Red letter day

When I was an undergraduate, my university offered the option to sit second year exams in March, a term early. A decent grade came with an exemption from the summer exams, and so it was that my housemate Tim and I spent a lot of April and May 1997 in The Porterhouse, drinking their Red ale. I have a very particular memory of the beer, which was smooth and fruity; predominantly sweet, but not excessively so; balanced, and modestly strong, so well suited for an afternoon's drinking before a long evening of Mario Kart duels. In the early 2000s, I got out of the habit of drinking in The Porterhouse, and when I came back a decade later, the Red seemed to me to have changed, with a harsher bitterness and a more stark caramel sweet side. No harm: there were always plenty of enjoyable alternatives. But my experience with the Red of old came back to me recently when I called in to try the beer they've released to mark 30 years of the beer brand and its Temple Bar headquarters*.

In a marked contrast to previous birthdays when there's been a new stout, this time they've launched Celebration Amber Ale, commissioned from regular supplier Hopkins & Hopkins. It was available on cask and keg. I went cask, with a shot of keg on the side, for science.

It's a dark copper colour and smells, as good Irish red ale does, of ripe summer fruit, and strawberries in particular. The flavour brings the opposite side of that rare but happy equation: a dry bite of tannins. That gives it the refreshment factor of its near-relation English bitter. Some hop character might have been nice, and I thought the American nomenclature of "amber ale" perhaps signified that, but it's never been a Porterhouse strong point. I don't know if Peter Moseley, head brewer for all the years that The Porterhouse was a brewery, was involved in the recipe design, but if not, Hopkins & Hopkins has done a great job of channelling his kind of beer, which is fitting for the occasion.

The keg version's extra fizz is a boon, reducing the fruit sweetness further, to make it drier and even more refreshing, but I preferred the cask one, which is rounder, softer and altogether more cuddly. It's nice to have the opportunity for a a side-by-side draught format comparison.

Maybe it was simply the surroundings, largely unchanged for the last 30 years, but I got quite the Proustian rush from drinking this. It's a very decent beer in its own right, if the low-hopped red/amber genre works for you. New examples of it are quite thin on the ground. Maybe I still would have preferred another birthday stout, or even the return of lost Porterhouse classics like TSB and Wrasslers. But nostalgia is not The Porterhouse's business. Here's to the next 30 years and beyond.

*The Porterhouse brand in general pre-dates the brewery, having been applied originally to the founders' Bray pub (since sold and now trading as The Palm) in 1989. The first Porterhouse brewery was located at the pub in Temple Bar between 1996 and 2000, and although the company still owns a production facility in Dublin, it's leased out and hasn't produced Porterhouse beer since 2023.

Kildare's wins

It's a busy brewing county, Kildare. I guess it benefits from being in the Dublin hinterland but without the constraints of Dublin commercial rents. Today I'm looking at four recent beers from four different Kildare breweries.

I'll begin with a lager from Farringtons, though not in the brewery's usual livery. Hells Yeah is a collaboration with Martin's Off Licence and is branded for the shop, having been created for their Advent box last winter. It's a hefty fellow at 5.4% ABV, and the brewer's German vocabulary may need a refresh as it's not very hell at all: a medium-amber colour. It follows that the aroma is more like that of a bock, mixing rich golden syrup malt with a strongly vegetal hop seasoning. The body is unsurprisingly full, and there's a lack of carbonation, detracting from its abilities as a thirst-quencher, which is what I wanted it for. The flavour is full too, however, and enjoyably deep and rounded. There's gooey treacle tart and a surprising blackberry-jam fruity side, all hitting up against the green bite of spinach, asparagus and nettles. I detected a tiny bleachy twang on the end, but couldn't say if that's a minor brewing flaw, or just what happens when weighty pale malt meets noble hops in quantity. On paper I shouldn't have liked this, but while it wasn't what I signed on for, I appreciated its boldness and cuddly demeanour. Some regular-lager drinkers may have got a surprise when it came out of the box back in December.

