We Got Experimental for Pancake Tuesday!

BERRY BRAMBLE STING  BREAKFAST PANCAKES!

Instead of milk, we decided to try our fruity Blackberry and Nettle soft drink in the batter mix. It was a triumph! So tasty and made the pancakes light and fluffy with a slight pinkish tone to them (although hard to see in the pics above). We then topped them with fresh strawberries, blueberries, flaked almonds, a dollop of natural yoghurt and a squeeze of honey. Healthy, nutritious and most of all tasty!

TOTALLY TROPICAL GINGER BEER PANCAKES

We then went with the taste of the Caribbean and added our Fiery Ginger Beer to the mix, replacing the milk again. Another great combination! This time we used lime juice instead of lemon, some Demerera sugar, some sweet pineapple and a dusting of cinnamon! And who doesn't love buying and chopping up a pineapple! It was a lovely ray of sunshine on a cold February evening. And definitely should not be confined to Pancake Tuesday, it'd make a great weekend treat! DO IT!

Black Castle Soft Drinks @ Hospitality Expo Dublin

This year we held a stand at the Hospitality Expo in the RDS in their Food Village and were delighted to meet a huge range of prospective clients from the hospitality industry. 

There's John living the dream, driving a huge transit van full of our soft drinks and stand on our way up to the trade show!

And here is our stand, decked out in all its glory! Complete with new posters of our cocktails taken by friend and Wicklow photographer Shane Doyle!

Happy to report we've been following up with lots of new clients and we should see our premium soft drinks popping up on even more shop shelves and pub menus!

Art and Soft Drinks for a Good Cause!

This January we sponsored a charity art exhibition for the Irish Housing Network held by Where The Heart Is in 12 Henrietta Street Dublin. 

Where The Heart Is is a pop up art exhibition/sale taking place over the course of one evening in order to raise awareness of the crisis surrounding homelessness in Dublin, as well as raising much-needed funding for the Irish Housing Network, a movement of concerned direct action groups who are seeking to highlight and publicise issues with the on-going housing crisis, as well as engaging in hands-on, emergency initiatives.

As well as featuring pieces from well known artists like Maser, the show also encouraged art students and people from the homeless community to donate their work to the cause. And it was a huge success with almost every piece selling withing the first 40 minutes!

We loved seeing everyone enjoy our grown up soft drinks - our Spiced Red Lemonade and Fiery Ginger Beer went down especially well!

Our Fiery Ginger Beer casually hanging our by this guy!

Well done to the organiser Evan Musgrave and his team of volunteers for putting on such a great night!

Cardamom: The Queen of Spices

Did you know that we use a spice fit for royalty in one of our drinks? While Black Pepper is considered the King of Spices, the little green pods called Cardamom are known as the Queen of Spices. Fancy!

So with such acclaim we decided to use it in our very own Spiced Red Lemonade. The exotic spice gives our Red Lemonade a distinctly grown-up and sophisticated flavour with sweet floral notes as well as a hint of pepper, mint and lemon coming from the pods. There are 3 types of Cardamon; Black, Madagascar and Green Cardamon which are found in a variety of foods from Indian curries to Turkish coffee! While it is one of the priciest spices we chose to use the whole green pods for their fresh potency.

Cardamon is said to have a number of health benefits: it aids digestion, acts as an antioxidant, helps prevents colds and flues and is even said to help prevent and slow down cancer.  More great reasons to include it in our Red Lemonade!

Cardamom combines brilliantly with other spices, so we paired it with beautiful Allspice Berries to infuse the water we use as a base to our lemonade. Again we use Allspice berries whole to give even more depth of flavour - hints on nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon. Yum!

With all this lovely sweet flavour coming from the spices we've been able to keep the sugar level low while maintaining a full flavour which tastes great on it's own, but also pairs perfectly with smooth Irish Whiskeys.