Category: Food & Drink

Beverage of the Week: Heineken Silver isn’t much, but it’s awesome on a hot day

Heineken Silver is supposed to be a perfect golf course beer. And it is, even if that’s sort of boring.

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

Heineken Silver was pitched to me as the perfect golf course beer. That’s an easy sell; most beers are great golf course beers, particularly those you’ve snuck onto the links in assorted bag pockets and gotten the chance to crack whilst still sweating. That first clandestine beer, sipped before the rest could catch up to air temperature (assuming you don’t have a handy cooler), is one of the great pleasures in the dad world. It’s akin to finding your favorite style of New Balances at Costco or making your first post on a Big Green Egg grill forum.

But Heineken Silver promises more than that; a slim-canned light beer that clocks in at fewer calories than many hard seltzers (95) and easy enough on the alcohol so not to wreck your day if you plow through a six pack on the course (4.0 percent ABV). That’s a solid enough selling point, especially in a booze marketplace where the middle ground is eroding and customers either want super light beers/seltzers/cocktails OR higher gravity double IPA types that provide a bigger bang for their buck.

That left an old standby to beef of its low calorie selections. Let’s see how it turned out.

Mid-2023 Trends from The Food Channel

Insight companies (which The Food Channel has partnered with since its inception), base their trend reporting on data: surveys, analysis of consumer behavior, scientific advances, and the numbers behind the behavior. Food manufacturers and others …

Insight companies (which The Food Channel has partnered with since its inception), base their trend reporting on data: surveys, analysis of consumer behavior, scientific advances, and the numbers behind the behavior. Food manufacturers and others pay big money to access those reports.

Two things, however, have made trend reporting muddy. First, the internet. Sure, online polling and observation offered new ways of watching the trends. It also put new voices on the scene, some trained and some not-so-trained. Second, the COVID crisis, when all bets were off and consumers went into survival mode, where trends just didn’t seem to matter as much.

Now, companies are tentatively finding their way back. With that in mind, we are publishing a mid-year trend piece just to get the juices flowing again. Here are five of our Top Food Trends for Mid-2023:

Photo by Simon Hermans on Unsplash

1) Food & Travel Changes. Yelp and TripAdvisor have gotten cluttered, and TikTok has added to the mix to the point that many no longer know where to turn for reliable information. What’s sponsored and what is truly a consumer experience? Do you use Expedia, Travelocity, Hotel Tonight, reward apps direct to the hotel…and when are they all the same thing/owned by the same parent? As more Boomers enter retirement and have time to travel, how do they figure it all out?

Many are falling back on traditional travel agents, even though they are often hidden behind a .com name. Companies such as cruisetraveloutlet.com, and others, are offering bundled options and all-inclusives that recognize that some people travel specifically for the food experiences. Culinary tours continue to spring up, and we expect to see more. Travel has changed, and food travel has become its own niche opportunity.

(To begin your research on culinary tours check out sites such as these: https://www.exploreworldwide.com/experiences/
https://www.culturediscovery.com
https://www.zicasso.com/italy/food-tours-vacations
https://www.foodnwinevacations.com/culinary-tours-italy)

2) The Conversation Around Tipping. We first called this out in a column in 2015, then in our Trends Report in 2016. We’d been following a conversation started by noted restaurant entrepreneur Danny Meyer, among others, and saw early hints that there would be a call for change. Now, with tip jars on counters and machines that ask for your tip before they move forward, well, consumers are starting their own conversation. We’re hearing words like “enough,” and “I draw the line.” At the same time, consumers recognize that workers often rely on tips, and want to help. When will the conversation move into action, and what will be the final impetus for change?

3) Customer Service. Granted, this has been iffy for years, and the fallout from recent events has made it worse simply because companies are short-staffed and don’t always have time for advance training. Restaurants are focusing on the need to create a place where people want to come. Consumers want to be around people who appreciate their patronage. This is the opportunity area: Nurturing staff members who are excited to help customers find what they may not even know they want. Less shrugging of shoulders and more extensions of consideration. It requires knowledge, training, but most off all attitude.

This is crucial as restaurant service is recognized as a long-term career, not an interim or high school job. That means the incentives have to be better, and the industry has to work harder at this.

