Doubles and quits

December 31, 2014, 12:37 am

It's the last post of 2014, a very busy year for beer and for Irish beer in particular. New breweries popped up all over the place and I paid overdue visits to Carlow Brewing, Porterhouse and Galway Bay. Dublin has been a little slow to catch up with the rest of the country but I'm expecting that to be somewhat rectified by the end of next year. The slew of winter seasonal beers has been bigger than ever and, for the second year in a row, Eight Degrees has released a trilogy of strong brews. One of them is a re-run of last year's Imperial Stout but the others are brand new and I caught up with them when they went on tap in The Norseman.

First up, a 7.2% ABV Belgian Dubbel. It's the appropriate shade of chestnut red and poured quite clear, though not completely. It's big on banana esters and heavy on the caramel too for an unsubtly sweet boozy banoffi effect, the heat rising to a slightly off-putting hint of marker pens at the finish. Thankfully the heat and markers don't build and the end result is a reasonably decent take on the dubbel style. While I got a little bit of a savoury yeast bite in the flavour, I suspect that this would be even more present in the bottled version and would help balance the intense sweetness. It's certainly one that will be interesting after a few years' maturation.

Eight Degrees wowed us in spring with The Full Irish IPA (and not just because of that photo) and have followed it up with a double IPA version named, topically, Double Irish. I didn't get much of an aroma from it, but that could have been the glass: those trumpet-shaped half-pints really should be banished from decent beer bars. Cut grass eventually wafted out of it when I'd drank down far enough. On tasting, the bitterness strikes first and while the flavour is complex, it's not a fruity one. There's everything else, mind: dank oily resins, grassy sharpness and a mouth-watering dry spicing. While carrying the full weight of its 9% ABV it's not at all sugary. It's a little more grown-up and serious than Ireland's other double IPAs and you can decide for yourself whether or not that's a good thing.

And speaking of comparisons, with all of my beer reviews done for the year, that means it's time for:

The Golden Pint Awards 2014

Best Irish Cask Beer: Full Sail
What happens when you take an already strong and hoppy pale ale and then dry hop it as far as physically possible. This is a face melter that goes through hoppy and out the other side. I'm hoping the expanded capacity at Galway Bay will make it a more regular sight.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Black Boar
We’re not worthy. Oh wait, yes we are. Where the hell has this been until now, White Hag? A silky knock-it-back 9% ABV stout that's so easy to drink they had to name it after a dangerous animal to remind us of the risk. At the opposite end of the hydrometer, a major tip of the hat has to go to Trouble Brewing for Graffiti: more of this, and this sort of thing, please.

Best Irish Bottled or Canned Beer: Independent Pale Ale / Dublin Brewer IPA
I first drank this way back in February but have been caning most of it under its Dublin Brewer guise at The Larder. I didn't realise they're the same beer but I have it on good authority that they are. Another big blousey whack of hops: invigorating, refreshing and great with a feed.

Best Overseas Draught Beer: Het Uiltje G&T Radler
Wiper & True's Mosaic pale ale was a major contender in the pupil-dilating stakes this year, but the Dutch contract brewers take the prize for me. All the wonderful things about my two favourite drinks in a single package. It's quite possibly the oddest beer I drank this year, and perhaps that alone deserves recognition.

Best Overseas Bottled or Canned Beer: Black Eyed King Imp
The second imperial stout to take a gong, but it couldn't be more different from Black Boar. BrewDog's limited edition special has a convoluted back story but when you meet it it's entirely integrated: one piece of warm, sumptuous liquid comfort.

Best Collaboration Brew: Crushable Saison
There have been lots of great Irish collaborations this year, thinking of Goodbye Blue Monday and Horn8's Nest in particular. But I'm giving this one to the Americo-Belgian saison made by Tired Hands and De La Senne because it best represents what both countries are great at, which is a good thing for collaboration beers to do.

Best Overall Beer: Het Uiltje G&T Radler
It has to be the weirdo, I'm afraid. That's just how I roll. But you knew that. Seriously, though: drink this beer and tell me it isn't amazing.

Best Branding, Label or Pumpclip:Jack Cody's
Gotta love that goat.

Best Irish Brewery: Eight Degrees
The same winner as last year, with no qualms at all because, while 2013 Eight Degrees was excellent, 2014 Eight Degrees surpassed it with a never ending stream of daring hop-forward beers. As the Irish microbrewing industry expands, the issue of quality -- and whether newcomers are up to scratch -- is raised again and again. Anyone looking for a benchmark on what quality tastes like can grab a handful of whatever the newest Eight Degrees releases are. A very honorable mention goes to Trouble Brewing for excellent beers reasonably priced: everything that's required of a local brewery.

Best Overseas Brewery:Siren
There was no particular outstanding beer that won this for the Berkshire brewery, but they kind of insinuated themselves into my drinking this year, in locations as diverse as Rome, Barcelona, Edinburgh, Bristol and my own kitchen: wherever top-notch beer is served, basically. A varied range of styles and all of it very good indeed. Word has it that importation into Ireland is imminent, which is great news.

Best New Brewery Opening 2014:The White Hag
Well duh!

Pub/Bar of the Year:57 The Headline
The Norseman ran it pretty damn close, both of them having taken the mantle from the Bull & Castle as ground zero for Dublin's beer obsessives. If pushed I'd say The Norseman probably has a better beer offer, but the quiet, comfortable neighbourly feel of The Headline makes it a better pub, which is what this prize is about. My top international finds this year were Open Baladin in Rome and The Bag o' Nails in Bristol, but neither is a 20-minute downhill stroll from my front door, so they lose out there.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2014:Alfie Byrne's
With JD Wetherspoon totally dropping the ball on the cask ale front, there aren't very many candidates. Alfie's opened in February and then we had a long wait for The 108 and The Back Page, which both appeared in late autumn. Alfie's gets a bit of stick because, through no fault of its own, it's a hotel bar. But the staff are great, the draught selection always includes something inspiring, and whereas you might see a lack of "atmosphere", I see a choice of places to sit. Away from you for a start, if you're going to whinge.

Beer and Food Pairing of the Year: Venison & Ale Pie and Leann Folláin
Always a tricky one for me as conscientious beer and food pairing is really not my thing. But down at The Pieman on Crown Alley a while back they had a venison and red ale pie on special, which I ate with a bottle of O'Hara's Leann Folláin, and it was lovely, and amazing value for a tenner. So there's my nomination.

Beer Festival of the Year: Quartiere In Fermento
Borefts was fantastic as always; The RDS September festival was huge and did not have a bad beer at it, that I tasted. Franciscan Well Easter Festival also took things to the next level this year. But the charming random oddness of the Wallace winebar chain's celebration of Italian beer gets my vote for 2014's festival highlight.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
As usual I did very little supermarket beer shopping, but I did pick up the odd bottle or two in Fresh. They do seem to keep a good range of locals and quality imports in stock.

Independent Retailer of the Year:Martin's of Fairview
I was wowed on my first visit to this northside offy: a fantastic range, all nicely spread out for ease of browsing. I still buy most of my beer in DrinkStore, but I will be back to Martin's.

Online Retailer of the Year:The Homebrew Company
It doesn't say this category has to be about beer does it? Anyway, I don't buy beer online, and I do like the service from HBC, so they get this Golden Pint.

Best Beer Book or Magazine:Sláinte: The Complete Guide to Irish Craft Beer and Cider
This is an actual contest for the first time in Golden Pints history. I love flicking through Ron Pattinson's Homebrewer's Guide to Vintage Beer, while Boak & Bailey's Brew Britannia was the most engrossing read of the year. But a book on the current state of play in Irish beer and cider was badly needed, and Caroline and Kristin have done a marvellous job of documenting it in an accessible and visually appealing way.

Best Beer Blog or Website: The Beer Cast
I am not alone in commending Richard for his forensic unravelling of the bullshit that Scottish brewers Brewmeister cloaked their brand in. The whole saga made for fascinating reading as well as demonstrating the real practical benefit of this blogging lark. Tremble in fear, ye quacks and charlatans. A pat on the back and a jolly-well-done goes to Mr Brissenden for his sweetly crafted observations on the production end of brewing, and to Belgian Smaak which has done fantastic work documenting rural Ireland's new breweries this year.

Best Beer App:BeoirFinder
And while Belgian Smaak has been tearing around the country, I rarely do. However, it's comforting to know that BeoirFinder is there if I end up somewhere unfamiliar and in need of a decent beer.

Simon Johnson Award for Best Beer Twitter: Chris Hall
We all want witty and informative, and thankfully there's plenty of it out there in the beery tweetosphere. Chris has been on top of it more than anyone in 2014, which is why I invite him to take a bow and receive my Johnson.

Best Brewery Website/Social Media:White Gypsy
Lots of current information on what's available and where to buy it, plus some lovely pictures of the brewery's hop garden, White Gypsy were really making the most of their Twitter account this year.

And that's your lot. Thanks as always to Andy Mogg and Mark Dredge for devising the Golden Pints and to everyone in the beer brewing, selling and commenting industries, especially here in Ireland, for making 2014 the busiest and most interesting year of my drinking career. See you in 2015 for the next round.

