A visit to Glasgow’s WEST Brewery was long overdue but we finally made it.
Apart from the tour to learn more about their German style beer, we have been very eager to try their take on Currywurst. This is a traditional fast-food option in Berlin which you can get at any Imbissbude (a fast food stall) across the city. The dish is made up of grilled sausage smothered in a curry tomato sauce, specially flavoured with spices and curry powder. It’s hard to find a good curry tomato sauce outside of Berlin, let alone outside of Germany. So we were excited to give it a go.
What we did
We had the tour first and booked a table in their restaurant for after. The tour led us through their new brewery (only 2 years old) in which they pre-dominantly produce their most popular lager – St. Mungo. This was because their other brewery is currently under construction to expand their production.
Our Verdict
The tour was interesting and informative. Although with 26 of us in sometimes very small rooms, we felt it would have been better suited for a smaller group. The guide was great, knowledgeable not only about WEST but also the competition “over the road” and other methods of brewing and distilling. His pronunciation of German names and words was excellent and he was generally highly entertaining in a tongue-in-cheek kinda way.
At the end of the tour we were given two beers to taste and it was a generous half pint of Märzen & Heidi-Weisse Beer for each person. While we don’t want to be ungrateful, it was difficult to drink both of them as they are so vastly different and mixing them did not work for us.
We then were seated at our table in the restaurant. The currywurst was delicious! While the curry tomato sauce did not taste exactly like the original ones from Berlin, it was very good and made us feel nostalgic and look forward to our next trip to Berlin in June. We had room for dessert so we went for Apfelstrudel and Gingerbread Cheesecake, which was served as is traditional in Germany, with generous slices and ice cream on the side plus garnishes of fresh fruit. Even the coffee (flat white) tasted like when going for Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) in Berlin.
The Apfelstrudel was delicious and as expected in the most positive way. The cheese cake surprised us as it was sitting on a fluffy ginger sponge which went very well together. Most intriguing was the Heidi-Weisse ice cream – which tasted exactly like the beer but like a creamy version. We found it a bit overwhelming on its own but it went very well together with the Gingerbread Cheesecake.
As we took Stevie (our car) to the Brewery, we took home some bottles to enjoy in the Palace rather than stick around at the bar. We can’t wait to try the Munich Red and Feierabend. We are already very fond of St.Mungo’s, so that won’t last long in the Palace Kitchen!
What we would do differently
The nostalgia we experienced with the WEST Currywurst has inspired us to finally attempt our own curry tomato sauce blend in the Palace Kitchen. We can’t wait to experiment and report back!
We are also curious about other items on the WEST menu, so definitely plan to come back and enjoy a sausage platter with a cold pint in the beer garden this Summer.
Adventures in the Palace Kitchen 
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