Mild at heart

It's back! The first new beer out of the revived Messrs Maguire brewkit arrived just over a week ago. It's currently sporting branding proclaiming it to be "Bonza Brew", but I imagine that after Australia Day festivities cease it will go back to being plain old Messrs Maguire Brown Ale.

I confess to being a bit skeptical when I first heard about it: an American, brewing a brown ale, for an Irish pub? This is going to be really sweet isn't it? But when I first tried it all doubts were cast aside: what we have here is proper actual mild, and lovely to boot. Under a loose-bubbled ivory head broods a murky dark brown beer with hints of red around the edges showing very obviously that this stuff has never been near a filter in its life. And that stands to it when it comes to tasting: there's a major fresh-ground coffee foretaste, roasted and a little bit gritty. This is followed by a light plum sourness and a little hint of banana as well. Mostly, though, it's about those lovely roasted brown malt flavours. If you like beer which has had the bare minimum of dicking about done to it, this is one to go for. Sinkable and all as it is, a note of caution must be sounded at the ABV: 5.5% will sneak up on you. I'd have loved to see two or so percentage points knocked off that, but you can't have everything.

It'll be interesting to try the cask version. I find it hard to imagine there'll be much difference but will be finding out for certain in a couple of weeks at Ireland's first Cask & Winter Ales Festival hosted by the Franciscan Well in Cork from 11-13 February.

But back to MM. For the launch of the new beer, Mel kindly invited a bunch of us from Beoir down to the basement bar for a tasting. We got a tour as well and, as someone who's been a regular in the pub for a dozen years, it was interesting to finally get a look behind the scenes. It's surprisingly big, for one thing, the fermentation vessels occupying space below the pavement of Burgh Quay, edging on to the foundations of O'Connell Bridge. A tour bonus was Haus lager fresh from the conditioning tanks: cloudy and alive with flavour the way German kellerbier is supposed to be but rarely is, in my experience.

A big thanks to Mel and the MM crew for inviting us in, and here's looking forward to the next round of interesting brews from the MM kit.

Rum customers

I completely understand those who take a "just say no" approach to spirit-flavoured beers. There are some truly dire examples out there: bad base beer, loaded with sugar and artificial flavourings, and covered in alcopop-style kiddie branding. Not what anyone who actually likes beer wants from a beer. Today I'm looking at a couple of British ales that take more of a mature stance to spirit additions, both employing that important commodity of the Empire: rum.

Marks & Spencer Wiltshire Rum Beer is a dark shade of amber, pouring fizzily with just a subtle aroma. I was relieved not to have my senses assaulted by jarring sweeteners and flavourings; instead it smells gently floral with perfume and a hint of sticky toffee pudding. On tasting the first flavour that jumps out is honey: that herbs-and-lavender on sugar of the dark unctuous variety. Past that there's actual beer -- you get the toast and green veg of a solid, dependable English strong ale. Yes, it is sweet, but nothing sickly, cloying or any way reminiscent of the pseudo-alcopop genre. In fact, there doesn't appear to have been any additional sugar or flavourings according to the ingredients listing, just rum and the base beer Wadworth 6X. My only criticism is it's too gassy, to the point where the abrasive bubbles get in the way of the mellow flavours. Oh, and the price too, of course, but that's to be expected from M&S.

I can't remember what I paid for it, or where, but there's definitely no criticism on the carbonation front for Innis & Gunn Rum Cask. You get a lovely tight layer of foam and a fairly gentle fizz to carry the flavours. Unfortunately the flavours being carried aren't great. From the outset it smells both sticky (the same cloying buttery vanilla yuck that is the brand's hallmark) and vinegary. Now, my bottle was a few weeks past the best-before, but it's not like it's bottle conditioned or anything. I think the sharp sourness may be a feature rather than a bug.

It's certainly present on the flavour. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it helps clean the beer up, putting a bit of an edge on the overpowering oak taste. There's a bit of cardboard at the back, and that I can perhaps put down to the bottle's age. What I don't get at all, though, is rum. Looking at the box I see that the contracters have given it thirty days in fresh American oak and then another thirty in a rum cask. No surprise, then, that the fresh oak won, trampling over any molasses or caramel or spices or any other traces that there was once rum here. If Innis & Gunn is your kind of thing then you may enjoy this barely-changed brand extension, but it's definitely not for me.