Until a few weeks ago, when our Great Uncle Diageo started getting the red and yellow stuff (black is pending) running out of the new plant at Littleconnell, Kildare's biggest brewery was Rye River. Their summer special is a sour ale with raspberry and pineapple called Flamingo Acid Test: an elaborate name with a simple ABV of just 4%. It is at least pink, rendered pale by a significant degree of murk. "Centrifuged" says the boilerplate text on the can. Must have been just a quick spin. The haze makes it look like one of those milkshaky pseudo-sour beers, but it isn't. That said, it's still not very sour. The pineapple in particular adds a strong sweetness that the raspberries' tartness fails to balance and which steamrolls equally over the effect of the three-acid blend with which they've kettle-soured it. Don't expect complexity, then, but otherwise it's fine: a bit of simple summer fun. Basic, but nowhere near as basic as your Aperol-drinking friends. 

Kildare's oldest brewery is Trouble, best known around Dublin for its Ambush pale ale, but producing the occasional other beer too. Fresh Start pale ale is a rare new addition to their line-up, and I don't know if the name is meant to signify something. The online commentariat have noted that, although it first appeared on shelves in late April, it bears a canning date in January. Still, I don't think the Citra and Amarillo hops have been harmed unduly by that: it still smells bright and zesty, and the flavour blends Amarillo's fruit candy with a sharper bite of Citra pith. All that is as you'd expect, really. Although... it feels very light and is an exceptionally pale yellow colour, neither of which tallies with its full 5% ABV. There's not much malt flavour, and while the hops are definitely present, the flavour is a little understated. It's a grand sunny pinter, but the strength seems somewhat excessive for what you get.

Not far from Trouble is the Dewdrop Brewhouse at the Dewdrop pub in Kill. Morning Dew is badged as a limited edition can and is a saison, with a beefy 6.2% ABV. It looks the part, all pale and hazy, with plenty of foam on top. "Fruity Dry Peppery" are the three descriptors the brewery has stuck on the label, and the aroma is all about the first of those: big banana and pear, which isn't how I like my saison, by and large. Pepper (white) does follow in the flavour, and the body is pleasingly light and crisp; saisons of this strength can turn out unpleasantly flabby, but this one keeps things taut. The fruit is still there, however: the pear in particular, but that's simply a different kind of crispness. And it finishes dry to complete the set. Overall, this is pretty much on the money, and especially impressive as the work of a country brewpub. I know that saison is a hard sell in the craft beer space generally, but wouldn't it be nice to have a local one in regular production? This would be a good candidate.

There's nothing especially noteworthy in this lot, though also no stunt recipes or similar show-off silliness. Steady and stolid is the Kildare way.

Two out of Eight ain't bad

Eight Degrees was one of the first Irish brewers to adopt the high-turnover mode of brewing, supplementing a safe core range with a regular train of specials, crossing all the beer style boundaries and involving all manner of ingredients and collaborators. That ended when the brewery was sold to a multinational, and never came back in this changed era, even now that the original founders are in charge once more. So I'm pleased today to be covering two new Eight Degrees beers.

They describe Dolcita as a "tropical IPA", and I've voiced my concerns before about the t-word being rarely indicative of actual tropical fruit flavours. So it goes with this one, but that's not a problem. In lieu of mangoes and pineapples, this 5.7% ABV hazy IPA has a bright pithy bitterness, pushing mandarin zest and lime rind. There's an almost earthy tang on the finish, where the bittering compounds concentrate together on the palate. Despite the haze and the claim of tropicality, this tastes like an IPA from the classic era of Eight Degrees: big flavoured and technically proficient. I've missed that.

The brewery has had something of a fractious relationship with stout over the years. Its original Knockmealdown Porter got rebranded as a stout, then faded from sight and wasn't revived when the company was. Instead, the new bottled core range includes Bojanter. I really like how they've gone all-in with bottles, which is of course the correct serving format for Irish stout. Tracking it down was tough but it showed up recently, like Dolcita, at The Porterhouse.

