Alternative arrangements

I missed all the rí-rá agus ruaille-buaille of the first All-Ireland Craft Beerfest, held at the RDS last weekend. A shame because it was, by all accounts, a storming success. Big congratulations to the organisers and a hearty pat on the back to the Beoir volunteers who stepped up and helped out. Next year I will manage my calendar more carefully. (Details of what I did instead will feature in the coming weeks as I sift through my scrawly notes.)

Lots of specials and seasonals from the Irish breweries were on tap at the festival and I really hope I'll be able to find them elsewhere at some point. The first opportunity came yesterday, on the warmest afternoon of the year in Dublin, when I dropped in to the Bull & Castle for a quencher. Thankfully, Metalman have taken the unorthodox step of making a witbier their winter seasonal and it was on tap.

Alternator's pale and hazy shade of orange has me immediately thinking of German-style weissbier, but the aroma is definitely wit: lots of coriander leaping out of the glass. On first sip I found the texture a little thin and a bit gassy, but I can't really quibble about this since cold and fizzy was exactly what I was after. Thirst slaked, there was enough left to give the flavours a bit more considered analysis, and there's plenty to be analysed: big fresh and juicy jaffa oranges first, gently spiced around the edges with that coriander, some white pepper and a properly bitter, floral hop kick. Towards the end the weissbier vibe came back as clove notes started to make themselves felt.

Overall, a cut above most interpretations of the witbier style and perfect while the sun shines. Just the one keg in the Bull & Castle so get it while it's hot, er, outside.

In it for the money

Odell again. This time another of their dark malt-driven beers: 90 Shilling. It's a darkish amber colour and shows little by way of aroma. The signature fruity Odell hops are there in the flavour, but they're muted under lots of milk chocolate and a heavy dose of caramel.

While warming, it's not especially thick or heavy and the fizz keeps it from being properly mellow. Like lots of the beer from this brewery, and the dark ones in particular, it just misses the mark. Some fine tuning and it could be fantastic. As it is there's nothing wrong with it, per se, but it's less than the sum of its parts.

Meanwhile, just 12 weeks from the brewery to my back garden comes Odell's double IPA Myrcenary. Keeping things fruity, I get masses of magic mandarins on pouring what proves to be quite a pale and hazy beer, showing very little gloop for a 9.3% ABV monster.

A proper sniff shows it's no hop-bomb either, giving off innocent sherbet notes. The texture is more full-on, however: heavy and a bit greasy in the mouth. The first taste brings a gorgeous hop burn, but not harsh at all, nor inappropriately alcoholic. Smooth, warming and flavourful are what it's all about. This is not an aggressive beer, but rather charming and fun to spend time with. I'd be interested to compare it with Sierra Nevada's Torpedo. It's more subtly flavoured but I couldn't say if that's a good thing or bad in double IPA.

That subtlety means Myrcenary is scarily drinkable. Remind yourself to sip it. It's an awful beer geek cliché to say the double IPA is the best beer in the brewery's range, but with Odell it really is.

Come back Leffe, all is forgiven

I guess it was one of those "I'm leaving Sainsbury's and there's still a square inch of space in my trolley!" moments. I recall the items purchased on that excursion included a duvet, a toaster, a thing for poaching eggs in the microwave, and this: Sainsbury's Abbaye blonde. This was last October and the large bottle has languished in the back of my fridge ever since.

My enthusiasm for drinking it probably lasted less than the time it took me to wedge it in next to the tea towels, and as far as I can see it's no longer sold by Sainsbury's. The web tells me it's from the Saint Omer brewery in north east France which raises a question about the "Bière de Belgique" wording on the label. Can this be translated as "Belgian-style beer"? I dunno. Though it being French would explain the awfully clunky "Premium Continental Blonde" style designation. And does anyone still buy things because they're "Continental"?

Anyhoo, it's rubbish. Though a lovely shade of dark amber, its flavour is completely hollow, showing only the faintest hints of golden syrup right at the very back. I had been bracing for something horribly sticky, and its wateriness left me feeling somewhat short-changed. On the plus side it's very easy to put away, even at 5.6% ABV. The carbonation is low so it's actually quite refreshing.