I've surprised myself by picking the beer directly flavoured with rum over the barrel-aged one. What it perhaps shows is that the quality of the base beer counts far more than the post-fermentation processes, quality that Wadworth 6X possesses but Innis & Gunn doesn't.

Give and take at Aldi

Since it first appeared, plaudits have been rolling in for Aldi's Specially Selected Traditional Irish Ale, brewed by Carlow Brewing. It adds an extra interesting layer to boring old red ale with its rich and roasted flavours. Heavy, warming and very satisfying to drink, though only in 33cl at a time. It was a welcome addition to Ireland's supermarket beer. Only now it looks like it's gone again. There are reports of occasional four-packs in Aldis around the country, but in general it seems it's on its way out.

At the same time, Aldi have two new Irish brews on the shelves. It doesn't say where they're from, other than "Ireland" and the branding is "O'Shea's". I'm going to guess that we have something new from Carlow on our hands.

Hopes that O'Shea's Traditional Irish Ale was simply a rebottling of of the old Specially Selected red were short lived. This very dark brown-red beer has sweet caramel as its driving force and next-to-nothing by way of roast. Not a whole lot of hopping either, though I reckon the tiny, tinny, niggling metallic tang at the finish is hop-derived. All that residual sugar gives a lovely meaty body; creamy, in fact, and not at all watery as 4.3% ABV supermarket own-brand beer can often be. I do miss the crispness of its predecessor, but the ability to have a full-sized glass of it almost makes up the difference. Not a bad drop, this. At €1.99 a go I reckon I'll be keeping it in stock.

Carlow also brew a stout for Marks & Spencer. It's 4.5% ABV and one of the best session-strength stouts on the Irish market. The fatal flaw is the €3.29 price tag: good, but not that good. And now along comes O'Shea's Traditional Irish Stout: €1.99 in Aldi and 4.5% ABV. Could this be..? Once again the answer is no. O'Shea's is pretty distinctive in that it's remarkably similar to the red. Darker, though not really by a lot, and faintly drier but not anything like as dry as is usual for a bottled Irish session stout. You get a big hit of caramel up at the front, reminding me a lot of Carlow's strong extra stout Leann Folláin, but without the richness that comes from the added alcohol. To an extent I'm also reminded of much weaker milk stouts. And even sweet central European dark beers like Šariš. Anything but standard bottled Irish session stout. It's not a bad beer, by any means, and it went well with a plate of chilli. It's just a few degrees askew from stout as we know it.

Bears in Sunglasses are the new Goats in Hats

I'm well overdue giving some of the Saranac beers a spin. These are produced by the venerable upstate New York brewery FX Matt and have been available in Ireland's decent off licences, and a few bars, since last year.

Where does one start when trying a new range of beers? Why, with the juggling bear wearing mirror shades, of course. I'm a sucker for accessorised wildlife on beer labels, as I've mentioned before. The beer is called Pomegranate Wheat -- a straightforward fruit-infused wheat beer with just an unusual choice of fruit. I had great hopes that the pomegranate would allow it to transcend the general crapness with which American wheat beer is cursed, but no. If anything the thin, vaguely dry, insipid wheat ale has swallowed up all the exciting and exotic pomegranate flavours and just left something that tastes like a bargain-basement cordial. There's a ghost of a fruit juice flavour, and it may even be recognisable as pomegranate without the drinker being told in advance, but mostly it's watery blandness and an off-putting tang from the yeast sediment. I guess this is what tempts breweries into using non-fermentable flavour syrups after fermentation, not that I recommend doing that.

Onwards, then, to the IPA. Can't go wrong with a US IPA, right? That's what I thought, right up until the first splash of beer hit the glass. No aroma. Hello? Hops? Anybody there?

The base beer is perfect for a flavour-packed IPA: 5.8% ABV, almost syrupy-thick with lots of sweet toffee flavour. Pack that with citric American hops and you've got a flagship beer on your hands. But there's none of that here. A hint of Cascade comes through in the flavour, sitting uncomfortably on a malt base that's much too big for it, but of aroma: nothing.