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The gaze of Janus

January 2, 2015, 12:43 am

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Hidden Agenda joins Graffiti and Vietnow in Trouble Brewing's OMG All Teh Hopz family of pale ales, this one at the 4.5% ABV mark. Australian varieties Vic Secret and Summer are providing the show here but it's not really one of those soft tropical fruit jobs you often get from Aussie hops. Prepare yourself instead for a major blast of fresh, sharp citrus and pine resins. Only in the finish is there any more rounded fruit taste, a swift suck on a mandarin but nothing more. I assume some malt has gone in here from the orange colour but I couldn't taste its presence: it's actually a little watery at its heart, especially when arriving cold. Still, I welcome the clean zippy hop bang and hope they make more like it.

White Gypsy's cask winter seasonal is a big 5.7% ABV dark ale called, appropriately, Dark Night. There's lots of chocolate in here but it's not overly sweet and, while rich and warming, doesn't taste all of its strength. When acquired fresh in The Brew Dock there was an extra bitter bite in the background, for a sort of Wrasslers effect. I couldn't be sure if it was generous hopping, a yeast bite or even an immature greenness I was tasting, but it added an extra dimension to the flavour, one which was gone a few days later when the pub was clearing the cask for the Christmas break, leaving behind some unseasonable but tasty strawberry sweetness.

And across the Galway Bay pub estate we're starting to see the appearance of Heathen, a 3% ABV sour black wheat beer. I've got through a lot of this since it first appeared in The Black Sheep: it's light and clean and super quaffable. The puckering dark vinegar tang is shocking at first but once you've settled in to it the flavour and high carbonation make for a refreshing oxyclean scrub for the palate.

The last of the new breweries to send beer out in 2014 was O Brother in Wicklow. They made sure I got some exercise by keeping the two first-run beers on opposite sides of the Liffey in L. Mulligan Grocer and The Norseman. Believe it or not the two glasses of The Fixer here presented were both poured from the same keg within seconds of each other. It's described as an American Red and it's very bitter: green cabbage and metal, plus some chewy toffee. There's more of a strong English bitter feel to it, I thought, than anything stateside. The cloudy version was actually a little softer, though still rather acrid.

I much preferred their pale ale The Chancer. Startlingly pale and with every right to claim the "'n' hoppy" that goes with it. Bright fresh lemon zest is the principal flavour; malt sweetness steers it towards candied peel, though it does build, becoming a bit piney floor cleaner by pint's end. Overall, a very good quality effort and it will sit well alongside more established luminaries like Metalman and Black's of Kinsale pale ales.

Irish brewing is in fairly good nick, then, if this lot are anything to go by. The current renaissance in international beer styles, starting in 2006 with Galway Hooker, is well documented. But it's the story of Irish brewing before that that I'd love to see told, in answer to Alan's question for this month's session: What beer book yet to be written would you like to see published?

I remember, and drank, the Irish craft beers of the early 2000s, and have seen tantalising glimpses of the extinct breweries which dotted the country in the previous five centuries through the work of Barry, Martyn, Ron and others. But while I'm sure all the information is out there somewhere, and that there are plenty of wonderful stories to be told, nobody has yet taken the time to write a properly wide-reaching history of Ireland's beer. I'd even settle for Dublin's.

In general I'm quite happy with where we're going in this country. I'd just really like to know more about where we've been.

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Ringers

January 5, 2015, 12:03 am

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"Are you here for food, or just a look around?"

Yes, Wetherspoon has certainly been something of a curiosity since it came to Dublin last year, hence the smiley greeter at the door of The Forty Foot on its first morning of business. I was here, since she asked, for beer.

Chances are you'll have seen the shock news as it happened: the pub chain choosing not to stock Heineken-brewed beers. A bevy of substitute bevvies was shipped in to replace them, and that's what drew me.

The stout line-up included Bath Ales Dark Side, and I kicked off with that to get it out of the way. While it's nitro-dispensed there's a pleasant tongue-tingling sparkle to this, though the texture is also plenty creamy. As expected, the trademark Bath Ales butterscotch is present in a big way but it's disguised somewhat by the sweet chocolate. It's a passable pint but you won't catch me drinking another.

Keeping it company at the black end of the taps is Marstons Revisionist Stout, a tiny bit stronger at 4.1% ABV with the informative tap badge helpfully offering black malt and roast barley, so I was hoping for a drier experience to cleanse all that diacetyl off my palate. The head on this one was promisingly darker: a healthy shade of nicotine, but of flavour there was none. Even after letting it warm up a ways there was a vague putty sort of tang but nothing that tasted like beer, never mind stout. My palate was cleansed but so was my optimism that the Marstons Revisionist project can deliver anything worthwhile.

Chances are I wouldn't have opted for Murphy's or Beamish on a visit to The Forty Foot anyway, though I have no objection to either. But these two stouts don't even reach Heineken's low bar.

My hopes were higher when I turned to lager. As titles go, Adnams Dry Hopped Lager really sounds like a winning formula. They certainly got their money's worth out of the Galaxy hops: this is a total mandarin bomb, to the point of being almost too sweet and juicy. There's a little bit of resinous incense spice and some heavier herbal dank, all of it given total free rein by the pristine lager cleanness. With no major bitter element, this is the beer to turn the local collars-up lagerboys into IPA fanatics.

On the journey home, since I was in the South County anyway, I dropped in to the other Wetherspoon: Blackrock's Three Tun Tavern. Mostly I wanted to grab a pint of Devils Backbone Pale Ale, the US-style offering brewed by Banks's for the chain and not yet in stock at The Forty Foot. Here is the bitterness missing from the Adnams lager: sharp and waxy; invigorating and refreshing. The flavour is rich and pithy, all ripe jaffa oranges, and the aroma adds to the waxy bitter effect. I liked it. It functions equally well as a cold, cheapy thirst-quencher and a more considered sipping ale. Would I be shot for suggesting there's a hint of Timothy Taylor Landlord about this?

And ugh, because I have to: Innis & Gunn Lager. My half arrived an innocent pale yellow colour smelling of nothing and tasting of little more. There's a bit of lagery grain husk and just a trace of the standard I&G toffee yuck. But it benefited hugely from the super-low serving temperature and was actually quite refreshingly bland, something I never thought I'd say about an Innis & Gunn beer. Still, I wasn't tempted to let it warm to further explore its charms. Down the hatch and one more for the road.

While waiting to be served that (sadly, second-rate English-style bar service comes with the package) I spotted another Adnams beer in the bottle fridge: Crystal Rye IPA. I guess there's a reason "Crystal" is writ large on the label, because it's writ large on the flavour too: a stiff, chewy toffee character, barely troubled by the hopping which I'm sure is generous but just gets drowned in caramelised sugar. There may be a grassy rye bite in the finish but it's entirely possible the power of label suggestion is putting that in there for me. I'm glad it was cold and I'm glad it's only 5% ABV: it could pass for stronger.

A couple of cans of Sweet Action for the long trek home on the number 17, and my day of 'Spooning was over. Once again the beer quality and price wasn't enough to drag me away from my more regular haunts, but roll on retirement, eh?

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Free schipping

January 8, 2015, 12:49 am

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Two beers from Schipper's of Mount Eden in New Zealand today, both acquired at the Alltech festival waaay back last February so sadly not on the Irish market, as far as I'm aware.

First up is Scallywag, a 5.5% ABV amber ale boasting Motueka, Pacifica, and Styrian Goldings hops, though boasting is about all that's going on. There's a vaguely pleasant orangeade tang to it, balanced against some light biscuit malts, but not a whole lot else. As well as lacking the proper flavours for an amber ale, it even has the colour off, being more pale than amber. There's nothing wrong with it per se, it's just not what I'm after in this kind of beer.

Golden Geezer also makes a bit of a colour faux pas, being more of an orange amber than gold, pouring fizzily with a light fuzz of haze through it. Though only 4.6% ABV it's not the weak antipodean lager substitute I was expecting. The aroma gives the first clue: peaches, pink grapefruit and other succulent tropical loveliness. A more assertive bitterness arrives on tasting, pithy and acidic at first, allowing some rounded juicy mandarin in the middle before going back for a sharp lime finish. All done with Pacific Jade and Nelson Sauvin says the label helpfully, I'd never have guessed. Its Achilles' heel is the texture: an attempt at lightness has left it more watery than anything else; the hops lack a proper malt base to cling to. If you're going to unbalance a beer then this is definitely the direction in which to do so, but just a little more body would have upgraded it from pleasant sunshine sessioner to world-beater.

Schipper's, it seems, know what they're trying to do, and are capable of doing it, but on this evidence I think more practice may be required.

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Out for a scoop

January 12, 2015, 12:27 am

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Word arrived via the Beoir forum recently (cheers Cathal!) that a pub in the northern Dublin suburb of Swords had set up a brewery in its basement and that the first beer was now available. As it happened I had some spare time at the end of my extended Christmas holiday so ventured up last Friday afternoon for a looksee.

The Old Schoolhouse is one of those organic, rambling country-style pubs, nestling into an embankment just outside Swords village and covering multiple levels, inside and out. The normal mainstream beers are available on tap, as well as a couple from Rye River. Behind the main bar, however, is another set of taps, one of which bore the legend Scholar Black Stout. This is the first beer from the basement nanobrewery which they've named "Ravenbrew".