I was curious as to what glass they'd serve it with -- a half-pint pilsner flute is traditional -- and it was a bit of a surprise to get a snifter. That's a perfectly fine glass, so no harm. The beer is properly black though doesn't hold its head well. An aroma of mild roast and sticky treacle starts us off. The carbonation is light, giving it a smoothness which I'm sure is intended but isn't quite typical for bottled Irish stout, especially at a mere 4.3% ABV. The brewer has opted for sweetness as the main feature, the aroma's treacle built out into a flavour of dark caramel, similar to that of a Czech dark lager, I thought. Dryness is in short supply but there is a mineral tang, slightly vegetal, demonstrating that some appropriate old-world hops are involved. I liked this, as much for the daring choice of format as the taste. I might have dialled up the alcohol and reduced the caramel, but that's a personal preference thing. Bojanter deserves a place in the canon of proper Irish stout, where it's not trying to be anything other than itself.

The pace may have slowed, but Eight Degrees is still turning out quality new beers. I await the next ones eagerly.

Creamy how?

When I saw that Galway Bay had named a beer Irish Cream Stout, I assumed that "cream" here was one of those redundant marketing words, like I'd be more likely to buy a "cream stout" than simply a "stout". But no, it's "Irish cream" as in Baileys. This beer is meant to taste like both cream liqueur and stout. I was apprehensive... but intrigued.

The head is Baileys-coloured, so that's a good start. Its dark brown body looks a bit muddy, though. The aroma suggests a fairly ordinary sweet stout, showing more toffee than one might expect from the unlikely-sounding added ingredient of "Irish cream natural extract". I'm guessing that's lactose, chocolate, vanilla and hen parties. There's oatmeal too, and that really pays its way in the texture. Though only 5% ABV, it feels like a big and luxurious imperial stout: silk, velvet, and similar cliché textile descriptors.

It doesn't taste at all like Baileys. As with the aroma, there's a slightly sticky sweet quality -- caramel and milk chocolate bars -- but that's well balanced by a solid dose of serious roast, drying it out in the finish and improving the drinkability. Which is just as well.

I'm not sure this experiment worked. The beer wasn't ruined by dumping a tub of powdered Baileys into it, but there's a very decent classic oatmeal stout underneath, which I would have preferred to drink instead. One could consider this a minor variant on standard milk stout but it doesn't have the complexity to be anything more involved. You may need a bottle of cream liqueur on hand, to top up its "character".

Dark deeds

Why do I take so long picking beers when I'm standing in front of the fridges in Redmond's? It's because I'm trying to piece together the theme for a blog post. Something about Thornbridge and dark beers, maybe?

Baize is presumably a reference to the brewery's nearest big city, Sheffield, being perennially associated with snooker. The green (three points) and the black (seven points) are respectively represented by mint in a 5.5% ABV stout. Lactose is the only other non-standard ingredient, standing for the cue ball, I guess. The aroma's mint is faint, no more than a waft from a freshly opened bag of mint imperials: processed and sugar-laden, not fresh. Although it's a milk stout really, the dairy sweet side is quite understated, and there's a proper balancing coffee and toast roast. They haven't gone overboard with the mint flavour, which is a pastey smear, like the inside mush of Fry's Peppermint Cream (ask your grandparents) rather than raw herb leaf. I prefer the raw herb leaf approach to mint in beer, so this didn't really suit me. It's fine, and no doubt successfully built for the mass market, or whatever mass market exists for mint chocolate stout these days. There's a pleasant creamy richness, placing it exactly on point for good, satisfying, stout. Its novelty side is best ignored, and I think it would be a better beer without it. The black is worth more than the green, as they say in brewing.

A porter is next: Panela, brewed with coffee and dried sugar cane (or "sugar" as it's also known), at 7% ABV. The head on this pure black beer is almost nitro-like: slow to form and luxuriously thick when it does. The coffee comes through in the aroma, though not in a gimmicky way, with not much to differentiate the added ingredient from the common effect of dark porter malts. It's subtle in the flavour too, and I think may contribute more to the texture than the taste, adding a pleasant oiliness to what I might otherwise consider a disappointingly thin body. The oil builds gradually on the palate so that by the end of the glass there's a noticeable coffee aftertaste. The main flavour is dry and roasty, with notes of charcoal and burnt breadcrust; the hops a metallic minerality. Overall, this is a solidly-made strong porter given just a slight novelty twist, which is frankly the best kind of novelty twist. Thornbridge's sober reliability wins out.

