Hot Flavours of the fortnight, featuring Kinnegar, Kraken and...Bob Dylan?

Making its Convention Centre bow on April 17 and 18 is the Dublin Drinks Mixer, which proclaims to be “Ireland’s largest gin, spirits and cocktail event.”

Among the sixty exhibitors already confirmed to be there are Sixling Cloudberry Infused Irish Gin, Intrepid Spirits, Off The Cuffe Bitters, Cool Swan Irish Cream Liqueur, Teeling Whiskey, Clonakility Distillery, Brockman’s Gin, The Boatyard Distillery and Michter’s, the much-garlanded Louisville, Kentucky distillery that’s finally landing here. Yay and thrice yay!
Tickets, which depending on add-ons cost between €10.85 and €43.55, are available from eventbrite.ie.

Our new favourite cockle-warmer is hot chocolate made with 18g Dark Chocolate Powder, 4g Demerara Sugar, 1.5g Ground Ginger, 1.5g Sea Salt, 1.5g Ground Cinnamon, 5g Dark Chilli Chocolate, 200ml Milk and 50ml Kraken Black Spiced Rum. With marshmallows and whipped cream on top, it’ll make anything seem better.

From the makers of Dublin 1’s best Chinese restaurant, M&L, comes the roast meat-loving Kitchen 85.

Loitering with considerable intent on Marlborough Street, the stars of the show is the Char Siu pork, which had us crying big salty tears of joy. We also devoured the whole Steamed Turbot with Chillies & Spring Onion and the Braised Duck Wing with Mushroom. kitchen85.com.

Thirty new jobs will be created with the launch in April of Chequer Lane By Jamie Oliver.

Anticipating his arrival on Dublin 2’s Exchequer Street, Oliver says: “Chequer Lane will celebrate some of my favourite comfort good. Ireland has some of the greatest fresh product in the world and we can’t wait to show it off.” We’ll avoid being sniffy and wait to see what Jamie puts on the plate.

Also opening in April on Cork’s MacCurtain Street is the Thompson Bar & Restaurant, which will include a new microbrewery overseen by Cotton Ball man Eoin Lynch.

“This is not a soft drink,” proclaim the brewers of Ko, a craft Kombucha that hails from Offaly.

Handmade in small batches – we’re a sucker for the handwritten best before on the label – this very drinkable raw fermented tea is available in Original, Strawberry and Blueberry flavours from selected stockists nationwide and the kombucha.com/shop where it’s €35 plus P&P for a dozen bottles.

Tipple of the fortnight: Kinnegar 5% Olan’s Tart Apple Sour

Sours are tricky things to get right. They need to have that lip-smacking quality, but too sour and they’ll extract every drop of moisture from your mouth. Not for the first time in their illustrious brewing career, the good folk from Kinnegar in Donegal have got theirs spot on with a little help from Dan Kelly’s Cider who’ve supplied the fresh pressed apple juice. Light bodied and extremely fruity, it’s part of a Kettle Sour Series, which also includes Sour Grapes and Brownknowe, which is aged in sherry-infused oak and tastes all the better for it. A can of Olan’s Tart will do wonders for your Normandy Pork Casserole – one glug for the chef and the rest for the pot – and is being road-tested this week as a ham glaze. We’ll let you know how we get on!

Let It Knock

Having won numerous awards Stateside, Bob Dylan’s Heaven’s Door range of whiskeys are about to cross the Atlantic.
While you won’t find him shoveling grain in their Tennessee distillery, The Big Zim is a serious whiskey buff who worked his way through almost 500 samples before giving his blessing to the brand’s core range.