Big pitcher is a watering hole which believes in providing their customers a grand pub experience!! Everything here is big, true to their name!

I was invited as part of the Food Bloggers Association of Bangalore (FBAB) for a bloggers table.

Location

The Big pitcher is located on the Old Airport road, opposite the Leela Palace. This is between the Diamond district and the Manipal Hospital. I believe this area lacks good breweries that some areas like Indiranagar boasts of!

Ambience

The Big pitcher has multiple floors with a different theme in each of them!

Club Kahuna is for those of you who love great music and a little dance! This floor also offers a full blown signature brew, cocktails and IMFL.
Sizzling street is a purely food oriented floor, which has a buffet with focus on BBQ food. Now, you’d also get beer on the tap, on this floor as well 🙂
Studio 4121 is a fine dine setup, which is what you should be choosing for a meal with your business clients!
Star Lounge is the floor that you must choose if you’re looking for a rooftop ambience!
Splitwood is built around the roadhouse concept, which has a very rustic cowboy theme, with a wild west ambience! The blogger table event was held here.

Brewed Beer!!

Bangalore is undoubtedly the home, to some of the best microbreweries in India. Big Pitcher is one the biggest microbreweries in Bangalore, in terms of the scale at which they brew beer.

Not many get the chance to understand the process of brewing beer and we were lucky enough to have got the opportunity, to do just that!
Sharing more info on the process would get a case booked against me 😉
Do I have any lawyer friends ?? 🙂

The brew master gave us a lot of insights on how they go about their operations as well.

Although, here are some pictures 🙂

What do the beers look like?? 🙂

What did the beers taste like??

I’m not much of a beer person. This is mostly because beer is made from gluten and I follow a gluten free diet. Most I can do is take 1 sampler size glass!
Having said that, I did take a sip of all the beers that were on the tap.

The kinds of beer that are served here are:
1. King slayer
2. Hopwitch
3. Adjust Maadi
4. Sarava
5. Czech that Pilsner
6. Dark Ale

I did like the lighter beers as opposed to the darker & bitter ones.
The favorite amongst my friends, that day, was Sarava! Go for it, will ya ? 🙂

Cocktails

The sheer variety of cocktails, that Big Pitcher has to offer is spectacular 🙂

But, this did not quite work for us on the judgement day. I’ll tell you why.
We were given about 8-9 cocktails( I say 8-9 because, 2 of them were very similar ). And when you have these many cocktails to taste, you’d be left high and dry with a paradox of choice 😦
Too many drinks, too many alcohol families to make you a little too confused to actually pick one and finish and/or continue with, for the rest of your outing 🙂

I wouldn’t blame Big Pitcher for this, on the contrary, I truly appreciate their magnanimous character 🙂

Why the Monin pic? Some of the cocktails that are served here, do use the syrups. Although, not all the cocktails we had, have these syrup additions 🙂

Which Cocktails did we have ??

1. High Sea Adventure
This is a vodka based drink, with vanilla and coconut milk. This comes in a unique presentation of an earthen pot! I could feel the vodka power through and didn’t quite get the vanilla or coconut flavors. This drink did feel a little off balance. This may well be because the spice yellon flower added on top. I do love vodka cocktails, but this was bit off, for me 😦

2. Fig Mojito
This is a Dark rum based drink, with fresh fig, brown sugar, mint.
This is probably their take on the Rum & Cola cocktail 🙂 The fig is a fancy addition 🙂 The drink did taste good as it had lots of mint!

3. Che Guevara
This is a Gin based drink, with fresh apple, green chilly, honey & sour mix.
I was at the bar, watching the bar tender make this drink and it was quite a spectacle! This was one amazing cocktail, despite gin, NOT being anywhere close to being my favorite alcohol family. It was appreciated by most of my friends too!

4. Elder flower Martini
This is a Whiskey based drink, with bitters from elderflower.
The drink did not quite have a good combination with experts heavily criticising this one. But, I felt it was not that bad after all 😉 If it had something going in favor of it, it was that it looked pretty awesome!

5. Jungle Mary
This again, is a vodka based drink, with strawberry juice(yeah, really!! ), tomato juice( i quite like tomato juice!), guava juice(how many juices really?? ) and tabasco. I think this one is a crazy mixture and I was eager to try this one out. This was also the first drink that was served to us 🙂 They made the rims of the glass covered with a chilly spice salt rub(which is what appealed a lot to me)! Well, how did the drink taste? I would say it was above par. And since it was a vodka drink, I quite liked it 🙂

6. Strong Big Ice tea
This is one helluva drink!! It sure is going to knock you out 😛 It has so many alcohols viz. rum,gin,vodka,tequila and brandy. The cocktail is made with some spices and lemon juice! I thought the presentation of this was very good!
The drink kicked some serious butt, and was one my favorite ones 🙂

7. Beach Bumm
This is a recipe meant to win ! It has the goodness of tender coconut water, malibu(rum), vodka and hazelnut. I feel with the current climate in Bangalore, we’d need something revivifying like this 🙂

8. Son of a beach
This drink was also a vodka based drink, with fresh kiwi, lemon and mint muddle and topped with cranberry juice. Not only did this drink look good, it was by far the best drink in taste!! And I did save this for the last 🙂

Food

The folks here not only invited us to have a great liquor experience, but also to binge on their amazing food creations!

What did we eat??