But who wants a Belgian-style blonde that's refreshing?

Murky cygnus manoeuvre

"White Gold": such a lovely way to describe a beer that looks like slightly cloudy Budweiser. But I'm being facetious. Wild Swan (are there any tame swans?) is a lovely 3.5% ABV summer blonde from Derbyshire's finest, Thornbridge. I think it's an English golden ale at heart. It has the crisp lager-like refreshing qualities of the best ones, and a piquant, pithy hop bite at the finish. Even at this low strength there's also a touch of bubblegum malt coming through as well.

But that pale haziness is pure Belgian witbier. It's missing the spice, admittedly, but there's the right sort of lemony zest at the heart of the flavour, as well as the palate-cleansing fizz.

Complex enough to sit over; light enough to quaff: Wild Swan is a great all-rounder.

It's only a number

The six hundred and sixty-sixth entry on my blog. Well there was only one thing for this: the bottle of Black Damnation II that Stephen from The Beer Club gave me. As is usual for this sort of super-rare imperial spoogebeer, you'll have to give me a whole paragraph while I explain what it is.

So, we have a blend of three imperial stouts, starting with 50% Struise Black Albert which has been aged on Colombian coffee beans. Add in 25% of De Molen Hel & Verdoemnis matured in Jack Daniel's barrels, and fill out the rest with Struise's Cuvée Delphine. They've subtitled it Mocha Bomb. Oo-er.

I'm guessing it never occured to them that they had all the makings of beery Irish coffee, but that's sort of how it's turned out. Yes there are hops, lots of them: deliciously bitter with plenty of fresh green veg flavour. But under that you have some pleasantly mild coffee, sweetened with brown-sugar-like malt and boozed up by the whiskey. A smooth creaminess really adds to the effect as well. Rounded, warming and exquisitely balanced, it's not a mocha bomb, it's a purring fireside pussycat.

Imperial Irish coffee. Satan in an aran sweater. Lovely.

Diageo with a human face

It's a rite of passage for the Irish beer drinker to be able to reminisce on a failed Guinness brand extension. You're not fit for a bar stool if you can't bore innocent people senseless about your memories of Breó, or the St James's Gate series, or the Brewhouse series, or (the holy grail of failed Guinnesses) Guinness Light.

I've tasted most of these (yawn, yeah, whatever, grandad) and in several cases they weren't bad beers: they just weren't ready for that time and place. Diageo are currently pushing out a new brand extension -- this time to the venerable Smithwick's marque -- and, in the opinion of this amateur market analyst, it's in a much better position.

Smithwick's Pale Ale is a very pale -- blonde, really -- beer being launched on keg and in half-litre bottles around the country this month. It's 4.5% ABV and has been late hopped, including dry-hopping, with Amarillo. And it shows. While light of texture to the point of wateriness and a little on the gassy side, at least from the keg, there's no mistaking the flavour of proper hops: a sweet and juicy peachiness is given an empty stage to sing its heart out.

Cleary, a lot of thought has gone into this product, and it owes its existence to more than Diageo's general revitalising of the Smithwick's brand and the flatlining of mainstream beer sales in the developed world (though I don't doubt both those things had a lot to do with it). Why, of all things, a hop-forward pale ale?

Five years ago such things didn't exist here. Microbreweries made red ales, and lagers, and stouts and wheat beers. Then Galway Hooker came along and changed the parameters, eschewing the mainstays of Irish beer and going for high doses of Saaz and Cascades. Established craft breweries followed them and the hoppy pale ale is now in the repertoire of most of the nation's micros. It's an accessible style of beer and just different enough from the other taps on the bar to make it worth investigating. But most importantly it just tastes nice. You don't need a slick brand identity to shift this stuff, nor countless centuries of brewing heritage, nor suggestions of sophistication or the exotic. It's the sort of beer grown-ups like to drink and it stands on flavour alone.

There are apparently several more to come in this Smithwick's series, but I reckon they've started in a safe and sensible place, and my perspective on the beer offerings in the Typical Irish Pub is certainly brightened by its existence.

