Try try again

Persistence Brewing Company is the latest addition to Dublin's beer offer, its taps confined to that cluster of trendy bars along Fade Street including Idlewild, Drury Buildings and that one above L'Gueuleton that doesn't actually have a name. It took a bit of poking around to find where the beers are brewed: the brewery in the background on the Persistence website is Rascals, but that seems to have been a couple of years ago. Eventually Kevin the proprietor got back to me to say that the current range comes from JJ's in Limerick with a standalone brewery currently in planning. There'll be four beers in the range eventually, though the pils had yet to be brewed at time of writing and the red ale wasn't on tap when I dropped into Drury Buildings on a rainy lunchtime in August.

I started with the stout, P45, a 4.5% ABV session number served on nitro and looking very much the picture of mainstream industrial Irish stout. It's an especially sweet example of the style, big on chocolate with just a modicum of bitterness in the finish. And that's your lot: it has no particular stand-out features; no quirks or flaws. It's just impressively average. There's nothing here to scare the drinker of mainstream stout (or indeed anyone else) which may be just as well as the bar doesn't serve any other example on draught. This one really could do with a bit more personality.

P60 IPA was much better. An orange hazy affair, it's 6% ABV and has a lovely fresh and spicy hop aroma. It was served extremely cold so the flavours took a while to unfold. There's a nice balance of sweet sherbet zest and a harsher resinous bitterness. The former dominates at first, and is the more enjoyable element. As the beer warms it starts to get heavier and bitterer and more difficult to drink. Still, it's decent stuff and is pretty much what you'd want as a house IPA: hitting the right flavour points without being too complex.

I'll be keeping an eye out for the red and the pils, though I'm expecting similarly workmanlike performances from them as well: both are hard styles to impress with. Perhaps the flair will come once production goes in-house.