Sadly the brewery is not on display and is out of bounds so the details will have to wait until a visit can be arranged. By then there should be a pale ale available too, meaning there's definitely a reason to go back. For the moment, I contented myself with a pint of the stout.

Scholar Black is a very straightforward take on Irish nitrokeg stout and has plainly been designed as a direct substitute for the big industrial brands. Don't expect any unorthodox complexities or high intensity flavours. Instead you get a super-smooth creamy pint with just enough chocolate to prevent it from being bland and a very nice dry and slightly bitter tang on the finish to keep it in line with the Irish dry stout style spec. I doubt I'd be crossing the city again to get another pint of it, but if it was on tap in my local, especially at just €4 a pint, I could see it being a go-to beer.

Flavour aside, what I really love about the whole thing is a pub simply setting up to brew its own beer on-site. We don't have nearly enough of that kind of thing in Ireland, and for no good reason I can see. I hope the Old Schoolhouse becomes a beacon for publicans who want to get into the production game. It has certainly set an example of how to do simple decent quality beer well.

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Egged on

January 15, 2015, 12:23 am

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They make a cute couple, this pair from Den Ouden Advokaat, a Belgian maker of egg-based liqueurs. I've no idea why they felt the need to commission two beers, but when in Belgium... Neither of them contain any actual eggs, I was relieved to discover.

Boerken is a murky dark red ale of 9.5% ABV. It smells like a bakery on Good Friday, heavy with wholemeal flour, raisins, sweet spices and heat. One might expect it to be a heavy affair but the texture is nicely light and barely troubled by carbonation for a kind of vinous quality. The flavour intensity is up to this descriptor as well: there's a certain spiced and fortified wine vibe, with juicy boozy raisin notes out in force. The bakery theme is well represented too, with a massive cakey-bready element to the taste. There's a slight crisp roast flavour at the very end, adding a very mild dryness to the whole, but the lasting impression is of sweet dark fruit, almost like a dubbel but benefiting greatly from the lighter texture. Still, the impact of the taste, amplified by the alcohol, meant that one was plenty.

So we turn from the farmer to his wife, Boerinneken. She's just as strong as the oulfella, though paler -- an orange amber shade. The alcohol heat is just as apparent here, and has less space in which to hide. The flavour just isn't as complex, with the honey and golden syrup sweetness of a tripel but none of those invigorating spices you usually get in the style. Instead there's a kind of warming herbal element, Deep Heat and eucalyptus. It is not a fun beer, nor an easy beer, but I can't really say there's anything technically wrong with it. The warning is right there in the ABV.

Two slow sippers for a winter's evening are what we have here. For refreshment, best look elsewhere.

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That's refreshing

January 19, 2015, 12:22 am

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At last! A white IPA that's comfortable with its true nature. While the civil war rumbles on over black IPA with neither the hoppy porter faction nor the IPA purists gaining ground, white IPA is simply hoppy witbier. No question. End of. That Sierra Nevada have decided to call theirs Snow Wit is to cut any stylistic controversy off before it starts.

It's even closer in ABV to witbier than most of the white IPAs I've met, at just 5.7%. The colour is a very pale yellow, worryingly like the cheaper, less well-made Belgian wits. The aroma is gentle but wonderfully complex, pushing out peach and passionfruit juiciness with a spicy gunpowder background -- not bad, given the "seven varieties of experimental dwarf hops" with which it's brewed. Such gimmickry seldom works in the drinker's favour.

The dry wheaty quality dominates the flavour, and it's perhaps even a little watery, but the spice and fruit are there to a degree as well and there's a sharp bitter tang giving it a perfumed waxy scented candle finish which isn't really to my taste but may keep hopheads happy.

That said, my preference for this style of beer is bigger and badder hopping and I don't mind sacrificing the witbier spices and subtleties to get it. Snow Wit is just a little too well-behaved.

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Two portraits of hops

January 22, 2015, 12:44 am

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Another rattle of the Brown Paper Bag last month yielded two new beers from the Dublin-based gypsy brewing collective, both created at Gadd's Ramsgate Brewery in Kent.

On a Thursday evening in early December I trekked up to The Back Page on Phibsborough Road -- no hardship really; it's a lovely pub and worth going out of one's way for. Lupe Garou, for such is the new beer's name, is available kegged only, and Baggers Colin and Brian were present to launch it. This is a 100% wet-hop ale, made with lots of freshly-harvested East Kent Goldings on a base of nothing but classic English malt Maris Otter, up to a weighty 6.5% ABV. It certainly shows off the features of the hop, in very clear terms: waxy bitterness, turning even towards a herbal honey effect at the extreme edges. The strength lends it a certain amount of golden syrup unctuousness, but really it's all about those stern and serious English hops. It's a fun and creative use for ingredients we tend to take for granted, but they're also the reason it's not a headline grabber: you have to really like traditional English ale flavours to be wowed by this.

Just over a week later, the lads were working late again, this time in top south Dublin offy Redmond's of Ranelagh. The occasion was another new beer, Howrye [pronounced "how'r'yeh", with an interrobang and a cheeky Sligo wink]: a 10% ABV rye wine. What's really interesting with this one is the Projecteers did not consider it ready when first bottled several months ago, so have been storing it to let it mellow and mature. And the result is spectacular: all the flavour from the US hops, and Chinook in particular, is still there, all oily and palate-coating. But there are no bitter edges, not a trace of harshness, and while it's warming it's not hot or even particularly boozy. Howrye slips down easily like a smooth liqueur, flavoured with bright peppery and citric flavours. It's great to not have to wonder if it'll improve with age: I suspect that this is at its absolute peak and highly recommend getting stuck into it now in case those bright hops start to fade.

Cheers to Colin and Brian for the free samples, however I did actually buy some Howrye of my own, and will quite likely buy more.

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Beercelona

January 26, 2015, 12:42 am

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My most recent New Year jaunt was to Barcelona: the hub, I'm told, of Spain's expanding craft beer movement. And while that may be true, interesting beers are fairly tightly contained within a small number of specialist outlets, though new ones are opening all the time.

Black Lab, for instance, still smelled of paint and sawdust, having welcomed customers for the first time a few days before Christmas. It's situated in the handsome old harbourside building which also houses the Catalonian Historical Museum. In due course there will be a brewery here and the interior layout allows for prominent display of the equipment when it arrives. In the meantime, two house beers brewed at the nearby Edge brewery, plus a few international options.

Black Mirror is the session-strength stout: 4.5% ABV though a little lacking in darkness and foam for the style, I thought. It's barely carbonated and smells of cocoa and treacle while tasting of chocolate syrup and bitter coffee, the sweetness rising to an almost metallic saccharine tang with time. Perhaps a little too sweet to gulp down but I found it a reasonably pleasant sipper.

The companion piece is El Importador, a 5.5% ABV amber ale which arrived looking a nasty muddy brown colour. It was a surprise to find it's really a rather clean beer, the rye coming in strong at the start adding a huge grassy bite, then big pine hop flavours in the middle with a kind of baking soda chalkiness as well. I liked it but I'd say rye fans will appreciate it much more.

Black Lab will be a very nice little place when it's finished and pouring its own beers but it's still worth a visit now.

The first Barcelona beer pub I visited was La Resistència, a long narrow café-style establishment with minimalist decoration. It was IPAs all round here, starting with Espiga Black IPA, an 8.5% ABV whopper with a thick and creamy stout-like head. The aroma is pure fruitcake: warm baked raisins and glacé cherries in particular. There's more of a juicy mandarin thing happening on tasting, however, overlaid with a drier green bitterness and lots of dark roast but no sign of that alcohol in the flavour. This a really good, drinkable, complex powerhouse of a beer and a lot more fruity and fun than black IPAs tend to be at this sort of strength.

Ratpenat 2014 IPA is more orthodox: 6% ABV, a hazy orange colour and smelling brightly of orange and lemon zest. Unsurprisingly that's how it tastes too: a big burst of citrus with a bonus sprinkling of exotic jasmine perfume spice. It got to be a little heavy-going after a while, but nice for a small one.

Food is obviously a big part of the equation when it comes to beer in Catalonia and most of specialist bars will do good quality tapas as a minimum. Ale & Hop, in the Barri Gotic, goes further and has a proper vegetarian restaurant at the back behind the pub section. The food is very cheap and pretty decent, though small portions come with the pricetag. The veggie burger filled a hole adequately, however. To drink, more from Barcelona's own Edge Brewing.

La Sense Nom is a saison at a proper saison strength of 5% ABV. Not so proper is the blending in of apple juice which adds a sweet red-apple flavour to the coppery-gold coloured beer and quite possibly covers any saison spicing which may be present. There remains an assertive sharp bite in the finish, so while there's a slight air of alcopop about it -- especially the easy drinkability -- there's still a proper beer underneath. Slightly weaker, in strength and quality, is Edge's La Flor De La Vida, a rather watery attempt at a pale ale with the overpowering floral bitterness of tasted perfume, fading to a barely-perceptible celery greenness. The brewery claims it's English style but I don't think they've got the right angle on what English pale ale is supposed to taste like at all.

