I popped into the Vat and Fiddle Pub, the Castle Rock Brewery Tap Room, to hunt down the Brown Sauce from The Sauce Shop. The Vat is one of my locals for a Friday night beer and I am often in there getting a pint of Harvest Pale and a little bit of pub grub at the start of the weekend 🙂

I am a big fan of The Sauce Shop and have been really excited recently to try out their new sauces many of which have been collaborations with local brewers such as Castle Rock and also Neonraptor (but that is a different story).

I first met them back at the Park Market when I was most taken with their first version of a classic Brown sauce which they were calling the Nottingham Sauce, as they got bigger and perhaps more national they dropped the name and it became their Mushroom Sauce (giving away the main ingredient then 🙂 )

Breakfast Cob at Vat and Fiddle

The Breakfast Cob from the Vat and Fiddle pub menu is a pretty safe pair of hands, a nice white bread cob filled up with Sausage, Bacon and a Fried Egg. The only danger here is yolk spillage as you bite into it. This is a sandwich crying out for a dollop of that Brown Sauce and that is what it got!.

They don’t really do a breakfast here at the Vat and Fiddle, or so I thought, then recently I noticed the ‘All Day Brunch‘ popping up on their specials board. Excellent that sounded like just the thing to have as well. I thought about getting the Lasagne but that might not have been the best pairing for the sauce 🙂 [note: I reckon could have made it work though]

The sauce shop said that the Brown Sauce “needed a makeover” while describing it as  “Fruity and lightly spiced, this is a familiar flavour that’s been taken up a notch. We’ve combined sweetness from dates with tart tamarind and the deep bitterness of Castle Rock’s English Stout, Sherwood Reserve. This is no ordinary Brown Sauce…”

I like that they have used the Sherwood Reserve as that is one of Castle Rocks Natural Selection range, the sales of which “boost the funds of the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust with an emphasis towards the trees, animals and landscapes in the ancient forest of Sherwood that once sprawled over much of Nottinghamshire.”

Sherwood Reserve a darker ale, is described as ‘rich in taste with much of its bitterness coming from the intensely roasted malt’ so I was expecting that some of that bitter maltiness  flavour would come through in the sauce.

I really do like the Brown Sauce from The Sauce Shop and I also note do like their Tomato Ketchup as well. It is really great to see local sauce enthusiasts and empire builders joining forces with the local pubs and restaurants to set us all up with fantastic condiments.