So jarring is the omission that I'm convinced I have a dud. No sane brewer would send out a beer like this. There were still three months to go before the expiry date on the bottle but I reckon they should look at making it much shorter, impractical as that may be for something that has to cross the Atlantic. If you live closer to Utica than I do, then don't let my review put you off Saranac IPA. I'd put money on it being lovely when closer to the source and fresh.

Two beers that could be an awful lot better, though I think one of them is through no fault of the brewer. And the other, well: bears in shades don't need excuses.

The living dead

We had an hour or so to kill on a Sunday evening in Dundrum recently. I'd heard that one of the new bars in the shopping centre had Carlow beers on tap so went in on spec, in the hope of a pint of O'Hara's Red.

Ruairi Maguire's is a run-of-the-mill superpub: multiple mezzanines, lots of open floor space for cattle-shed drinking plus a few nice little quiet corners decked out in dark wood and fake leather: not the sort of place I'd make a beeline for, but needs must when there's craft beer on the go.

Alas it appears that O'Hara's Red has left the building, leaving Curim Gold as the only craft tap in the place for the moment. We were actually on the way out when herself spotted the specials blackboard by the door advertising bottled beer of the month White Lady for €3.80. Well how bad can it be?

I was actually really seriously expecting it to be cider. But it is a beer: an organic bottle-conditioned lager from North Yorkshire (both the region and the brewery of the same name therein) titled after an undead milkmaid who haunts the premises.

Sadly, it's a bit of a ghost lager. Massive attenuation has sucked all the character out leaving a wan, thin and rather cidery beer behind (so I wasn't too far wrong in the first place), very pale and with a mountainous weissbier-like cap of foam on top. There's none of the big bittering or flavour hops you might expect to compensate for the lack of body. I can't see too many committed lager drinkers turning to this, regardless of whether their normal tipple is Bavaria or Budvar.

Nevertheless, props to the pub for at least having something different and cheap available. I'll be checking that blackboard next time I'm through.

The last waltz

As I said on Monday, Vienna 2003 was an early, pre-blog beer hunting session of mine. I came away awed by 7 Stern, another of the city's many brewpubs. Its use of unusual ingredients inspired a love of odd beer recipes that I still have today. Last week I dropped in again, to test if the memory was as good as the reality in 2011, and to get some notes down on those beers.

First up it was Hanf, the hemp beer. A pale yellowish amber it's very light of texture and relatively low on fizz, designed to be refreshing. This it does wonderfully, with a lemon zing followed closely by sharp pepper. A real eye-opener, this: not so far-out that it stops being properly beery or anything, just a really interesting way to make flavoursome and thirst-quenching beer. Mrs Beer Nut went for the Winterbock, from the rotating seasonal bock list. It's a big-hitting warm-hearted affair, creamy and a little smoky as well.

My second beer was the Chilli, another I'd had before but couldn't really remember much about. It's a clear gold colour and looks like a totally innocent plain lager. Tastes like one too, except with about four or five drops of Tabasco in it. The flavour is all chilli, all burn and very little beer. This has been brewed purely for the endorphin rush and, despite the total lack of subtlety, I really enjoyed it. Last beer before moving on was their Bamberger Rauchbier. It's pretty clear they're going for Schlenkerla Märzen with this, and it's almost right on the money. It's just a bit fuller bodied than Schlenkerla and the strong smoke flavour has an almost greasy, cheesy ring to it. OK, that sounds horrible, but it is very tasty.

That was all we had time for. The less gimmicky beers will have to wait for my next visit. I still love 7 Stern, however.

I had much lesser expectations of 1516. We stumbled across it in 2003, on an evening when it was loud and crowded. We just about squeezed in by the door, the beer list was a grubby laminated sheet and I don't recall what we had, just that it was a bit boring. On our return visit we found the place much quieter and were able to give the beers -- six of them -- more considered appraisal.

Elb Weisse isn't actually brewed by the 1516 brewers at all. It's made on their kit by the Erste Linzer brewing company and is a light and pale weisse with lots of lovely fruit and spices: oranges for refreshment and cloves for a warming headiness. Next to it is a glass of Alt Bayrisch Dunkel, its standard measure being 40cl for some reason (strength, I'm guessing, but the menu doesn't give ABVs). If I were assigning styles I'd call it a doppelbock: it's very heavy with lots of burnt caramel. However, there's much more of a hop complexity than any German doppelbock I've tasted.

