SPOTLIGHT ON pubs and grub plus some extra pay day treats

There’s nothing fancypants about what we’re serving up this week: a cookbook with beer by a woman who’s an expert.

Writer, judge and speaker Melissa Cole is a titan of the beer world. Starting out on a pub trade paper around 20 years ago, she knows “everyone in the game” and champions both new brewers and established names, collaborates on brews, and fights to rid the industry of sexism, aiming to make all things beer-related accessible to all.

Her latest challenge is to have us all cooking and eating with it, properly, whether that’s stirring a Belgian-style wheat beer into hollandaise sauce, or making Scotch eggs laced with a traditional bitter. Of writing The Beer Kitchen, she said: “It was born out of a passion for beer and general greediness. I love cooking and I read a recipe for steak and ale pie. It had beautiful, golden, fluffy pastry on top, the middle oozing out. I thought, ‘I wonder what beer’s used in that?’ And it literally said ‘Beer’. It was ridiculous. I thought, ‘If you use an IPA in that, it’s going to be disgusting, it’ll be super bitter and even a port will be too much, so why haven’t you said?’ I got annoyed, especially because all the recipes with wine said ‘you need a full-bodied red from the Bordeaux region’. So I started experimenting.” So how did she fall in love with beer? “At university in Preston, I went to work at a cask ale pub, The Old Black Bull, and didn’t know what the hell was going on. There was this little lady running up and down the stairs, flying about, so I stopped her and asked her what was going on. I was a student, I’d drink anything cheap that was put in front of me, but she taught me the ropes. She gave me a taster and it completely opened my eyes, it was a total epiphany.

“It was a very blonde beer, it had this tight creamy head on it, and there was a really tropical flavour to it. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is amazing. That was a beer called Roosters Cream, and that was it. I left that pub with the two great loves of my life: Beer, and that landlady’s son.”

So what’s the perfect pub? “I don’t need sticky carpets, this nostalgia for pre-smoking ban pubs baffles me. I want nice toilets, welcoming to all walks of life... and I want scotch eggs with runny yolks in the middle, a good pork pie, pork scratchings - none of your fancy pants nonsense, and bacon fries rule.”

The Beer Kitchen by Melissa Cole, published by Hardie Grant, costs £20

Expert Melissa Cole, below, wants to get us cooking with beer, with her new The Beer Kitchen cookbook