Beef and Ale Pie

We thought we'd start with a very classic pie - Beef and Ale Pie. Though I'm not a big fan of Ale (tastes like watery beer, and then I'm not even a fan of beer), the filling was really delicious! The meat was very tender and the flavour was just great! The carrots were too soft for my liking; next time I would fry them so that the sauce can take on some flavour of the carrots, and then take them out and add them shortly before the whole thing goes into the oven.

I also didn't feel that the pastry topping was really necessary, but then it wouldn't really be a pie, would it? It was slightly dry, and I'm wondering whether that had anything to do with the coating of egg (I normally use milk).

All in all, I'd definitely make it again, though I'd change the way I cook the carrots and the top layer of the dough.

Edited 7 August 2015: Made one of these for the freezer, but unfortunately the pastry didn't survive its excursion to the North Pole. Therefore I decided to serve the filling with potato dumplings (store bought) and Red Cabbage with Appels and Red Wine instead, and actually this worked really, really well - so well that I'm actually considering to stick with the potato dumplings and red cabbage in the future!