Before leaving, a go of Fort IPA, Fort being another one of the local outfits. A big 7% ABV here but all that malt just leaves a musty grainsack aroma and flavour. The hops are heavy and resinous and the whole thing tasted old and tired, all booze and bitterness. It disappeared from the blackboard soon after so I suspect I got the tail end of a keg which may well have been tapped quite a while previously. Them's the breaks.

At the opposite end of the old city from Ale & Hop we find La Cerveteca, a pleasantly bohemian corner watering hole with nine taps and a laidback acid jazz soundtrack. The first thing that caught my eye were the handpumps, one of which was pouring St Joan, a pale ale by the Agullons brewery. Now this lot have nailed the English style: all the meadowy flowers of English hops, as well as the mildly metallic bite that comes with it. There are heavier hop resins too, and a spicy sticky incense complexity. Yes, at 5% it's a little overclocked for the style, and there was a rather harsh yeast bite which they really should sort out if they're going to insist on cask dispense, but overall a surprisingly good go at the genre and a very satisfying pint of beer.

I looked for something cleansing to follow it and eschewed the German lagers in favour of Naparbier's Aotearoa Pils. That was a mistake. This hazy 4.2% ABV yellow lager is massively piss flavoured, far beyond catty and into concentrated kidney territory. Where the lovely kiwi tropical fruit should be there's a sickly peach nectar effect, though there's no quibbling with the malt base: golden syrup and crisp oatmeal biscuits. This is not a beer which does things by halves but should probably only be consumed in them.

One more foray into Edge's portfolio comes via Homo Sibaris, another neighbourly café-style beer pub. Hoptimista hits the sweet spot for amber ale, combining fresh floral hopping with rich and cakey caramel malt. The flavour is awash with marzipan and comforting sticky toffee pudding, finishing on a sharper grassy bite which balances it beautifully. It's strong at 6.6% ABV, but leaves it up to you whether you want to gulp it down and enjoy the hop refreshment, or linger longer and let the malt confectionery soothe. On this showing I can't say I was overly impressed by Edge's beers -- it's the sort of brewery that would be grand to have as your local producer, but isn't worth crossing the continent for. Hoptimista is the one possible exception to that that I found.

Taking shelter in Dunne's Irish Pub while waiting for somewhere else to open, I was offered Barcino Bogatell Blat as their one sop to Catalonian craft brewing. The specs are those of a weissbier, with wheat, Hallertau hops and "Bavarian yeast", but it poured crystal clear with a thin lagerish head. There are cloves in abundance in the flavour, but not much else. It's very one-dimensional and started to get sickly as it warmed. Definitely not a good ambassador for the region's microbrewing scene.

With all the pub-hopping I barely had time to sit in my hotel room drinking. When I did, it was Montseny Negra from a slickly branded brewery whose wares I didn't see anywhere in the on-trade. This one sold itself to me by claiming to be "following the Irish tradition". Oh yeah? A malt cocktail of barley, wheat, oats and rye bring it to 5.2% ABV and it pours an opaque brown-black, topped by a short-lived ivory head. And yes, despite the off-kilter grain bill and high-ish ABV, it does do a very good impression of quality Irish stout, balancing mineral and roasted dryness with chocolate and latte sweetness. There's even a lovely touch of creaminess in the texture, begorrah. A very well put together dark beer, all-in-all.

I just had time at the end of the trip for a couple of beers in La Cervesera Artesana, the Barcelona brewpub I first encountered back in 2002 and re-visited the last time I was in town in 2007. It's still tipping away, with a modestly ambitious range of beers, though few of those advertised were actually available. On a carefree whim I chose Boletus from the line-up, knowing only that it's something in a Belgian fashion. What I got was a hazy amber beer, heavy and warming, with a pleasant granola cereal aroma. It tastes lightly orangey and lacks the Belgian-style esters, putting me more in mind of an English strong ale. And then there's a slightly nasty gastric edge which didn't help things, or leave me any the wiser as to what the brewer was intending.

Iberian Wheat was also a strange one. It's the dark orange shade of many a weissbier but has a massive sharp and sour vinegar-and-lemon bite. Infected? Maybe, but it didn't spoil things. There was also a nice dry carbonic catch in the back of the throat and some fun fruity peachade. I can't think of anything to compare it to, but I rather enjoyed it as a novelty.

I've stuck rigidly to locally-brewed beers this post, and if you're familar with Barcelona you'll have noticed I've missed (at least) one major landmark on the bar scene. I'll come to it in the next post when I'll be looking at the foreign beers I found on the trip.

↧

Visiting dignitaries

January 28, 2015, 12:52 am

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≪ Previous: Beercelona

The same smallish set of foreign breweries tended to show up on the blackboards of Barcelona's craft beer bars when I visited, though all obviously chosen for their geek-drawing power. The Brits seem to be doing particularly well out of the inbound keg trade. Take BierCaB, for instance. The high-tech, high-concept, high-stool, eye of the Barcelona craft beer storm counted Siren and Weird Beard among its tap offerings when I was there.

From the former: Soundwave, a New-World IPA at a modest 5.6% ABV. Kiwi-style grassy herbs and fleshy peach feature in the aroma, and while the flavour kicks off on grapefruit and lime bitterness it suddenly floods with fresh juicy mango and satsuma, with just a small grassy bite on the end to add seriousness. As an IPA, Soundwave is damn near perfect. Now available in Ireland too. Huzzah!

More peaches followed in Weird Beard's Lord Nelson, a 6.8% ABV saison which the west London brewery has produced in association with Elusive, a new brewing company due to start production in Hampshire soon. For a saison it's rather sickly sweet, the sugary fruit effect weighing heavily on the palate. A rising bitter backing track fails to balance it and creates a disconcerting sort of green apple skin effect. Are we done with saisons yet? I think I may be done with this kind.

And obviously you can't fling a beer mat in a geek bar anywhere in Europe these days without hitting a Buxton tap. BierCaB had Battle Horse, one of those black double IPAs I can never decide if I like or not, all green-smelling and tasting powerfully cabbagey, to the point of acidic sourness. Bizarrely my notes say I found it enjoyably refreshing, even at 11.1% ABV. Wrong-footed again. Meanwhile over at Ale & Hop they were pouring Buxton's Wyoming Sheep Ranch, a clear gold double IPA with a lightly zesty aroma but laying on the complexities when it comes to tasting: big resins, lots of heady dank, a dose of wax plus a dusting of spices. Yet it's all harmonised rather beautifully and the result is smooth, clean and very satisfying. You'd take your time with this one even if it wasn't 8.4% ABV.

Last of the English beers comes courtesy of Homo Sibaris: Moor's So'Hop, a sharp and lemony pale ale of just 4.1% ABV, hazy yellow in colour and with a heap of dry, back-of-the-throat bitterness. The aroma promises oodles of lemon sherbet fun but it's all acid business on tasting. Instead of sweet fruit you get a serving of green celery or asparagus in the flavour. Eat it up, it's good for you.

It's probably a healthy sign that American beers were thin on the ground. Not so much as a Sierra Nevada or Brooklyn tap to be seen. I did spot one beer from Kentucky's Against the Grain, home of the dad-joke beer name. Mac Fannybaw (sigh) is a Scotch ale (sigh) of 8.5% ABV, dark red-gold and smelling of smoke and seawater -- pleasantly so; I could sniff it for ages. Smoky sourness is the main feature of the flavour, light and clean, having a lot in common with good German rauchbier. Names aside, I liked it a lot.

Canadian beer was easier found than American, and Black Lab had two IPAs from Flying Monkeys in Ontario. Smashbomb is a beer you've tasted before: a middling shade of orange with a slight haze, sticky candy and a jaffa bitterness. Enjoyable, but rather generic, I thought. Still better than Hoptical Illusion, a darker rose-gold and rather toffeeish: crystal malt, a vegetal bitterness and not much else. The brewery claims there's Centennial, Amarillo and Cascade in here, but I'm damned if I can see where they went.

The nordics were fairly well represented and I had my first Estonian IPA in the form of Virmalised by Põhjala while in La Resistència. No head to speak of, but it had some nice wintery herbs in the flavour profile, sage in particular, and an interesting touch of coconut, but was ultimately rather watery and unexciting. I'd expect a bit more of a kick at 6.5% ABV.

Next to it, one from Lindheim in Norway: their O-Pale. Same strength; more weight. This reddish-gold beer shows big English characteristics, all marmalade and meadows in both flavour and aroma, spread on a wholegrain-toast malt base and dusted with a pinch of bubblegum which is slightly out of character but does it no harm at all. I liked it but, as with the Virmalised, I think they could have got the same effect at a more sociable ABV.

Back to BierCaB then, for a beer brewed by Lervig of Stavanger in collaboration with Surly of Minneapolis. 1349 Black Ale is 13.5% ABV and as tarry as you might expect. It smells woody and boozy, tasting sweet like a barley wine, heading towards cherry cough-sweet territory. The brewers' notes say there's Yirgacheffe coffee in here so, hey, now mine do too. I couldn't taste it though. Overall a smooth and warming end-of-evening sipper, but a small one is plenty.