However, I also think there's a darker lesson for Ireland's independents. Medium-strength hoppy keg ales are done. Diageo make one now, and unless you can play the local card or have some other unique selling point I imagine it's going to be a much harder thing to flog. Time to make something else.

Monte: got a raw deal

I feel shortchanged by my beer experience in Uruguay. We arrived in the picturesque seaside town of Colonia, just an hour's boat ride across the Rio Plata from Buenos Aires. We just had the one night before moving on and started the evening watching the sun set from the terrace of La Torre, a café-bar on the waterfront. They had three from the Mastra range, and Mastra Negra was my introduction to Uruguayan beer. It's a gorgeous 6.2% ABV Baltic-porter-a-like, bottle conditioned to a smooth texture with lots of chocolate and  rosewater, turkish delight floral overtones plus a dry finish. I made a note to try the other Mastra beers -- a red one and a golden one -- when we got to the capital, and moved on to dinner.

That was the last I saw of Mastra. In the four subsequent days in Montevideo I never found any of it. Or much else of merit, to be honest. Patricia Porter looked promising: 5.8% ABV and a rich shade of dark brown. Plenty of brown sugar sweetness, edging on to molasses, but not really much else. Easy drinking and inoffensive. Plain old Patricia is a decent enough lager, lightly carbonated, leaning towards sweet, but with more hops than you might expect for a leading macro in a South American country.

Zillertal also gives the hops a decent outing, but they're a little musty for my tastes, and the anaemic wateriness of the lager doesn't help. A Germanic name will only carry you so far.

Probably the biggest national brand in Uruguay, at least if promotional pub furniture can be taken as any sort of measure, is Pilsen. Ironically, this is much more like a helles than a pils: smooth and sweet. Its dark gold colouring makes it look better than the others but it's really not up to much. And to further bewilder the incautious drinker there's Pilsen Stout: authentically black with red edging it's almost totally flat. Flavourwise there's not a whole lot going on: a vague sweetness, bordering on metallic saccharine plus some dry, burnt notes. It went fine with my cheese and charcuterie plate, though the roquefort drowned it somewhat.

And with that, three weeks were up and it was time to go home. Some beautiful beers in South America, and some stinkers. Just like Europe, then.

The big guns

To this northern European it's a very alien drinking culture they have in Argentina. It would almost be fair to say that they don't really have one. Beer tends to be treated almost the way we treat wine: shared comunally with meals. The human need for mild psychoactive stimulation appears to be taken care of by the ever-present mate -- a ubiquitous cross between tea-drinking and pipe-smoking. In several places, a request just for beer was met with well-OK-then suspicious looks, though doubtless I could have got my mate thermos filled with hot water as a basic courtesy. On one occasion I ordered a beer while perusing the menu in a restaurant and since my wife didn't, the 33cl bottle arrived to the table with two glasses. These bizarre backward foreigners with their weird notions of beer being something to be served in large bottles and enjoyed with food. What do they know, eh?

One upshot of such practice is that big bottles are the norm for most beers, certainly the stuff the mainstream breweries produce. For some unfathomable reason 970ml is the standard measure (and cm³ is the standard unit). There's a definite thrill of the exotic when glancing through the window of a classy restaurant to see a family at table with giant mutant bottle of Stella Artois in a silver ice bucket on the side.

None of that for me though. On a cool sunny day in downtown Puerte Iguazu, however, I did partake in a big bottle of Iguana. I love the branding on this, though the beer is a very simple and thin quenching hot-country lager, designed for taking edges off thirsts and nothing else. The other biggie I met, again in Iguazu where choice was severely limited, was Palermo Ice. Quite smooth and sweet, this, in almost a Munich Helles style.