In fact, they're not at all afraid of the hop at 1516. Or, unusally for this part of the world, the three-letter A-word. Their Amarillo Single Variety Hop Pale Ale is not at all the kind of thing I'd expect to see on a beer menu in a German-speaking country, especially given the mostly-workmanlike performances at Salm and Wieden. But there it is, and it's lovely: that signature orangey Amarillo aroma. The taste is a little bit tinny: "grandad's spoons" said the wife. I got a similar sort of galvanic effect from BrewDog's 5am Saint, and this is along similar lines, though even more hop-forward. To back up the notion that someone with access to the 1516 brewkit is a defiantly unparochial beer fanatic, there was also a clone of Victory Brewing's Hop Devil. This is a big and quite sticky pale ale, this time loaded with Cascade for the zesty citric Americanised flavours. I don't really care how accurate an interpretation it is -- just that I loved drinking it.

To darker stuff, and the questionable decision to name their Irish-style stout Eejit. It's so-so, as a stout. The hopping levels are high, perhaps even as high as Porterhouse Wrasslers XXXX, but it's a lighter beer so you're left with a sticky liquorice affair that doesn't really deliver in the dry roast department.

Our printed menu was in need of some updating, so there was no pumpkin ale to be had. Instead, a board above the bar advertised the enigmatic new seasonal Bo-Rye. I'm not a fan of the grassy flavour of rye in a beer, and thankfully this had next to none. Instead, this red-brown beer has oodles of fresh hops on the nose, balanced beautifully in the taste by soft dark malts for a fruit and nut chocolate bar effect. Sumptuous, and a high note on which to leave 1516, ready to promote it to my list of top-flight brewpubs.

And that's it all over bar the bits and pieces of miscellaneous beer I came across in Vienna. Some Ottakringer Dunkel passed my way briefly at one point: a dry and crunchy plain schwarzbier. And my last beer of the trip, with dinner before heading to the airport, was Golser Märzen: clear and very pale it is far more full-bodied than it looks, with massive amounts of märzen bread flavours tempered by a lightly Germanic bitter kick on the end.

Vienna is such a great beer destination, as well as great architecture, easy transport and probably the best collection of art collections of any city I've ever been to. And I don't think I'm even half way through the brewpubs yet. I won't be leaving it another eight years to go back. Mind you, this summer will make it nine since I was last in Prague...

Bring a torch

Bratislava is a city for explorers. Not that there's a whole lot to see in it -- the Pharmacy Museum is about as exciting as it gets -- but the Bratislavans like you to put a bit of effort in to get to the pub. Not for them placing a door on the street through which the bar may be entered. Oh no, they'd much rather you followed a sign down an entryway, then up some stairs, along a corridor (the twistier the better), ideally down some more stairs, and eventually through an unmarked door you'll find yourself in a multi-room tavern wondering where the best seats are. Sometimes several different pubs will be located in different parts of the same rambling building. It's endearing, but it takes a bit of getting used to.

And then someone has to take it to the extreme. The grandly-titled Bratislava Flagship Restaurant, once you're off the street and through the red curtain, has its entry passage decorated as though it were a street, lined with tables and a miniature pub-within-the-pub. It culminates in a grand staircase leading up to a vast auditorium with a stage at one end, tables both on the lower floor and the galleries, and a bar in the orchestra pit. There's also what looks to be a brewkit, stage left. The menu speaks cryptically of "house beers" but says no more on styles, provenance or availability. Instead, the big draw for me here was Zlatý Bažant 10°, served in the traditional tankova fashion. Zlatý Bažant is brewed by Heineken Slovakia and is ubiquitous in Bratislava, usually in the 12° keg version. Tankova is naturally conditioned, served without extraneous gas and, crucially, is unpasteurised. The Flagship and its sister pub around the corner were the only places I saw Zlatý Bažant advertised as served this way. The resulting beer isn't spectacular but it does add an extra dimension of hop flavour to an otherwise rather dull lager.

The Zlatý Bažant stable also includes a dark version: Zlatý Bažant Tmavé. This, as you might expect, is smooth and sweet. In fact it borders on the saccharine but pulls it back with some lovely dry roast notes and burnt caramel. Very drinkable overall. And for a limited time only (said the ads) there was Zlatý Bažant Bock. Leaning towards the Dutch style of bokbier, this is 6.3% ABV, dark ruby and very sticky. Under the cream-coloured head there's a beer brimming with coffee and molasses, and while it's rich in sugar it's not sickly, lifted by a lively carbonation and complicated by green crunchy vegetable hop notes: celery and spring onions.