Finally, there's no deed darker than turning a perfectly innocent American-inspired IPA hazy for no good reason. I've always thought of Thornbridge as an upstanding and ethical brewery, so I've tended to just pretend Hazy Jaipur doesn't exist. Another boy did it and ran away, sort of thing. Facing up to reality, this is the same strength as real Jaipur at 5.9% ABV and is a very pale yellow shade with a light touch on the haze: I guess they couldn't bring themselves to fog it up completely. It doesn't smell hoppy, as such, with a bath-bomb combination of flowers and spices which is, I'm sure, largely hop-derived, but doesn't have the bright and citric quality that makes Jaipur what it is. Bitterness is what makes Jaipur what it is, and that has been dialled way back here. Hazy IPA should instead substitute fresh tropical fruit or an alternative juicy quality, but this doesn't. Instead, I got slightly sticky malt, which is the wrong sort of sweetness. That's the point where I checked the base of the can, and although it's within the brewery's stated best-before date, it was canned around ten months before I drank it. I suspect it was best well before opening. On the one hand, this disappointing and thoroughly un-Jaipurish experience is partly my fault for not reading the numbers, but on the other, the brewery has made it this way and doesn't seem to regard a problematic lack of hop freshness as a deal-breaker. Regardless of the details, the Jaipur brand is not well served with this extension. Other than the ABV, it has no features I associate with that classic of English IPAs.

I'm not sure which conclusion to draw from this. Either Thornbridge does its best work in classic beer styles and shouldn't go chasing craft-era gimmickry, or I'm becoming ever-more curmudgeonly and less tolerant of whippersnapper brewers trying to be creative. Could be both. I'll need a few more beers to settle this.

Too far down with the kids

Creative and unexpected moves has always been the stock-in-trade at Rascals Brewery -- the clue is in the name -- but I really wasn't expecting their latest gambit. I'm taking it as an indicator of the ongoing decline of "craft beer" as it was once known. For one thing, the brewery logo is as small as they can make it on the packaging, suggesting not quite disavowal, but certainly a different angle from usual. And secondly, Chido is purportedly a Mexican-style pale lager with added lime zest, sold by the six-pack of 33cl clear glass bottles. For those unfamiliar with how beer is sold in Ireland, the bottled multipack format belongs exclusively to imports, at least since Eight Degrees tried and abandoned it almost two decades ago. But I'm quite prepared to believe that it's something that might work now, as beer transitions away from involved and fancy towards simple and familiar.

I began by testing it within its intended context. It was a sunny day and I was thirsty. I drank it cold from the bottle and it was fine: no more or less offensive than any of the beers it's designed to emulate. I was afraid it might have Desperados-levels of fruit-syrup sweetness, but it doesn't. Maize is listed on the ingredients, and that helps keep it crisp and bland. 4% ABV is lighter than the competition, and overall it was perfectly refreshing. Poured out, head retention is naturally not part of the spec, and it doesn't look anything like as attractive, taking on a greenish hue. The lime makes it smell rather sticky, but again, it isn't meant to be smelled. Slow and considered tasting led to increasing annoyance at the maize's corn-husk twang. The beer still isn't sticky, but it has the wrong kind of dryness, tasting cheap and overly processed, then watery in the finish. The lime is unobtrusive, but doesn't add fresh zing, more a sort of dull sourness. Cold from the bottle is very much the way to go here, take it or leave it.

One final point to add is that it isn't cheap. I paid €15 for the six-pack, which places it at a premium compared to the imports it's copying. We're not doing craft beer here, so why are customers still expected to pay the craft tax? I'm no expert on Gen Z, but if they do want this kind of thing, might they prefer it in standard cans for less money? While market analysis is really not my area, I can't see this being a success.