And speaking of strong and coffee-infused, they had De Molen's Kopi Loewak in the display fridges at La Cervesera Artesana. This is a mere 11.2% ABV and you really can smell the coffee, and the alcohol too: Tia Maria in a big way. The first impression is of a rather dry and burnt coffee stout and it takes a while to open out and let the rich chocolatey imperial flavours come through. They blend with the coffee to make a kind of sweet chestnut nuttiness. If you like a coffee beer to really taste of coffee, in a raw bean sort of way, this is what you're looking for.

Only one German brewery had much of a presence on the Barcelona beer scene: Aktienbrauerei Kaufbeuren from south-west Bavaria. I chanced Steingadener when I was in La Cerveteca, chalked up simply as a dunkel. And I thought it a good, powerfully flavoured, version of the style: huge liquorice, lots of caramel, generous chocolate and a very German herbal bitterness. Though it was indeed sweet, I was very surprised to find it's actually a dunkelweiss, being far cleaner of flavour than they normally are. Shows the power of suggestion. I'm sure I'd have noticed loads of brown bananas if I'd been told to expect them.

And that's your lot from Barcelona. I hope I've shown over the last two posts that there's plenty of variety to be had (though you doubtless all knew that already). The good news for the beer tourist is that some places, including BierCaB, are open all day, not just in the evenings. Even more open early on weekends, though some close in the afternoons. In short, you need to do some schedule planning before setting out for any specific establishment. It could do with more space, however. Many pubs just got too crowded, with the staff too few and the beer too foamy, for comfortable drinking. But it certainly shows promise and there is clearly room for lots more establishments, of all sizes.

And if this is the point where you're thinking "Yeah, I really should go/go back some time soon", the Barcelona Beer Festival is 13-15 March this year. What better time to visit?

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Up Andorra

January 30, 2015, 12:56 am

≫ Next: The West

≪ Previous: Visiting dignitaries

Drinking in a micronation: is there any sweeter feeling? My New Year trip to Barcelona incorporated a day in Andorra, a grey little country perched high in the Pyrenees, three hours by bus from the Catalan capital. This particular Shangri-La charges no duty or VAT on anything so tends to be thronged by the neighbours filling up on cheap booze and fags. It's weird going to a place which is plainly designed with the wealthy in mind, but where the prices of things are comically low. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Liechtenstein.

There is but one brewery in the country, and one specialist craft beer outlet in the capital city Andorra La Vella.

La Birreria is technically an off licence, but it also has taps and tables and serves snacks, much like Dublin's own Probus Wines. I started on the house beer which is not, in fact Andorran, but brewed in Ibiza. Up in the mountains that feels a lot further away than it actually technically is. The beer was a Christmas porter called Trapella, 6% ABV and brewed with carob beans. It's a murky homebrew-ish brown colour and smells of nothing. The flavour is fun though: proper Christmassy, with spiced brown sugar overlaid with fresh herbal pine. A slight burnt-pudding edge finishes it off. The carob doesn't contribute a whole lot, but even before I read it was there I could detect the faint presence of a fake chocolate flavour, which makes sense. Decent stuff, if a little rough around the edges.

Cereveses Alpha brewery is on the ground floor of an apartment building some way north of the city. I didn't venture out to it, but you can have a wander through the dinky brewhouse, shop and bar on Google Streetview if you fancy.

Sant Corneli is the pale ale, strong at 6.4% ABV, looking hazy and leading to an almost Belgian IPA kind of flavour: lots of sweet honeydew fruit and jasmine spice from the hops but also a pillowy texture and a contribution of tasty warming esters from the yeast.

La Font del Bisbe also claims to be a pale ale, albeit a torrado (toasted) one. Heavily toasted, it turns out: it's a dark russet colour in the glass. More Belgian goings on in the aroma: alcohol heat, caramel and figs, like a strong dubbel. And yet all that disappears on tasting and you get a clean, highly attenuated beer, with lemon sherbet at the front of the flavour and not much behind it. It's a very strange effect. I would drink more of it, though.

The winter ale is a 7.5% ABV job called La Dama de Gel and is infused with cacao and whisky. It's a deep brown colour with a vinous aroma, and muscat in particular: the sweet and quite perfumed white grape. That comes out even stronger in the flavour where it's joined by a little hint of jaffa orange and a chalky minerality. It's another strong one without much by way of residual sugar and I found myself warming to this house style.

And now things get a little weird. Alpha makes a smoked beer called Fums, 6.2% ABV, headless, and a clear brown colour. I'm not at all sure I would spot that it contains smoked malt if it wasn't flagged on the label because it doesn't really taste smoky. The single, resounding, unambiguous flavour here is silage: that funky green stench of farmyards in winter. Perhaps it should be surprising that more beers don't taste like this. Like silage, beer is essentially fermented grass. Anyway, Fums is very odd, but not unpleasant, to me anyway.

The last remaining Alpha beer on the shelf was Full Fusion, a concoction containing ginseng, guarana and taurine. And I would say there's lots of taurine in here: it's the same blinding pale yellow as an energy drink and has exactly the same sickly artificial-candy-lemon smell and taste. It's very unbeery -- no sign of any malt or hops -- but perfectly drinkable. While I was doing that I got to wondering if the brewers had simply pitched yeast onto a bucket of Red Bull. I'd imagine that would end up something like this.

It's great that Andorra has its own beer brand, and an accessible specialist bar. Sadly, because I spent pretty much the whole day in it I can't tell you very much else about the country. But definitely drop by La Birreria if you're passing.

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The West

February 2, 2015, 12:59 am

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≪ Previous: Up Andorra

A couple of weeks ago I took up the invitation from Aidan of Galway Hooker to visit the new brewery site in Oranmore with a group of fellow Beoir members. It's a hell of a set-up, all shiny and automated in a space that's more like an aircraft hangar than a typical Irish microbrewery, and certainly a long way from the cramped block-built shed where the brewery started in 2006. There's even a cosy tasting room on site where I got the chance to taste Galway Hooker Dark Lager for the first time.

This follows the Pale Ale and Stout to be the third permanent Galway Hooker beer and, for the moment at least, exists only in bottled form. I think I was expecting something black and schwarzbier-ish so was surprised to find it's much more on the Vienna or Alt side of the house: copper coloured -- not dissimilar to the Pale Ale, in fact -- and with a light, clean crunchy grain backbone overlayed with subtly green German hops adding notes of fresh rocket and raw spinach leaves. All very approachable, and sessionable too at just 4.3% ABV.

Another brewery on the grow is Beoir Chorca Duibhne in west Kerry who upgraded last autumn from their toytown half-hectolitre kit to a grown-up 5 barrel job. We've certainly been seeing the fruits of the expansion here in Dublin in recent months, with a sequence of bottled seasonals and beers on keg for the first time.

The latest of the latter was simply titled Dark Winter Ale and is a blend of Carraig Dubh porter and Cúl Dorcha dark ale with a finished strength of 5.7% ABV. Its appearance is true to its porter roots: brown-black with a creamy head. Yet the first thing I thought of on drinking it was pilsner and I suspect that's the German hops from Cúl Dorcha at work. Of course it's still malt-forward, but it's a particularly lagery crisp, wholegrain biscuit sort of malt. The hopping behind it shows lots of cut grass. Only when it warmed did I start getting hints of chocolate from the foundation porter but the sharp hop acidity still dominated. It's all just a bit too severe for my liking and I think I prefer drinking both beers separately.

This was in 57 The Headline which had another new western beer on tap just after New Year: Black Donkey's Belgian American Amber Ale, the first from the Roscommon brewery's pilot kit to hit the market. I won't sugarcoat my words here: I did not like this beer one little bit. It's massively musty, with the sort of dry rot stank you get in the less fancy charity furniture shops. Is it an oxidation effect? Might the grain have just been off? Is it something about the way the ingredients are combined? I don't know. But it didn't taste Belgian to me, and certainly not American. It's too dry for either and the only trace of fruitiness I could find was a tiny hint of red berry right on the finish. I'm all for playing with ingredients and styles but I wouldn't have been happy with a beer like this going out under my brand, though Richard the brewer tells me he got lots of positive feedback on it. Did anyone else out there try it?

A bit of a hop kick to go out on. Marcus from Reel Deel gave me this sample bottle of his second beer, Jack the Lad, at a do in 57 organised by his distributor, Vanguard. It's a 4.5% ABV IPA, a darkish clear gold colour and smelling pleasantly perfumed, with fabric softener and lemon cordial notes. The first sip delivered a big and pleasing dose of citrus hops but I think my palate adjusted almost immediately and subsequent mouthfuls were more muted. It's still hop-driven, showing sharp grapefruit and lime in particular, but there's a soft cake-and-candyfloss base behind it. Much like good ol' Galway Hooker Pale Ale, this is an easy drinker with plenty of hop complexity to hold your interest too. The suggested Irish cheese match on the label is a nice touch as well.

So that's some of what they're up to out west. The next post looks at a handful of new beers from points east of the Shannon.

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... and the rest

February 4, 2015, 12:44 am

≫ Next: The third way

≪ Previous: The West

Galway Hooker isn't the only brewery I've been getting in the way at lately. I attended the brew day for Beoir#2 at Trouble Brewing last month, nosing around the sizeable facility they now have in Kill. As well as their own beer, Trouble does a bit of contract brewing and a look at their whiteboard reminded me of a few available in Dublin that I had yet to try.