I hadn't been expecting much at all from the Zlatý Bažant franchise but I was pleased by what I found.

The other ubiquitous Heineken brand I saw around the place was Kelt (not to be confused with A-B InBev's former Prague-brewed stout of the same name). Kelt 10° was the standard pale lager, rather bland but perfectly drinkable. It's certainly nowhere near as impressive as the keg font: a massive broadsword sunk into the bar counter. Yes I know it's not meant to impress anyone with a mental age over ten but I thought it was kitschily wonderful.

I bought a variety of bottles in the vast Tesco just outside the old town. I was really in looking for tokaj (a dispute with the Hungarians makes Slovakian tokaj hard to come by outside its homeland) but couldn't resist grabbing a few random interesting beer bottles from the shelves. Urpiner Tmavý, in its 33cl bottle, was one that jumped out at me. Just under 5% ABV (11° Plato, to use the local convention) and a deep ruby red, this is quite a light and dry dark beer with quite high carbonation adding to the dryness and nothing more sugary than a touch of liquorice. Palatín was much more typical: dark brown and lightly fizzy with lots of caramel and coffee, perhaps even a hint of marzipan as well. Of all the roasted-yet-sweet dark beers I had on this trip, this one balanced the elements best.
Mrs Beer Nut's pick of the bunch, however, was Topvar Tmavé. I liked it too. It starts fairly typically with the caramel and molasses flavours and then the stouty roasted grains follow in after. It's filling and warming and just what you need when it's -5°C on a January day in Bratislava.

Because no divorce -- however velvet -- is ever final, there's plenty of Czech beer to be had in Slovakia. Pilsner Urquell is probably the second most common beer brand after Zlatý Bažant and is even available in tankova form some places (I recommend The Beer Palace; great food too). Topvar, though Slovakian, is an SABMiller stablemate, as is Gambrinus which often appears as a budget option in Pilsner Urquell-branded pubs. In Bratislava, by the way, the budget option means paying 99c for your pint rather than the full whack of about €1.30. Gambrinus 10° is harmless stuff: light and refreshing with just a hint of golden syrup, though tasting overall like diluted water when it follows a couple of Urquells. Bernard 10° is another pale light lager along similar lines with a lovely bitterness to it.

As far as dark Czech beer goes, Tatranský Zámok Dark was the only one I picked up, in the supermarket again. My glass here adds to the way it already looks like red wine. It tastes lighter than 4.8% ABV might suggest and cuts right back on the sweetness to make something drier, almost crisp. The only other Czech beer of colour I came across was in a bar. Velvet is a nitrogenated amber beer brewed by A-B InBev at the Staropramen plant. You might expect it to be in the smoothflow bitter/Irish red category, and the brewery does claim an English heritage for it, but on tasting it's much closer to a cold-fermented lager. Sweet, yes, but quite clean tasting and really not all that bad despite the blandness. Not that I'd be up for drinking it again or anything.

When I saw Budvar Bud in Tesco I knew I had to find out more about it. Extensions to the Budvar brand are pretty rare around here, and a 7.6% ABV tramp-strength version? Bring it on! Surprisingly, adding 50% extra alcohol doesn't change the beer all that much: it still displays Budvar's signature herbs and golden syrup, but with just more of them: a little extra pungency from the hops, a little bit more stickiness from the malt and some extra booze heat. While the beer isn't off-balance, though it comes close, I don't see why you'd want a 33cl bottle of this over a half-litre of Budvar. It's just not as enjoyable to drink.

I mentioned above about Bratislava's convoluted approach to pub entrances. There are exceptions, of course. When two Belgian ex-pats decided to open a Belgian theme bar they wanted an authentic front window with tables just inside and a zinc bar. And that's just what they've created with Café De Zwaan in the heart of the old town. For confused Slovaks, a narrow corridor runs up the side of the bar into a larger back room. The beer list is better than I thought: heavily influenced by A-B InBev but including a few hand-picked niceties. No fewer than five Christmas beers were on offer, including Bush de Noël. It's an uncomplicated chestnut-coloured beer, with loads of alcohol being its primary characteristic -- 12% ABV and feeling every bit of it. This is built on a heavy, rather syrupy base and has just a sprinkling of seasonal spices added to it. I quite liked it, but one bottle was plenty.

