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Duck à l'ananas
Dropping in to L. Mulligan Grocer one sunny Friday recently I noticed that they had a damn near perfect selection of summer's evening cask beers. On the handpumps were O'Hara's IPA and Dungarvan...
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A venerable glassful
It's been a while since my last Belgian oud bruin, that slightly sweet, slightly sour, medium-strong dark copper ale. So here's Paulus from Van Eecke in Watou: 6% ABV with a no-nonsense label that...
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Manifest density
It could just be laziness on my part but it seems that there's a bit of a drought of new American beers in Dublin at the moment. Plenty of good stuff in the established selection, of course, and the...
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Moorish conquest
They're spendy buggers, the Moor bombers, and I'm not sure why. The brewery is very well reputed and the labels talk a great game, but every time I get near, the price tags tend to drive me away. I've...
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Steamin'
I hoped that this Belgian blonde wasn't the worse for wear after a protracted spell in my oubliette. I only missed the best-before by a week so reckoned I'd probably get away with it -- it's 8% ABV...
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Let the beer do the talking
A provocative topic from Justin for this month's Session -- IPA: What's The Big Deal? India Pale Ale a style which I think divides beer fans more than the commentariat like me let on. For a lot of the...
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Bullet: the bite
New from the Cork Beer Renaissance™ is Green Bullet pale ale, ostensibly by Mountain Man Brewing in the wild west of the rebel county but the eponymous Phil is doing these first batches closer to sea...
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Taste the irony
Dark skies, high winds, lashing rain: it was time to break out the summer beers. Widmer's Citra Blonde, a seasonal for balmy days like this, is the purest gold of evening sunbeams and has an odd but...
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Because "Belgian" is no kind of descriptor
We do tend to throw the B-word around rather indiscriminately. It generally means a very full-bodied, estery, slightly yeasty kind of thing: cloudy, funky, and available in any colour from pale...
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The kids in the Hall
Thornbridge abounds! The Black Sheep had their Seaforth on tap a while back, a dark orange IPA named in honour of an early ale-bearing ship plying the East India trade. It's a powerful 5.9% ABV but was...
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Rampant rabbit
Bit of a gusher, the Fort Lapin Tripel, bounding out of the bottle to form an ice-white layer of foam over a dark orange body. It smells juicer than your average tripel, with strong notes of jaffa and...
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Foam on the range
We all got pieces of crazy in us, some bigger pieces than others is the tagline on To Øl's First Frontier IPA. So I guess crazy is what the massive chunks bobbling around in the bottle are made from....
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Unshellfish
Another cringingly titled beer from Flying Dog: Pearl Necklace is a 5.5% ABV stout made with real oysters. More oysters than hops, in fact, if the ingredients listing is in order of quantity. A thin...
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But where's the Italian plumber?
Full marks to Revelation Cat for the label design on these beers, capturing perfectly the style of Nintendo's 8-bit game packaging, to the point of possibly prompting a letter from the lawyers. The...
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Meanderings
Top of my to-do list this year was travel to Kilkenny and visit the Smithwick's St. Francis's Abbey Brewery. They've been producing beer here since 1710 but that's about to change as the 1960 takeover...
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Two quick ones
I'm not sure I can fully get on board with this month's Session, hosted by James of Beer Bar Band. The topic is Your Elevator Pitch For Beer and there's a bit of a convoluted set-up:You walk into an...
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Arch rivals
You're not a proper London brewery if you don't have a railway arch, though what you do with it apart from brew beer is entirely up to you. I was in town for a weekend last month and visited three of...
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Expectations
I don't remember exactly where it was*, but I have a recollection of being warned off Mongozo Coconut as being, objectively, The Worst Beer In The World. The other ones in the range -- from off-kilter...
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An American weird beer in London
Cheers to Derek for the heads-up that The White Horse in Parson's Green were staging their annual American beer festival on the weekend I was in London last month. It was a scorching hot day and the...
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Chew on this
There are few things that make one appreciate Bavarian beer the way it's meant to be appreciated more than Ron's travelogues, but one of them is arriving home thirsty and opening up something Bavarian...
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