Photo by ArtiSims Boards, Boxes & Bites (available on Facebook)
Artisims@yahoo.com

4) Charcuterie anything. For a while it was food flights, where bars and restauranteurs offered tastings. They can be fun, actually—pancake flights, beer flights, cheese flights, dessert flights, and more. The next step seems to be putting them all together on one big board…or into something innovative (snackle box, anyone?). Celebrity Chef Tyler Florence has reportedly even called out “tin fish boards” as the new charcuterie—using cans of caviar and other tinned fish.

People are playing with size, too, making mini-boards for personal feasting and table-length boards with multiple options beyond the traditional meat and cheese. TikTok Influencer and “private chef in the Hamptons” Cooking Classy (also known as Meredith Hayden of Wishbone Kitchen) has been known to comment that “cheese chunks and crackers are not charcuterie,” and she’s not wrong. After all, the origins of charcuterie are about charred meat, paired with cheeses and any number of sweet and savory items for flavor and texture. That includes pickles and olives, various spreads and preserves, mustards, honey, fresh fruit, and more.

Presentation is part of making food fun, and it’s a great way to make food both entertaining and safely sharable. So, bring on the Charcuterie Brunch and the Charcuterie Chocolate boards.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

5) Pickles. We always try to offer at least one specific food item that answers the question, “What’s the on-trend food item?” When the Chick-fil-A app allows you to remove its famous pickles from a chicken sandwich, it makes you wonder how popular that option would be, because pickles are in the limelight right now. It goes along with our previous trends that identified an interest in brining, although the latest interest extends to the pickle juice itself—cooking with it, reusing it, even drinking it. And it’s not just cucumbers. Sandwiches have pickled onions, as do tacos. Pickles and all-things-pickled are turning up as something more than a condiment right now, and are worth watching.

That’s our top five for a mid-year checkpoint of food trends. We’re also watching as more and more restaurants begin charging an additional percentage to use a credit card. We’re watching AI and the pros and cons and how they will affect the industry. We keep an eye on the kinds of grocery stores where people collect their merchandise and even shop and ship for others (yes, Trader Joes, but it’s catching on). Food prices and availability are still discussion topics, and lots more.

In the past we’ve brought you mushrooms/mushroom coffee, plant-based, seafood, nostalgia foods, mocktails, food as medicine, THC, Ube, African food, fermented, hatch chilis, and more—all before they were regularly talked about. For fun, go back and look at a few from the past. After all, knowing what has come before is often the first step to understanding what’s next.

Beverage of the week: Gosling’s canned Dark ‘n Stormys are wonderful… until you add fruit

Canned dark and stormies make sense, especially if Gosling’s is making them … until you add extra fruit.

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

I love a good dark and stormy. I’d never had the classic cocktail before a work trip to Bermuda, where it’s the national standby. Then, since rum, ginger beer and limes are easy to come by here in the states, it became a staple at home — a simple to make cocktail that doesn’t have more steps than a whiskey-and-Coke but feels significantly classier.

Gosling’s, maker of both rum and ginger beer, decided to streamline that process even further and jump into a crowded market of canned cocktails with its signature drink. Their Dark ‘n Stormys come in four different flavors: original, cherry, pineapple and mango. And because dark and stormies rule, I took it upon myself to try all four.

The good news? Gosling’s knows what it’s doing when it comes to the original. The bad news? Well, there isn’t much sense innovating when you’ve got a base model that’s just about perfect.

The 10 best beers I drank this year, in honor of International Beer Day

Firestone Walker. SweetWater. Tyranena and Franziskaner. All made the cut for my favorite beers of 2022-23.

I am a lucky man. I write about football and beer. I have the job of a lazily developed sitcom dad.

Today, on International Beer Day, I am taking the opportunity to reflect. A full year since my last IBD list has dropped 52 new Beverages of the Week into my portfolio. Some of these were hard liquors. Entirely too many were hard seltzers or canned cocktails. But this failed to keep me from my truest boozing love: beer.

The past 12 months have allowed me to expand my palate and my Untappd resume, bringing new breweries into the fold and allowing the chance to try fresh offerings from reliable standbys. Some of the beers I drank were for work. Others were because it was a college football Saturday or a pro wrestling pay-per-view Sunday. Almost all of them were good, and a select few were wonderful.

So here’s where I’m gonna look back at 365 days of drinking and pick my 10 favorites. In no particular order, these are the best beers I drank between 2022 and 2023.