And so on coming back from Galway the other week I dragged Séan and Ronan into Pantibar on Capel Street. As I'm sure is usual on a Saturday night it was heaving and there was just about space to stand at the bar. Panti's Pale Ale is the one Trouble produces for the place, on sale for just €4 a pint. On the dark side for a pale ale, shading towards amber, it's not exactly as flamboyant as its patroness. There's a solid malt core and then a vegetal green bitterness on top for an English bitter effect, though much tastier than bitter tends to be on keg. Overall it's easy drinking and not a beer that's going to interrupt the conversation. Coupled with the price, that's pretty much exactly what you want from a house beer.

Trouble has been brewing the revived Revolution Red Ale for Big Hand since 2010 but I only recently became aware that it has a stablemate now too: Augustine Dublin Steam Lager.

I dropped by the shabby-chic bohemian hangout that is Dice Bar, Big Hand's only outlet these days, to give it a go. It's 4.7% ABV, a bright pale gold and has a strange corn husk sort of flavour. This grows into a buttered popcorn effect which may perhaps be typical of the steam beer style but just didn't work for me. The overall impression was of a wonky, adjunct-laden mass-market industrial lager, even though that's not what it is. Revolution is a much better bet if drinking at Dice Bar.

There's also a new one in the O'Shea's range of budget ales that Carlow produces for Aldi: O'Shea's Traditional Irish Golden Ale. You know, like all those other golden ales Ireland is traditionally known for. It's 4.1% ABV and yes, definitely golden, so at least they got that right. The aroma is rather dry and husky with sweet golden syrup overtones which isn't very promising. But - surprise! - there's a lovely spiciness in the flavour, really taking the edge off the sugar. The grain husk remains, so we end up with a rather dry and serious golden ale, with a little marmalade shred bitterness, and I liked it for that: none of your bubblegum or fabric softener here. Very nicely put together for something that costs buttons.

Five Lamps is also at the contract game now, producing a house beer for the Pitt Bros barbecue joint on South Great George's Street. House Brew is a very straightforward Irish red ale of 4.7% ABV, comedically overpriced at €5.80 for a 33cl bottle. Of course it makes sense to have this kind of thing in this sort of place: the toffee and caramel really do complement the roast meats, and pulled pork in particular, but a big trayful of barbecue delights requires, I think, at least a pint of beery backing. They should have this on draught. Sipping it to try and make my €5.80 last to the end of the meal wasn't a fun experience. A fun experience was going straight to The Beer House afterwards where they had pints of Five Lamps Blackpitts Porter for €4 a throw: same brewery, nicer beer, well under half the price.

I was back at The Beer House on Friday at the end of Saturday's cross-town bimble in the company of Wayne, Janice, Ian, Sarah and Steve. It was a pleasant surprise to find the newest Five Lamps beer, a late winter seasonal called Phoenix Dark. It's a rich dark brown and tastes as luxurious as it looks, full of sumptuously smooth chocolate and caramel with a roast edge to prevent it from getting sickly or cloying. There's no sign of the strength either so I definitely could handle this a litre at a time, Munich-style.

Two more beers released under their maker's mark to finish with and the latest in a sequence of strong special edition beers from Offaly's finest is Bo Bristle Milk Chocolate Stout. It's all of 7% ABV but hides that well, especially when arriving cold from the keg. I had to leave it perched on one of 57 The Headline's radiators while I soaked up the atmosphere. Even with the flavours masked, the texture is appropriately rich with a real creamy feel of milk chocolate. And while this is present in the flavour (eventually), it's understated -- a light sweetness rather than, say, the full-on Dairy Milk effect of Porterhouse Chocolate Truffle Stout. There's a distinctly stouty dry bitterness too so don't expect a candified sugarbomb. In short, a damn decent strong Irish stout with a lacing of chocolate that may not be strictly necessary.

Wild Irish is something of a curveball. A modest 4% ABV, red-gold in colour and quite thin, which isn't surprising given the strength. The flavour opens with a firm bitter bite and finishes on a long, slow acidic burn. Rumours abounded that it's unhopped, but Dave the brewer has cleared that up: a bittering addition of hops was added, but the rest is all locally foraged elderberry, hawthornberry, ginger and rowanberry shrub. These are all active at the centre of the profile as a tartness and light meadowy herbal notes, no ginger heat though. The low gravity means it doesn't taste full of residual sugar as can sometimes happen with low-to-no hop beers. Wild Irish is an absolutely solid beer in its own right and not just a gimmick.

Bo Bristle seems to be having fun while everyone else is playing things pretty straight, by the looks of it.

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The third way

February 6, 2015, 12:27 am

≫ Next: More than just IPA! (but mostly IPA)

≪ Previous: ... and the rest

Joan from Barcelona-based Blog Birraire is at the helm for this month's Session, seeking opinions on the purpose of beer festivals: "geek gathering or beer dissemination?"

There's no doubt that both are the case in Ireland. The Irish beer festival calendar is becoming quite established now, starting next weekend with the Cask & Winter Ales fest at Franciscan Well and moving through the grand shows of Alltech Brews & Food and the Irish Craft Beer & Cider Festival taking in plenty more intimate gigs along the way. We the geeks know the when and where and show up without fail, especially when the exhibitors have something new to show us. It's good to catch up with fellow drinkers from around the country whom one might not normally meet down the pub.

Yet even at the most specialised and out-of-the-way beer event, the insiders are still very much a minority. I'm always amazed, though I shouldn't be, at the huge numbers of visitors at all sorts of events all through the year who had no awareness of beer beyond the big brands. Here it's the job of the festival to create or boost that awareness, and hopefully carry it out of the refined festival atmosphere and into the shops and pubs to make the newcomers aware that choice exists, if they choose to exercise it. It's a battle which I think is gradually being won. At Septemberfest in 2009 I was massively sceptical about the possibility of any of the thousands of punters continuing to drink independent Irish beer and cider after the big tent in the Phoenix Park came down. Today, thanks to the growth in the number of breweries and their reach, the non-obsessives are more likely to come to a festival with at least some familiarity and can be sent away with their horizons broadened.

But I reckon as well that festivals have a third purpose beyond Joan's two. I've found them to be a great way of learning about any particular country's brewing. And I'm not just talking about the formal national festivals like GBBF or Zythos. Even smaller ones like Borefts or Quartiere In Fermento, in my experience, really help with understanding what's happening with beer in other places. Several other places, in the case of Borefts. Much as I love trawling around pubs and breweries it's nice, just occasionally, to have the local beer scene entirely encapsulated under one roof. Certainly anyone looking for easy access to a broad sweep of Irish beer would do well to come to the RDS in September.

And when I can't go to the festival, the next best thing is for the festival to come to me. Today's beers are all from Brazil and arrived courtesy of a visitor (hi Tiago!). Pleasingly, they cover a range of styles and come from different places along Brazil's extensive Atlantic coast, which is just what I'd choose if I were wandering around a Brazilian beer festival wondering what to have next.

Amazon Red Ale is from Belém in the north, 6% ABV and brewed using priprioca, a local herb. "British school with terroir of the Amazon" is the stated aim. It certainly smells exotic: a pleasant air of cedar and sandalwood. While the heavy use of crystal malt makes it quite sticky with big toffee notes, it remains clean and quite refreshing through the offices of the herb, giving it a peppery incense spiciness. I liked it.

It's down to São Paolo next, for Trem Bão by Blondine brewery. This is intriguingly described as a "session IPA saison", which is a lot to squeeze into a 4% ABV package. To further confuse things it looks and tastes like a witbier: a hazy pale yellow and with lots of sweet lemon candy, though minus the spices. I got a little bit of saison-like zest in the aroma but that's it as far as that claim goes. However, there's nothing to suggest IPA anywhere in the deal, neither bitterness nor hop flavour nor hop aroma. It's still a pleasant and refreshing beer, just think of it as a witbier radler rather than any more serious styles.

We go further south still for the last of the three. Way Beer is based in Pinhais, and this is its Irish Red. I feel a slight twinge of national embarrassment that a brewer all the way down there, below the Tropic of Capricorn, would attempt this most uninspiring of styles. Still, it's 5.8% ABV so at least it's not going to be an accurate rendition. It looks the part, however: properly coppery. There's a sweetness at its heart, with toffee and chocolate coming through in particular. But mostly it tastes oxidised: stale and even a little funky. It's not a great beer and is a good lesson in how big hops can help cover up some shortcomings in the brewing and packaging process, and that without bold flavours there's nowhere for the naughty flavours to hide.

Obviously I'm not going to be making any pronouncements on the state of Brazilian brewing based on these few examples. But it certainly seems to be the case that the drinker isn't stuck for variety. And that's something for the geeks and the neophytes to celebrate.

