Brewdog Manchester and Honest Burger 'Brew Burger'

As a major fan of both Brewdog beers and Honest burgers, I was pretty excited to read that they'd been working together on developing a burger for the launch of the Bourbon Baby beer that would be available in Manchester for ONE NIGHT ONLY and so drew a big burger on the calendar at home to make sure I wouldn't forget when the date rolled around.

Whilst trying to translate the list of ingredients, it became clear I was looking at a bbq bacon cheese burger which would incorporate the following:

Bacon that had been candied using 5am Saint (an existing Brewdog red ale)
Comte Cheese
Onions in beef dripping and Punk IPA (Brewdog's flagship IPA)
BBQ sauce made with one of their Paradox beers
Pickled Cucumber
All on top of the classic Honest 150g aged beef patty and sandwiched within their usual toasted bun

The sauces were supposedly so boozy that the burger actually had an ABV, unfortunately I forgot to take my kit to test this so i'll have to take the claim at face value.

I arrived a bit early meaning I was ready and waiting like a horrendous over-zealous fan (i'm ashamed) at 6pm to get an order in as soon as they went on sale.

I was overjoyed (really) to see the burger arrived accompanied by Honest's triple cooked hand cut chips with rosemary salt, none of this frozen fries nonsense. I'd been fiending for these for months and they absolutely didn't disappoint.

I dived head-first into the burger and it all held together admirably but while very enjoyable to my taste buds the sheer range of ingredients and flavours was very difficult to separate when mushed together inside my chops. The good news was that the signature Honest meat wasn't completely overwhelmed and shone through, helped by the meat being cooked perfectly pink in the middle.

I could've gone at it with a knife and fork in an attempt to give you a break down of how well thought out the list of ingredients was and how they all worked together perfectly to result in the burger to end all burgers (bringing on burgergeddon) but that's kind of missing the point.

The Bourbon Baby beer which came with the burger was a great accompaniment. Typically Brewdog beers aren't known for a subtle flavour and this was definitely a nice surprise with a mild and sweet taste of it's own. My taste buds were hammered by the burger so I won't even attempt to describe notes for you i'm afraid. I was interested to read in the the recent issue of Hop-Propaganda (kills me it's not just called HOPAGANDA), the in-house Brewdog magazine that it's been developed as an "experiment in how a lower ABV session ale will develop in cask" and understanding fully what they were aiming for they definitely nailed it.

In the spirit of experimentation and trying something a bit different it was a great little burger and I have a lot of respect for the ideas that went into it all. A collaboration that was certainly a lot of fun and something that i'm definitely pleased to have experienced.