Blood Orange Wheat Beer (Marks and Spencer) By @SpectreUK

I do enjoy the odd flavoured beer. It's true that some are odder than others, and some fruit flavoured beers can be downright unpleasant, such as banana beer and passion fruit beer. I've tasted blood orange beer before and liked it, as well as orange peel beer (which I haven't seen for a good while) and loved it. I remember that they go especially well with fishy dishes. You've probably guessed it from the title, blood orange juice was added in the brewing of this 4.5% volume wheat beer by Adnams Brewery in Suffolk. Although not named on the can 100% European hops were used in the brewing as well as malted barley and malted wheat.

On opening the can there was an orange smell mixed in with the wheat and herbal hops. I expected more of a citrus smell, and figured my nose was a little broken from the steam room at the swimming pool earlier. There was indeed an orange tint to the golden beer as I poured it. On taste there was an unexpected sourness. Unlike all of Adnam's usual perfectly lips-smacking craft ales, the first taste of this beer actually made me worry slightly. Worry enough to check the date on the bottom of the can. I'm not sure the herbal hops mixed well with the blood orange juice. I'd have thought more citrus hops would have been used, either that or the malted wheat in the background just didn't get on with the blood orange or the hops. This beer seemed to me like an argument of flavours that left a fairly unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Maltesers Luxury Chocolates (Debenhams) By @Cinabar

A new branch of Debenhams opened in Wolverhampton, which is quite exciting for the city. Obviously I went for a bit of am explore, and having looked round the clothes and make-up I discovered the gift section, and within that of course there was the confectionary. Oh my, I could practically build my entire Christmas list from the choice there. I did however decide to treat myself to these new Maltesers Luxury Chocolates, for blogging research purposes of course.
Although Maltesers are synonymous with Christmas gifts, they are usually in their normal form of a malt flavours crunchy ball coated in milk chocolate. This year Maltesers have introduced these new Maltesers Luxury Chocolates and just for fun individually wrapped them too! Don’t worry though they are actually quite big chocolates inside the box, there are 16 of them individually wrapped. The box is epically bright inside too, it is very red!

Each one consists of milk chocolate, malt and wafer and tastes rather good. I didn’t think that the chocolate was quite the same flavour as that in regular Maltesers, although it was still sweet and milky. The flavour of the malt was a little subdued but the mix of textures made these. They were soft and crunchy in different places and nice to munch on. I liked the fact they took two bites and they were a bit of fun. The only improvement for me would be a touch more malt in the taste, after all they are called Maltesers so it aught to be the dominant flavour.

A Very Lurpak Christmas (@NLi10)

Birmingham town centre has lots of promotional give-aways and odd Free food sometimes, some more tenuous than others.  Here we have the prime example of some free biscuits - to advertise the butter that they used to make them.

And they are pretty decent biscuits too, with spices and mince meat in them to taste all Christmassy.  Apparently there was a giant tree too as part of the stall but I failed to notice that.

I’m not sure that this will make me more likely to choose Lurpack when baking the Christmas treats, but all this festive good cheer can’t hurt can it!

Off The Eaten Path Crispy Rice & Pea Chips Sour Cream & Black Pepper Flavour (Sainsbury’s) By @SpectreUK

Always on the lookout for alternative snacks to crisps and nuts I found these Off The Eaten Path Crispy Rice and Pea Chips in the local supermarket, which are Sour Cream and Black Pepper Flavour. It did make me smile when I read the back of the packet, as it stated "Surprisingly tasty snacks made with real vegetables." This amused me firstly because the manufacturer was surprised that they had created something "surprisingly tasty", and secondly that these rice chips are made with "real vegetables", as opposed to the fake ones you get on tables in department stores, I suppose?!

Anyway, these rice chips are made with green and yellow peas with a sprinkling of cracked black pepper. On opening the packet I could at first see that they were pretty funny looking rounded crisps (see photograph). Not particularly appetising looking I must say. Perhaps that's where the manufacturer's surprise came from when they dared to bite into their first rice chip? In texture these rice chips are very crunchy. Not too tough on the teeth, but they wake you up when you eat one. Eating two at a time would be a bit ambitious. There's a taste of rice first which quickly mixes with the cracked black pepper. There follows a pleasant two stroke pea flavour, which merges back into cracked black pepper and rice into the aftertaste. Considering how oddly ugly looking these rice chips are, I did rather like them. I found them quite moreish in a weird kind of way. Besides, black pepper flavoured snacks generally go down a treat with me. They usually go well with a beer, you see… There are also Pea & Pinto Bean Snacks available, and I wonder if they're funny looking to?

Information on the box;
The 120g packet has 127 calories per 30g serving, with 11g of fat, o.6g of sugar, and 0.3g of salt. No artificial colours, flavours, or preservatives. Suitable for Vegetarians. Please see photograph for the ingredients.

Walkers Japanese Sweet Wasabi and Ginger Sensations Crisps (@Morrisons) By @Cinabar

You can’t say we don’t get a good variety of crisp flavours in the UK. I often find flavours even now that wow me and are just varieties I haven’t tried before. Walkers are excellent for this and yet again they have surprised me. Japanese Sweet Wasabi and Ginger sounded like a very intriguing combination.
Now I have a love hate relationship with Wasabi, I think it burns my nose and I can barely tolerate the hot stuff, but I still love it. This gives the slightly odd look of me with watering eyes if I eat it in a restaurant but despite the tears, I am thoroughly enjoying it. I don’t have the same relationship with chilli, I’d much rather just have a medium heat with that. Wasabi though, hot is more. For those who don’t know what it is the nearest equivalent is a hot Japanese version of Horseradish sauce. Place a generous dollop on sushi and allow steam in the nose to form.
Anyway onto these crisps, we sat down to share these with lunch and my mum said she’d taste one before having any on her plate. She said it was too hot, and choose not to have any. This interested me and I was looking forward to some Wasabi heat. I took some for my plate and ate one. It was lightly flavoured, a vague hint of Wasabi and a subtle touch of ginger. If I had to be honest it was shockingly plain. Now my mum has decent tolerances of heat so I was confused by this reaction. It was hot she claimed again. I munched my way through a few more, then I hit one, one that was tangy and spicy and bursting with Wasabi goodness and flame. Now I know what my mum had meant. The seasoning was completely unevenly split, and this meant that in my portion there were a few super spicy heavenly crisps and the others when compared directly to them were as dull as anything. This is very unusual for Walkers, so I may have to treat myself to another bag and hope this one was just a bit unlucky with the seasoning.