Only two servings of Quilmes Cristal passed my lips on the trip, one being in a pub which I'd been told had a great beer selection, and indeed featured well over a dozen taps, but for some reason (recent change of ownership?) was serving only Stella and Quilmes and I was too tired and thirsty to back out. It was horrible. The other was in the Iguazu Falls park itself, after a long morning of trailing about in hot sunshine we sat down for an empanada and an ice-cold Quilmes straight from the can. It was nectar. I didn't enjoy the stout or bock from the same brewery when last we met, but my curiosity was piqued by Quilmes Red Lager. It's a red-brown beer with some nice roasted flavours at first, but it gets too sickly too quickly and I resorted to draining the remains straight from the bottle, confident I wasn't missing much by way of sensory experience.

Imperial Lager I met on the terrace of an upmarket bar in the rejuvenated dockland district of Puente Madero. It looks the part, or maybe that's just because it was a nice day. A bit stronger than the usual at 5.5% ABV, it's another sweet one, expressing hints of banana ester that get louder as it sits around. But that's about it: definitely not as especial as the label would have you believe.

I'm not sure where on the macro-independent-craft spectrum the beer from Otro Mundo sits, but I'm sticking the one I had in here: Otro Mundo Golden Ale: a bold move to sell it in a half-litre bottle, I'm sure. It's very pale and quite hazy with some fun fruit tartness: a bit of apple and some light lemons. First impression is of a light and zesty ale for witbier lovers, though wait a while and there's some toffee to be found in here as well. Passable, I thought.


The brass-neck award for audacious marketing bullshit goes to Schneider, one of the major lager brands and one which makes big claims about its German heritage and standards. Featuring the signature of old Herr Schneider himself, it's brewed "according to German tradition". I caught up with it on the ferry crossing to Uruguay, where the label's fine print confessed to "cereales" of the non-malt variety, as well as stabilisers and anti-oxidants. In short it's a hideous adjunct lager: dry, dull and unpleasant. I don't think I've ever seen a beer put this much distance between what it is and what it claims to be.

And then, just like that, we were in Uruguay.

Colonial stylings

Continuing with the craft beers I found out and about in Buenos Aires, the city boasts two English theme pubs at opposite ends of the centre. The Gibraltar and Bangalore are both dark and cosy bars, with comfy leather seats and open fires perfect for taking the chill out of a dark blustery August evening. If they opened during the day they'd both have got a lot more of my business, not least for Kingston the cask ale they both sell.

Here we have the clearest indication of the confusion between Scotch ale and IPA in Argentina: Kingston is billed as the former in The Gibraltar but is an IPA in Bangalore, perhaps to fit better with the pub's overall theme. Anyway it's definitely on the sweet side with little to say for itself as regards hops. There are lots of other things going on instead, though: milk chocolate and caramel first, then some sharp perfume notes: orange blossom, turning to jasmine. Behind this there's a tannic quality which gives it enormous thirst-quenching power and prevents it from getting too cloying or overly sweet.

Both these pubs, plus many of the Irish theme pubs littering Buenos Aires, advertised three beers under the Gambrinus marque. Gambrinus Pilsner was an odd one: perfume again, at least at first, and giving off an unsettling air of urinal cake. This fades and it's plain old dull yellow fizz after that, with maybe a smack of extra pils bitterness. Gambrinus Pale Ale is a nitrogenated red with typical yucky, sticky caramel, then adding injury to insult with a galvanic metal tang on the finish.

The only reason I didn't give up on the whole range in the first place was that I tried the Gambrinus Stout first and was hoping for more in this vein. It's chocolatey with some lovely dark fruit sweetness thrown in, and just when you've got bored of that it adds extra dry roast and a vegetal hop tang to the palate. A little bit Murphy's and a little bit Wrassler's, I really enjoyed it. Plenty to take my mind of the €6 it cost for a pint.

Argie spargie

As I mentioned yesterday, Buenos Aires is a big and sprawly city and involved quite a bit of walking. Fortunately there are a few decent pubs spacing out all those monuments commemorating arse-kickings delivered to, and received from, the Brits (final score 2-2 after extra time). I was particularly glad of Territorio down in the Bohemian neighbourhood of San Telmo. It's a stylish street-corner café with a few decent beers which, crucially for the meandering tourist, opens in the afternoon.

