It didn’t really work.

In recent months, however, without much fanfare, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch (another show following much the same template of light chat around a cooker) has done what we all wanted and made beer a semi-regular feature, with Ms. Warman as their in-house expert.

Saturday Kitchen — why no beer?

Chef James Martin and his trademark lecherous leer.

Inspired by Pete Brown’s excellent letter to the Independent, we decided to drop the BBC a line and ask why their hugely popular Saturday Kitchen cookery show hardly ever mentions beer. With the 350 characters we were given, we said:

Saturday Kitchen is great and I’m a regular viewer. But I’m getting frustrated because, while wine is discussed every week, it’s very rare to hear anything about beer. There are loads of interesting, complex beers around, that go well with food; and lots of people in the UK prefer beer to wine. Please suggest some beer and food pairings in future.

With hindsight, we don’t think “great” is quite the word we were after, but we always like to start with something positive when we’re writing nutty letters of complaint.

Seriously, though — would it kill them to schedule five minutes every couple of weeks for someone like Pete to talk about beer? We’d much rather have beer treated as part of the mainstream like that than sit through another Oz and James cackfest.

We don’t hate wine or people that drink wine but we are much more interested in beer.