1. Ultimate Blazing Chicken Nachos
Nachos is the quintessential Mexican snack that we’re all very fond of. Be it just plain Nachos with a salsa dip, or volcano nachos with various toppings, we love it 🙂
This one was crisp corn tortilla chips with a meat sauce, lettuce, jalapeños and cheese!

2. Bang Bang Tofu
This dish was very appetizing. Tofu is made from soybeans and resemble cottage cheese(paneer) in many both taste and appearance. This dish was a thai style tofu preparation, with scallions sautéed with trio peppers. I liked this a lot !

3. Fish Saigon

This was a grilled Basa fish fillet. The fish wasn’t soggy and had great consistency, which is tough to achieve for a fried preparation! Full points to the chef!

4. Angari Khatarnak(deadly) Tikka
I was a little confused with the looks of this, as it looked like a mutton dish, but was actually a chicken tikka. This is very unlike the chicken tikka you’d get elsewhere! This was more like a minced version, which was flavored with curry leaves and green chillies! This did pack a punch and probably deserves to be named this way 🙂

5. Sriracha Butter Chicken
This dish was my favorite dish on the day!
It was a wok tossed Sriracha sauced chicken. It was spicy, crispy, and well cooked. The Sriracha sauce is a wonderful sauce, which is made of chili peppers, vinegar, garlic,salt and sugar.

6. 4121 Veg Pizza
Just admit it that you just love pizzas! No matter the age everyone is a fan of pizzas. I was happy to see pizza as part of the menu here 🙂 Since, this is gluten, I really have stopped eating pizzas. But, thin crust pizzas have very wheat, as opposed to the madness we get at Dominos, Pizza hut etc!! The veg toppings, olives and mozzarella on this pizza were quite good! I had 1 entire slice and was totally worth breaking my gluten free diet 🙂

7. Lachchu Singh ki Sabz Sitara
An elevated version of the Aloo gobi dish. They hit a home run when it came to the presentation of this dish as well as the taste! I absolutely loved this dish 🙂 I had this with the chicken biriyani which came with a combo( more on it later 🙂 )

8. Pizza and Pasta Combo
This is a very neatly crafted combo for folks that like to try a couple of items as part of 1 dish. They provide you with a chilly chicken pizza, red sauce pasta, cold pasta primavera salad and a chocolate cake 🙂 It’s a meal in itself, which is sure to delight your taste buds!!

9. Nawab Combo
This is another combo option that you could try. This is from the indian cuisine. It comes with chicken biriyani with raita, salan(curry) and a gulab jamoon(dessert). This for me is comfort food, and I could eat this for every single meal of every single day of every single year of my life 🙂 Enough said!

Desserts

The menu was quite elaborate on the starters and main course front, we were sort of spared on the desserts 😉 We were given just one of their best desserts 🙂

Trio Chocolate mousse
This is a dark and white chocolate mousse with lots of nuts and fruits sprinkled on top. This was a truly sinful dessert!! The rich chocolate mousse that was extremely smooth and crunchy in every bite, owing to the nuts added, was excellent 🙂 I think this is a must try!!

Service

When you visit a restaurant/brew house with 25 people who are obsessed with taking pictures and noting every minute detail about the restaurant( because this is what bloggers do!!) , the service matters a lot. We’d love to be able to take pictures of beautifully plated dishes and given more than just one of each, so, people don’t kill each other to get the perfect frame 😛

FBAB managed to get Big pitcher to reserve one entire floor exclusively for us and this meant a relaxed environment with no prying eyes of the common man 🙂
The staff was extremely courteous and took very good care of our various needs. Most of us got custom cocktails done, including me. I had even requested them to make me some mock-tails and the bar tenders were more than just happy to create them with a smile on their faces!!

I was also given some beverage coasters with cool graphics of their beer logos !!

A big thank you to the service staff and the managers of both Big pitcher and FBAB for organizing the Blogger’s table event, so well 🙂

Areas of Improvement by Butter Theory

1. I believe, that one of the many reasons people would come back to a microbrewery is for the beer. The quality of the beers dictate that! They really need to be able to come up with something very unique to be able to draw the attention of the several beer lovers in Bangalore. This is not to say that they haven’t some winners, already!

2. They really need to downsize their menu. The options are endless and will only confuse the customers, when it comes to picking a couple of dishes. The average table size would be 4 members. And they’d really order a couple of finger food options, while chugging down some beer! The elaborate menu on the main course could well be relaxed( or restricted to the floor which is meant for the buffet!).

3. They would need to do some more marketing on the various theme options on the 6 floors of their property! Not many know that there are so many options available. One could probably keep coming back here for 5 times to try out every single theme!

4. Cocktails need some more fine tuning. Out of the 8-9 cocktails that we tried, I only liked half of them ( out of which I loved only 2 of them ).

5. About the nachos: The presentation was quite good, although I felt there was a bit too much of lettuce. If they could do away with the lettuce, this dish would have looked even better! It was served with sour creme and salsa dip. The chicken felt a bit too dry and the sauce was insufficient.

I would safely say that there’s a lot to be experienced at Big pitcher, and one outing isn’t sufficient! I’ve been here twice and still feel that I’d need a couple more visits to try out the various floor/themes options!
When we went there, it was the World T20 season!! Come here with a bunch of friends to enjoy the live screening of sporting events! They do screen some of the IPL matches. The pricing is very competitive and wouldn’t hurt your pocket one bit! Come off, I say 😛