Aside from the better ones from Antares, they also had Dorada Patagónica, a cloudy, slightly weissbier-like, blonde ale from Cervecería Gülmen. It's rather more forward with its hops than your typical weiss, however, displaying some gorgeous succulent mandarins alongside an almost Belgian yeasty spice. Highlight of the menu for me, though, was Yapai Negra Especial. I've seen this stylised as a porter elsewhere but it tasted much more like a dark lager to me: red-brown, quite thin with lots of fine sparkle. There's a hint of light caramel, some mild roast and then a wave of sherbetising hops. As a bonus there's even a slight smoky finish. Yapi do a fully smoked version but sadly I never saw it on sale anywhere. Negra Especial is sublimely refreshing, and one of the few beers I met that manages to get all of its complexities out even when served at the low low temperatures preferred by the Argentinians.

There were two from El Búho on the Territorio menu but they weren't in stock. I caught up with another of their range at Cruzat, the bar with the most diverse selection of beers I found. Though, once again, the menu bore little resemblance to what was actually available, but they have the good sense to put the beer fridge out on the main floor on a semi-self-service basis.

El Búho Imperial Stout wasn't really worth the wait. The aroma starts with some promising, but worryingly understated, roast grain but follows it with sweet porridgey wort. And it's the porridge that dominates the taste, missing all the big-hop, big-roast marks that make imperial stouts great. A failure of the style and a failure of a beer, unfortunately. It probably didn't help its case that it was served next to possibly the single best beer I tasted in Argentina: Montechristo Imperial Stout. You only have to look at the photo to see the difference in densities. Montechristo is 11% ABV, supremely dense and silkily smooth. Both aroma and flavour lay on the coffee and molasses at the centre of the palate, adding gentle chocolate and lavender high notes to make it approachable, drinkable and, most importantly, fun.

All down hill from here, then. Berlina India Pale Ale is another one of those dark-red toffee-laden Argentine IPAs. This one at least has a teeny bit of mild hop flavour, reminding me a little of some US brown ales I've tried. There are no off flavours and it's overall an enjoyable though unexciting beer. Siete y ½ Cream Stout was what I was given on ordering the smoked stout, before I figured out that it's easier to just help oneself from the Cruzat fridge. Anyway I'm not sure I missed much: the sour infected smell from this suggests a brewery with a general hygiene problem. Whatever got in here chomped through the sugar very efficiently so instead of a creamy cream stout it's something as thin and gassy as a schwarzbier, and not a good one. A little bit of gunpowder spice arrived towards the end as it warmed, but really I just wanted rid of it and on to something else.


My weird beer curiosity got the better of me when I spotted El Bolsón Con Ají, a blonde ale with chilli in. I suspect, however, that the small shred of chilli pepper floating in the bottle neck represented the sum total of chillification. The beer itself is grossly sweet, full to the rafters with cloying butterscotch. The chilli gives just a slight catch in the back of the throat which in no way makes up for the rest of this atrocity.

Moving away from the pubs, the commonest Argentinian craft beer (-ish. Made by A-B InBev, see comments. Thanks Max!) I found in shops was the Patagonia range, in their imposing 74cl bottles. With two lagers and a weissbier it's not the most curiosity-inspiring of line-ups and I never made the time to try the latter. But the lagers were decent enough. Patagonia Bohemian Pilsener (shudder ye at the broad-brush American style designation) is as clear and as golden as you'd want it to be. The hops are genuine Patagonian ones, we're told, and there's a lovely green aroma from them as it pours, though not so much by way of flavour. It's smooth and crisp, with mild mineral notes but not much by way of malt except for a tiny bit of golden syrup on the end as it warms. Perfectly drinkable and quenching, though.

Patagonia Amber Lager is also very plain fare. Pouring a much paler golden amber than I was expecting, this has never been within a llama's spitting distance of a hop. The body is very light and the carbonation is gentle enough to make it an inoffensive easy-drinker that would work well by the neck if it wasn't in such of a monster of a bottle.

More on monster bottles when we come to the macros, but tomorrow it's back to the pub again.