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More than just IPA! (but mostly IPA)

February 9, 2015, 12:19 am

≫ Next: Head 'em off

≪ Previous: The third way

This poor tasting note on Odell's Tree Fort tripel has sat alone and unloved in my notebook since the middle of last year. Today I'm sending it off into the world with a couple of its compatriots. Tree Fort is an interesting one: 8.2% ABV and showing all the heat and density that normally comes with the style, though substituting a dry chalkiness and floral lavender where the yeast spices might normally be. But then the Odell house flavours set up stall: an intense satsuma zestiness, fading slightly to let pineapple and mango flood past. It's an immensely satisfying sipper and kudos to L. Mulligan Grocer for getting hold of a keg. I understand it was a one-off so if there's something I can sign to get them to make it again I will gladly do so.

And so to the IPA. First up is Finestkind by New Hampshire's Smuttynose brewery. The thick layer of sediment at the bottom of the bottle worried me so I poured very carefully and I think I got away with it -- only a very fine haze showing in the golden glassful. It smells of hard orange candy and while that's a part of the flavour too, there's also an intense lime and grapefruit bitterness sitting alongside it, spritzed with some spicy and floral perfume. The texture is light and the finish pleasingly quick with no lingering residual sugars. I was finding it all nicely downable when I realised I had no idea of the ABV -- it's not printed on the label and the naughty importer hasn't brought it into compliance with local law. Research shows it to be 6.9% ABV, though so hop-dominated is it that I would well believe it to be considerably weaker or stronger. Overall, a classic US-style IPA and definitely one to give to anyone wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to this style of beer.

Upping the ante next with a bottle of Brooklyn Blast: 8.4% ABV and "a decidedly robust IPA" according to the label. It's very cloudy, a bright orange colour but barely translucent. The hops are a blend of American and British and they create a strange earthy, herbal flavour typical of neither country's hoppy beer, plus a distinct coconut hit reminiscent of Sorachi Ace, suggesting we've passed British and US hop country and come out the other side of the Pacific. The aroma is a little more orthodox: orange pith and and a yeasty spiciness but there's also a waft of medicinal wintergreen. I was halfway down the glass before I could make up my mind on whether I liked it or not, and eventually came out in its favour. The odd tastes just eventually lock into place with each other, clean and clear, untroubled by malt interference. It's not at all what I was expecting when I took the cap off but it's certainly not boring or bland.

We conclude this round with a new one (to me) from Founders: their imperial black IPA, sententiously titled Dark Penance. Its ABV is actually a relatively modest 8.9% and it smells fresh and zippy: cut grass, citrus juice but nothing more serious than that. The colour is a very dark red, topped by a pillow of off-white foam that doesn't hang around long. I got a lot of toast on the first sip when the beer was still cold, an ashen sort of bitterness which I didn't really enjoy. The cut grass I first sniffed grows into a heavy resinous dank in the flavour, cabbagey and vegetal at the back of the palate; more spicy at the front with prickles of white pepper and nutmeg. And all of it squatting determinedly on the tongue: it doesn't care if you like it or not, this flavour is staying with you until it's done and the texture, while not unctuous, is heavy enough to allow that. As it warmed I became accustomed to its weighty green charms and relaxed into it. I've certainly had more intensely hot, thick and cabbagey versions of the style (looking at you, Revelation Cat's Bombay Cat), but this one has what passes for balance and nuanced complexity in the IBIPA sub-genre.

Conclusion: the latter two beers have me worried that US brewers might be a bit bored of making ones like the second. They're interesting, but there's a lot to be said for the basic style that made American brewing famous. Here's hoping for balance across styles as well as in flavour.

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Head 'em off

February 12, 2015, 12:14 am

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The annual Cask & Winter Ale Festival at Franciscan Well in Cork kicks off tomorrow. It's a few years since I've been, but I'm travelling down on Saturday to see what's what. Limited time means limited drinking opportunities so I've been going out of my way lately to try some new Irish specials on tap in Dublin which I'm expecting to be on the festival list, just so I don't feel obliged to drink them on the day if there's other stuff I want. It's all about choice.

A cask of the new stout from Black's of Kinsale appeared in Porterhouse Temple Bar yesterday. Model T is 6.5% ABV and I was smitten from the first sip. It has all the ultra-smooth, yet slightly dry, chocolate-cocoa of the best strong stouts, with that extra dimension of spice that only seems to come with cask serve, and even then not always. The ace in the hole is its hopping: fresh and green; gunpowder and sherbet; strawberries and spinach; all blended together beautifully with a mellow maturity. It tastes like a beer that has not been rushed at any stage of production. While I don't want to come over all Don Draper, Model T will make you fall in love with stout again.

A tough act to follow, so just as well Metalman Heat Sink got in before it. Wait, that sounds unkind. Heat Sink is a good beer, a smoked chilli porter they were pouring on cask in L. Mulligan Grocer when I dropped in last Friday. I confess the smoke passed me by completely, though Tim assured me there's plenty of smoked malt in here. The chilli is little more than a tingle on the palate and a catch in the throat, but it builds nicely if you take the beer in big gulps, something the clean and simple dry porter base makes very easy.

Possibly not at this weekend's festival, but also on tap at Mulligan's on Friday, was The Piper: the second beer from Four Provinces, brewing at Trouble. It's not all that different in colour to its predecessor, The Hurler, being rose-gold rather than copper. It arrived very cold from the keg and I initially found it rather dull for something claiming to be an IPA, the flavour made off with by crystal malt and carbon dioxide banditos. But peep behind the toffee and the fizz and there's definitely a proper fresh-hop resinousness in the background. Only in the background, unfortunately. I kept waiting for the hops to open out and really make their presence felt, but they never become more than decoration in what ends up being quite a plain, thin and fizzy reddish keg ale. The Piper is a bit of a tease.

So that's my pre-festival homework done. See you in Cork.

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Let's get this party started

February 16, 2015, 12:27 am

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The Irish beer festival calendar got officially under way at the weekend with the Winter & Cask Ales Festival at Franciscan Well in Cork, now in its 5th year. I travelled down a little earlier than usual to check out the Rising Sons brewpub which opened last summer. The management had kindly laid on some pizza for the visitors, and Shane the brewer brought us around behind the scenes.

It's an impressive set-up, the German-built brewkit gleaming in pride of place over the bar. The customers are so close to the action it must smell amazing on brewing days. The 20hL system makes a range of standard and special beers, now sold in over a dozen pubs around Cork, most of them under the same ownership as the brewery.

Mi Daza stout and Sunbeam pils pre-date the brewery but are now produced on site. My first beer on Saturday afternoon was Grainú Ale and the tap badge is highly uninformative about what this is. Turns out it's a witbier, and a good one too, perfect for clearing the travel dust from my throat. It's an orthodox pale hazy blonde and very much at the dry end of the style, low on fruit but compensating with extra spices and quite an assertive waxy bitterness. Once you get used to that you have an ideal quaffing refresher on your hands.

I followed it with Steeple (formerly known as "Steeple Hemp" but recently re-named due to confusion). I'd say this has knocked a few red ale drinkers off their stools. It's big on hops, starting out with a strange bitter chocolate-orange effect, with a touch of coffee roast as well. It's the sort of thing I would expect to be badged as a US-style amber rather than an Irish red, in this drinker's opinion. While I enjoyed the absence of sticky toffee flavours I think I would have preferred something a little smoother.

The house IPA is a 5%-er called Handsum, employing Columbus, Chinook and Vic Secret hops. Dark gold in colour it's surprisingly English-tasting, I thought, going for a dry, sharp and almost metallic bitter tang as its signature flavour. It's certainly invigorating but a little more fruit would have been nice.

For that sort of flavour profile one has to turn to the special editions and Shane gave everyone a taste of Survivor, a rye pale ale that's still in the conditioning tanks. This one is super-citric, packed full of delicious orange and lemon notes. I asked warily if they filter their beers and the answer is no (apart from the pils), so this hazy orange little stunner should remain stunning once it moves the four or five metres to a tap on the bar.

Also in the tanks was Divil-a-Bit, a 1.064 blonde ale made using La Chouffe yeast. It's not too hot 'n' heavy and has some wonderful spicy flavours: I picked out cinnamon and aniseed in particular.

For actual spices, the tail end of Rising Sons's Christmas seasonal was on tap. Sleigh'R is 5% ABV and a predictable dark red-brown colour. I don't know exactly what blend went in here, but I got suggestions of clove, ginger and nutmeg: the usual sort of stuff. What sets this one apart, however, is that the body is light, not heavy or sugary, which leaves it easy to drink and really quite refreshing, odd as that may sound. The malt provides a kind of Christmas cookies effect but knows when to stop, which is good.

By the time I'd got through all that it was gone 2pm and time to head for the festival. As it happened there was another Rising Sons beer on the line-up there. Changeling is a name the brewery will be using for a sequence of one-offs: not a very consumer-friendly practice, but there you go. This Changeling was a pale ale, and a very good one at that. Lots of fresh, spicy and dank herbal hops bursting out from a lightly effervescent body, all sherbet and baking soda. The malt didn't have much to say for itself here, but I wasn't really listening.

A couple of new breweries made their festival début at the event. I missed the red ale from West Cork Brewery but did catch the 5 Malt Dark Ale by Torc Brewing out of Killarney. It's 4.5% ABV and poured a hazy shade of ochre. There's a lovely mix of jaffa orange, milk chocolate, a little caramel and a slight metallic bitterness, all set on a light body, though not at all watery. The combination of flavours shouldn't really work and from the description seems like it would end up as an overly sweet mess but it's really rather charming and very drinkable.