On more familiar ground, in late March I was summonsed to Rascals to assist with the finals of the National Homebrew Club's annual competition. Over lunch, I tried out two new offerings at the brewery bar. Pilot #148 is described as a Tropical Pale Ale, and I took it that this was a reference to the hops it used. That seemed to be the case with the big and sweet pineapple foretaste, and there was an oily element too, which I took to be coconut -- they're tropical -- but seems to have actually been lime. I often mix those two up, and assume they're chemically similar. A glance at the menu told me that this is brewed with real pineapple, and lime, and apricot too, though I couldn't taste any of the latter. It's a loud and simplistic beer, and a little heavy for only 4.9% ABV, but the citrus gives it a refreshing bite. If you don't mind a little syrup in your pale ale, it's an acceptable one. I wouldn't be surprised to see it graduate past pilot and into full production for the summer.

That the Rascals pilot scheme is actually in the business of trying out recipes, and not simply making small runs for the taproom, was indicated by the next beer. Pilot #149 is a Non-Alcoholic Pale Ale, and I doubt anyone tried making one of these just for fun. I'm guessing Rascals is gearing up to put one in regular production. Well, this is a candidate. It's not perfect, and is as watery as it looks: the wan hazy yellow colour matching a thin body and a flavour which tails off quickly. But before that, the hops make themselves known, with a fun and spritzy lemon flavour, akin to barley water or soluble vitamins. All it needs to be convincing, I reckon, is a bit more body. I'm sure there's a spare bag of lactose somewhere on the Rascals premises.

Together, a party lager and an alcohol-free beer suggest that a change of ethos may be afoot at Rascals. Or, perhaps more accurately, they're sticking close to the target market of young drinkers that they've always had, but the demands of that segment have changed. I hope there's still room for old-person craft beer in their brewing schedule.

Passing for normal

Hungarian brewery Mad Scientist makes one of its sporadic returns to these pages today, with the two most normal-looking things from the most recent tranche of releases. The question before us is: how do they fare at making beer-flavoured beer?

What better test than a central European lager, though that should be the easy setting for a central European brewery. To assist, Mad Scientist has availed of the help of Radim Zvánovec, Budvar's global brand ambassador, who should know his way around the style at this stage. The result, worryingly, is called Bohemian Madness. It's properly golden and with a fine white head, although it's also quite hazy: definitely at the unfiltered end of this style. The aroma is sweet and a little syrupy, where I would have liked a fresh grassy bite also. I had noticed the can was a little squashy, and sure enough, the carbonation is very low here, with a cask-like fine sparkle rather than cleansing lager fizz. The flavour isn't too cleansing either, loading up on malt sweetness to almost toffee-like levels and utterly insufficiently balanced by any hops. Only a slightly harsh rasp at the back of the throat, delivered after the sugar has subsided, is the only clue that hops have been used at all. This is a very poor effort and it does no credit to Budvar to be associated with it, even if their name doesn't actually appear on the can.

Beer two isn't exactly a normal beer. It's a milk stout, and we all recognise what that is, but in the usual spirit of misadventure, Mad Scientist has added spruce tips and honey to Yvler the Creator, a beer that pours a beautiful shiny black with a handsome continental head of old-ivory foam. The spruce is surprisingly present in the aroma, adding a floor-cleaner grade of eye-watering pine and lemon zest, and a spritz of dry ginger-ale spice. I'm confident that the beer can hold that all in check, however, as it's a full 8% ABV. The texture is indeed thick, and there's a strong chocolate and vanilla dimension, as befits the style. I think I can pick out the honeycomb-candy of the honey too, but above all of this, there's the same sap and spice that dominates the aroma. It's disconcerting at first, but I enjoyed it. The bittering effect of the spruce helps balance the caramelly sweetness, or at least distracts from it. Although the beer coats the palate, the finish is as much Caribbean ginger fizz as it is smooth chocolate. The two sides don't meld, but the contrast is so stark as to make the beer shockingly enjoyable. This recipe was a gamble, but it paid off for me.

The point, then, is that Mad Scientist should stick to adding weird stuff to beers (and meads) because their heart isn't in it for anything straightforward. Lesson learnt.