De la casa

Brewpubs! One of the few beery things I'll go out of my way for when I'm abroad. In Buenos Aires out of my way meant a lot out of my way: the city sprawls like none other I know, with good bars and restaurants scattered far across the suburbs, and transport links which range from awkward to none. Standard Argentine opening hours make it all even harder, with most pubs closed until 6pm, restaurants to 8 or after, and the metro closing up at 10.45. The drink-eat-get-home window is rather small if you don't want to taxi everywhere.

We were lucky then (and it was pure dumb luck) that one of the city's brewpubs was a three minute stroll from our hotel in Recoleta. Buller is squeezed in to a narrow plot on a strip of restaurants but stretches back from its front door to a wide back room and upper mezzanine. The substantial brewkit sits on display at the entrance, something I always like to see. Six beers grace the laminated menu, with a seasonal on the blackboard behind the bar. Let's take it from the top:

Buller Light Lager (yes really) was actually the last one of the set I tried, for obvious reasons. As with Porterhouse Chiller (the only other craft-brewed version of the style I can think of) I surprised myself at how much I liked it. It's crisp, it's clear, it's very easy drinking and properly refreshing. In fact it's a hell of a lot better than most of the Argentine macro lagers I tasted.

The Hefeweizen is a small step up: translucent and anaemic, with hints of orange blossom and dry grain it's almost more witbier than weizen. But it's tasty and thirst-quenching and does the job. And the Oktoberfest is in the same vein. Pouring the dark amber of an American Oktoberfestbier it has more of those lightly sweet oranges from whatever hops they're using. Unlike most American Oktoberfests I've met it's entirely uncloying, keeping things light and breezy throughout.

Yet more oranges in the India Pale Ale, giving it an air of Englishness. However, it's far too sweet, neglecting the bittering hops and piling on sticky toffee where it doesn't belong. Served cold to be consumed cold, I guess. The real oddity in the house line-up was the Honey Beer: an 8.5% ABV stonker with a waxy aroma and loads of honey flavour in amongst the heavy sticky malt. It's Sugar Puffs in beer form, and not at all easy on a by-the-pint basis.

Buller Dry Stout completes the regulars. Quite a simple one this, with a little bit of roasted grain complicated by some mild dark fruit flavours, shading towards plum sourness at the finish and just catching the back of the throat with its acridity. I felt somewhat shortchanged by the whopping 5.8% ABV strength: a better brewery could do this kind of thing well under the 5% mark, I reckon.

The seasonal beer was another dark one, a Porter. Pulled straight from the homebrew handbook this was loaded with brown malt for a gorgeous smooth and rich espresso flavour, finishing with a similar fruity tang as the stout. No points for innovation, but full marks for making a top notch beer, and one of my favourites of the trip.

On to another far-flung district of the city and I'm really not sure if I should be counting Bar De Cao for this post. It's a bit of a mystery whether or not it's a brewpub, a mystery largely of my own devising due to my inability to articulate "Here, do youse actually make this stuff here?" in Spanish. On Scoopergen, Gazza says De Cao has a brewery attached, and elsewhere I've seen one of the company's other bars -- La Poesía -- listed as the brewery site. Anyway, I've been to both and saw no brewing equipment, but I did get to try the house beers. (Also, a tip of the glass at this point to Gazza for his Argentina beer guide which provided a couple of great pointers for bars in Buenos Aires. Much appreciated.)

De Cao itself is a lovely pub, being largely unspoilt since its founding in 1915 and reminding me lots of the Irish spirit grocer style of boozer, only with a bit more of a colourful Latin flourish. Their brewery, wherever it actually is, turns out three brews. De Cao Negra is the good one: very close to quality Irish stout with its light roast and hints of chocolate, but once again showing signs of mild sourness that add to its complexity. I could have stayed drinking this. I should have stayed drinking this.