Feeling that I'd given the beers and bars of Bratislava a fair shake, it was time to head home, but not before one last run around Vienna.

Scratching a little deeper

It had been nearly eight years since I was last in Vienna. The advent of global news TV channels means most of my holidays can now be dated by world events so I know it was the week the Iraq War started, and we spent a frantic five days trying to cram in the multitudinous art and history of the city before realising it couldn't be done. We left knowing we'd be back eventually. There was beer too. In 2003 I was already a seeker after new and interesting beers and pubs, but like with Vienna's art museums, its many brewpubs can't be done justice in only a few days. My return visit just before New Year meant the opportunity to see a little bit more of what the city has to offer. We stayed on Rennweg, near the Belvedere, so we got to visit the gallery there (I'm a big Klimt fan, but the The Kiss is just rubbish, sorry). And at the Belvedere's gates, a brewpub I'd never been to before either: Salm.

You already know Salm. If you're in the habit of visiting brewpubs in Europe, and plenty of places beyond, you'll probably have seen a Salm brewkit, glowing in burnished copper, somewhere inside. So confident are they in their equipment that they run this restaurant and bar in Vienna with some fairly solid Austrian beers to go with the food. So there's a Salm Helles, of course: a workmanlike, slightly grainy, slightly hazy, brewpub lager with just some added sweetness to show it's not a pils. The Pils itself is also cloudy and is all about the bitterness -- a gentle, and most unTeutonic citric orange flavour comes through, but not much else. Salm Weizen is one of the most flavourful beers on offer. It exhibits huge banana flavour and aroma with just a lovely bitter kick giving it some extra character. With the Märzen we're back on duller ground: hazy again and lacking in any real flavour, just a bit of grain, a little grass and maybe a hint of brown sugar towards the end. The only nod to a seasonal is the sometimes-brewed-sometimes-not Salm Bohemian. I'm guessing it's designed to be an old-fashioned dark lager but it's beautifully ale-y, like a porter almost: chestnut-red with bourbon creams and lavender-water.

One thing you may not have noticed on Salm kits elsewhere (and thanks to Séan for sending me to look for it) is this bit of steampunk on the side. It is, of course, a fractionating column for distillation -- the schnapsbrennern. And naturally they have the produce on the menu. Though they make big claims for their award-winning whiskey I opted for a shot of the bierbrand. This clear spirit is pungent stuff and slightly oily, like the mid-way point between vodka and jenever. I'm afraid I can't offer much by way of tasting notes other than "greasy booze" so make of that what you will. And maybe have the whiskey instead.

A few streets west sits Wieden Bräu, a rambling brewpub with a lengthy food menu, a range of taps, but only four beers available. Wieden Bräu Helles started out as another yellow lager yawnfest but quickly started to show some backbone in the form of a zesty lemon zing plus a little bit of green nettle. Clean, refreshing and easy, just as a helles should be. The Märzen was far duller: dry and lacking any of the body or flavour I'd have expected from the style. Aren't the little 30cl siedl glasses cute, though?

A little like the dark beer at Salm, Wieden Bräu Dunkles was a superb porter-like concoction with lots of really tasty coffee-and-cream flavours. Mrs Beer Nut detected a touch of marker pen about it so wasn't much of a fan of this beer which, I'm guessing, was fermented a little warmer than the yeast was entirely happy with. Worked for me, though.

The fourth beer is an ever-changing special and on my visit it was Whisky. I don't know what they did to this -- added flavouring would be my guess -- but thankfully they didn't do enough to ruin it. Though a dark amber in colour, it's much more what I'd consider to be a märzen in flavour and texture terms, being full-bodied, quite sweet, and bready. The "whisky" addition is a slight bit of smokiness and perhaps some essence of oak, but it's a gentle dusting of these and the end result, at a reasonable 5.5% ABV, is something definitely off-kilter but not quite full-on weird.

And so we leave Vienna for the moment and strike eastwards. But there's more Viennese brewpubs, all with the de rigeur brewing-copper-shaped light-fittings, to come later this week.