Our hosts rolled out a Vanilla & Pistachio Brown Ale, the sort of concoction that would turn Alan's knuckles white, and this time his rage would be justified. It's very sugary: thick and soupy though only 4.8% ABV. There's lots of vanilla and maybe a trace of nuttiness, but mostly wave upon wave of jarring caramel candybars. It had its fans on the day but I was not among them.

I had a much better time with the stouts on offer. White Gypsy's Pearl, which I'm guessing is a close relation of this, is a classic cream-and-chocolate Irish stout. Served on nitro it's smooth, but not bland, and satisfyingly sinkable. From the casks there was Independent Strong Porter, a 7% ABV job, massively roasty, especially in the aroma. The texture is very heavy and I got a slight, but not unpleasant, beefy autolytic tang from it. A lovely warmer in a cold winter's beer garden, this.

Stag Rua by 9 White Deer had hitherto eluded me, but here it was, along with its creator. At a meet-the-brewer event, Gordon explained that its roots lie in stout and a need to create a beer that the stout drinkers of west Cork will convert to in the summer. That certainly explains the refreshing absence of sweet crystal malt flavours here. Instead it's relatively dry with a little bit of roasted grain and some mild strawberry fruit sweetness. Most of all though it's thirst-quenching with lots of lovely English-bitter tannins. We're seeing red ales being taken in all sorts of directions by Irish brewers at the moment, but this is my favourite approach so far.

Brewery-mate of Stag Rua is Mountain Man's Sneaky Owl, an English-style dark ale done using Admiral and Bramling Cross hops. There's certainly that signature blackberry flavour from the latter, adding a mouthwatering tart balance to the silky milk chocolate from the dark malt. It's a light and easy-going beer and I rather enjoyed it, a bit like Hobgoblin on a really good day.

I left the powerhouse beers to the end. First up Hi-Viz from Black's of Kinsale. This 8.5% ABV double IPA reminded me a lot of Beoir#1, the 9% ABV double IPA that Black's brewed a year ago as part of a crowd-funding initiative. It has the same luxurious boozy weight and similar tasty spicy orange notes. Of course it doesn't matter whether or not it's a reboot, but it is great to have another double IPA of this quality knocking around. I hope we'll be seeing more of it.

And speaking of beers crowd-sourced from the drinkers, the festival saw the world premiere of Beoir#2, brewed by Trouble to a recipe put together by Reuben. I even threw a pot of hops into this myself back in January. The end result is 7.8% ABV and a beautiful chestnut red, warming and welcoming the drinker with juicy summer fruit and sharper caramelised onions. It certainly tastes the strength but wears it well, remaining perfectly drinkable throughout. I could have handled more than a half but time was marching on and the train home beckoned.

Cheers to all the team at Rising Sons and Franciscan Well for the day out. I'll be back for the Easter Festival, but before that it's Alltech Brews & Food in less than a fortnight.

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Bad hatter

February 19, 2015, 12:55 am

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From the people who brought us that weird but strangely pleasant pineapple lambic, a banana lambic. Chapeau Banana is 3.5% ABV and the label admits to 20% of it being banana flavouring. I was expecting something hazy and fluffy so was surprised when it poured clear and almost totally flat. The aroma pushes out a bright and busy foam banana sweet effect but also an underlying grumpy sour lambic tang: a real odd couple. A vinegary sourness dominates the flavour and the first sip brings a sense that maybe this is all going to be OK. But the banana candy is not to be outdone and leaps into shot soon after like an annoying little brother. Thankfully the finish is quick and the taste doesn't linger, so it has that going for it. The brewery's switch to 250ml bottles from the old 375s also limits the damage, but there's something wrong when a beer's good point is that there's not as much of it as there could be.

I know you weren't going to anyway, but don't drink this.

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England streaming

February 23, 2015, 12:05 am

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I've no idea why I've been dodging Thornbridge on this blog, but it seems I have. A notebook clear-out revealed a string of their beers that I'd drank on draught in Dublin over the last seven months but never got round to scribbling about. This post is for putting that right.

Puja first, a 6.4% ABV pale ale found on keg at The Black Sheep. The odd ingredient is what attracted me: Puja is a jasmine IPA. It presents as a middling shade of orange, maybe towards red gold, and slightly hazy with it. There's a huge amount of complexity in the flavour but it's also extremely drinkable, given the strength. Its secret, I reckon, is the tannins: a crisp, dry refreshing quality that allows for big quenching gulps. Each gulp brings an explosion of fruitcake fruits: sultana, orange peel, lemon zest. There's a lot of Earl Grey about it as well, plus a more intense frankincense spicing. Overall very balanced but nicely weird as well.

Big things were expected a few weeks later when Twin Peaks showed up in Alfie Byrne's. This one is Thornbridge's collaboration with Sierra Nevada, and I've rarely seen the Californian pioneers collaborate with anybody. It poured a worryingly pale shade of yellow and keeps things light and breezy in the flavour: some lemon sherbet and chew-sweet, plus a bonus burst of mandarin. The finish brings a slightly more assertive pithy bitterness and maybe even some naughty dankness, but not enough to turn it from a casual quaffer to a more serious beery experience. Maybe it's just the mood I was in on the day but I was a bit disappointed with it. It didn't taste like a joint effort of two such high-calibre breweries.

Still, there I was back in Alfie's a little later asking for a glass of Topaz from the beer engine. Another golden one: this time perfectly clear once it had settled. Maybe it's the dispense method smoothing out the complexities, but I found this to be a rather simplistic beer: a light dusting of orange sherbet, rising to a mild and tangy tangerine bitterness with perhaps just a frisson of spicy sulphur. Though strong for an English cask ale there's no malt action and very little weight to it. Enjoyable, sure, but not the sort of beer on which brewery reputations are built.

And if you don't mind I'll just wedge in another English cask while I'm clearing the notebook. This is Loddon's Hullabaloo, served in L. Mulligan Grocer. It was a warm summer's evening so I welcomed the refreshing aroma of pear juice, strange and all that I found it. Underneath that it's a sweet beer with lots of tangy orange candy. There's a little bit of the peary, almost nail-varnish-like, acetyl in the flavour, but it's mostly kept in check. Best of all there's more of those classic English tannins providing a dry finish. Tannin really is the key to drinkability in a bitter, if I'm the one doing the drinking anyway.

Puja excepted, I can kinda see why most of these slipped my attention for so long.

And since this post keeps getting kicked back in the publishing schedule for no good reason, I may as well bring it up-to-date with a couple more English draught beers I've encountered more recently.

Vigilante, from Beerd Brewery in Bristol (seemingly an offshoot of Bath Ales), was a surprise when it showed up on the taps at Bierhaus in Galway last month. It's a pale ale at an approachable 4.5% ABV, coloured a bright and attractive gold. And the flavour is very approachable too, all mandarin sweetness and light, laced with a fresh and zesty bitterness. An unfussy beer, simple, but brimming with understated quality.

More recently I had my first ever beer by Bermondsey's Brew By Numbers, on keg at Alfie Byrne's. 11|07 describes itself as a "session ale" and is 3.9% ABV, which is fair enough. No London murk here, just a scattering of bits floating in a clear gold body, though rather decapitated. The mild aroma of tinned fruit salad did not prepare me for the fresh dank hop hit at the front of the flavour. It's intensely acidic at first, then calms down a little, but only as far as grapefruit and no further. The texture is light, reflecting the ABV, but it's not watery and those hops -- Chinook and Centennial, apparently -- just keep on delivering. I really could drink a lot of this, but the 33cl serving at €5 a glass does not do it any favours. Via Maris, a few taps over, is a much more attractive proposition.

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Imperial realm

February 26, 2015, 12:24 am

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Two imperial stouts from the realm of New Zealand today.

Moa Imperial Stout has some classy presentation, though the black-on-black label is quite difficult to photograph. This is 10.2% ABV and, enticingly, is aged in Pinot Noir barrels. The flavour begins with quite orthodox coffee and sweet caramel -- all very pleasant. But soon afterwards, the barrel drops into the middle of it all, adding a massive, jarring, sap-and-sawdust effect. Behind this lurks the wine, distinctively grapey and adding a sickly sweetness that doesn't fit at all well with the residual sugars from the malt. It's frustrating and tantalising to be able to taste a superb imperial stout utterly ruined by poor secondary brewing techniques.

This bottle of Epic's Epicurean Coffee & Fig Imperial Oatmeal Stout arrived courtesy of Reuben's deep pockets (€25!). A modest 8% ABV and it does pretty much what it would say on the tin, if there was a tin. Figs? Yes, a generous sweet dark fruit element infuses the whole thing. Coffee? Definitely present, though not overpowering -- it's still the dark malts which provide the roastiness and warmth. And oatmeal? That's there too, adding a richness and smoothness. Everything melds together quite beautifully into a gemstone-like perfection. The only thing that's missing is the wow factor. Like other expensive drinks -- wine and whiskey, for instance -- balanced smoothness is where your money is going, not distinctive flavours.

It's clear that a lot of skill, imagination and hard graft went into creating both of these, but tastewise I don't think it pays off in either.

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