De Cao Rubia is orangey-amber, hazy and looking to me more like a weissbier than a blonde ale. There must have been a complete failure on the hop utilisation front, because it's horribly porridgey: a little bit sweet and grainy and then just watery afterwards. But hey, at least it wasn't infected. De Cao Colorada, on the other hand, was. It looked so promising, with a loose-bubbled cask-like head over a hazy red body. The carbonation is very low, but that merely serves to accentuate the vinegar and the overall impression of a glass of cold runny sick. As you usually get with infected beers, somewhere underneath there were traces of what it should have been: some lightly toasted grain, a bit of gentle roast, but they were very hard to find.

"Ack! What the hell happened with this one?!" is also missing from my Spanish vocabulary, alas.

Arrivals, departures

Last week's launch of the new Messrs Maguire Doppelbock was tinged with sadness. Not that there was anything wrong with the beer, you understand, it's a supremely complex 7.5% ABV dark lager, intensely sweet at first with bourbon biscuits and treacle, following through to a citric pithiness with hints of puckering sourness.

No, the sad bit is that Mel, who has been in charge of the MM brewkit for the last year or so, has been called home to the US. Mel has been hugely supportive of the beer geeks and -- far more importantly -- has taken an active role in bringing the unconverted into the city centre brewhouse to show them what beer is and how it's made. She will be missed and we selfishly hope that someone worthy of her mash paddle will be taking up the reins at the brewery before long.

And with one exit, a new appearance. From the pictures I've seen, the Dingle Brewery is an impressive operation, taking over the abandoned creamery site outside the west Kerry village and converting it into a working brewery and visitors' centre. While I'm all in favour of local beer for local people, and don't begrudge the fact that Dingle already has a brewery providing this, I was still pleased when a keg of Dingle's first lager, Crean's, showed up in Dublin's Against The Grain last week.


Rather darker than advertised, it's a deep rich gold colour. The texture is quite heavy and I think the solid dose of diacetyl might have something to do with it. I'm not one of those people who regards diacetyl as a fatal flaw in lager, but if you object to the buttery flavours it imparts then this might not be the lager for you. All in all it's a decent beer and while not a stand-out example of what Irish breweries produce, I'd be happy to drink it ahead of the other likely options in Dingle town's pubs.

A couple more new Irish beers are on the horizon and I'll hopefully get to try them in the coming weeks. Metalman débuted their third recipe, a witbier, in Waterford at the weekend. Meanwhile Diageo Ireland are about to launch their first new beer in several years: a pale ale, no less. While I'm chasing these, more on Argentina's beer, starting tomorrow.

A Cokes and a smile

Anyone else remember Ray Cokes? Early-evening show on MTV Europe in the mid-1990s? No, I wouldn't admit to that in a public forum either. Perhaps Ray hasn't done as well for himself as his colleague from that time Davina McCall, but he did show up a couple of years ago on Belgian telly presenting a show about beer called Tournée Générale. The programme has since spawned a second series, and it offers us a slightly askew take on this month's Session topic -- beer art and breweriana. Curtis has asked us to pick our favourite example of cap or label art, but I'm not one for covering old ground on this blog. Instead of an artistic endeavour promoting beer, I give you a beer which promotes an artistic endeavour: season 2 tie-in beer Tournée Générale Tripel Hop.

It's brewed by Palm but the design (love that minimalism) more prominently bears the logos of the host TV channel and Ray's production company.

Though it makes no style claims, it's 7.5% ABV and fits in with the new-ish wave of Belgian IPAs. Fitting for the accompaniment to a documentary there's a long explanation of the hopping process on the bottle: Magnum for bittering, late Amarillo and dry-hopped with Cascade. The end result is a bright shade of amber, hazy with vast amounts of fizz.

Like so many of this style, the hop fruitiness gets buried under the powerful Belgian yeast, but before we even get to that there's a strongly sweet barley sugar base, with only the busy carbonation keeping it from getting too sticky. The yeast esters follow, a mix of bananas and pear drops, and only after this do the hops get a look in. Soft and succulent fruit flavours are what's going on: honeydew and nectarine for the most part.

It's an enjoyable and well-constructed beer, all in. I'm even more impressed that a show about beer had the good sense to put an accompanying brew together, one which showcases excellently what malt, hops and yeast do. Interactive TV at its best; breweriana you can drink.