At the cooking stout

I don't cook. I'm married to someone who cooks wonderfully and who hates cleaning up after -- which I don't mind -- so we have a very practical arrangement in place that suits us both. It has me at a bit of a loss for The Session this month, though. Hosted at Beer 47, the theme is Cooking With Beer, but you can't cook with beer if you don't cook. I did briefly consider breaking out the pots and pans and attempting to put something together, but it would no doubt have ended up as awful to read about as to eat.

Instead, I'm sticking with what I know: consuming beer straight up in liquid form. My nod to the theme is that it's a beer which exists primarily for the purposes of cookery. Casseroles, chillis, beef pies, chocolate cakes: all can allegedly be enhanced by the addition of Mackeson Stout, brewed by A-B InBev in the UK (Luton? Magor?) and sold in 33cl cans.

Despite the lightness of 3% ABV, and rather a watery texture, it's totally opaque black. The fizz is gentle, maintaining a light beige froth once the initial head subsides. Soft creamy toffee on the nose, and while the taste begins with sweet and happy fudge, it suddenly becomes jarringly acrid and metallic. Thankfully the thinness means this doesn't last long and we move on to condensed milk in the aftertaste. I have to say that, despite it making no claims to be anything other than what it is, I expected better. Something that has been around this long shouldn't have that sort of off flavour in it, even if the brewery doesn't expect anyone to actually drink it.

It's probably unreasonable to be disappointed in a 3% ABV macro-brewed cooking stout, but this guy had me expecting much better things.

I've a feeling my last two cans will end up being used for culinary purposes after all.

Palest Peru

I miss the 66cl bottles of Cobra. I've not seen them around here in ages and nothing will make me trade down to the ubiquitous 33s no matter how cheaply the supermarkets offer them. Look, there's nothing rational about crap lager drinking, OK?

On a trip to Sainsbury's a while ago, I spotted Cusqueña in the speciality lager section and immediately clocked the bottle's similarity to good ol' Cobra. Well hello there. Fancy going back to my place for a curry?

Cusqueña is from Cuzco in Peru though I don't know by what machinations it has wound up in the UK. The bottle is slightly smaller than Cobra, at 62cl, though the strength is identical at 5% ABV. And the similarities don't end there: you get the same hefty body; you get the same relatively low levels of fizz; and you get the same touch of corny maize as the sole taste present in the beer.

Having little by way of flavour means little by way of off-flavour, so I decree this inoffensive beer to be absolutely fine as an accompaniment to super-spicy food.

The Swedes in the basement

A month ago I mentioned in relation to the new-look Messrs Maguire that some interesting imports have been added to the house beers in the line-up. Ocean is a brewery in Gothenburg, where a former brewer from Messrs Maguire is now running the show. Eighteen beers are listed on their website but just two are on sale in Dublin, exclusively at MM and heftily priced at €6.50 for a half litre bottle.

My evening had begun with Vienna Dark Lager at the Porterhouse and a pint of MM Jul Ól so, feeling the need for some hops, I opted for the Ocean IPA first. From my best attempts at reading the label, it doesn't appear to be bottle conditioned, which means there's very little excuse for the exceedingly low carbonation levels. There are some lovely refreshing peach notes in here, on a lightly tannic base, but they really need a bit more gas behind them to push them out. The alcohol level is higher than might be expected for such delicate flavours -- 5.4% ABV -- and I think its place is as a cool summer's day refresher. With a bit more condition I'd heartily recommend it, but it's just a cautious welcome from me for now.

I was understandably wary when getting another €6.50 from my pocket and ordering the Ocean Porter. This is a fantastic beer, however. More carbonated than the IPA but still wonderfully smooth and creamy of texture. The nose is full of rich chocolate and this continues in the flavour where it's complemented by just enough warm roastiness to keep it balanced and interesting. Were it not for the price, another bottle would definitely have been on the cards. In contrast to the IPA, I'd say this is best suited to winter and it reminds me a lot of Messrs Maguire's own Porter, which we haven't seen in a while.

It's difficult to justify splashing out on expensive imports when there's a hard-working brewery on site, but it's also good to know that a pale ale with a bit of hop character and a non-nitrogenated black beer will be available regardless of what's on the house taps.