From far and wide

The White Hag Brewery in Ballymote Co. Sligo celebrated its fourth birthday at the end of July with the second outing of the Hagstravaganza festival. Like last year I was up and back on the same day so had to make the most of the available drinking time. I think I did. You're getting two posts this year.

From the pre-published list, the brewery that particularly struck me as of interest was Berlin's Schneeeule as I've heard good things about their Berliner weisse. My first call, then, was Otto, a weisse with elderflower at only 3% ABV. I was astounded. It's wheaty and mildly sour, and the elderflower adds a fresh and fruity complexity, but it lacks anything distinctive. I guess I just thought it would be sourer.

I was on firmer ground when I spotted Dutch brewery Nevel on the board, having really enjoyed one of theirs at the Leuven Innovation Festival earlier this year. The first to pass my way this time was Gulzig, described as a "New England wild ale". This is a massive Brettanomyces party: the purest form of funky horse blanket, illuminated by a lighter and sweeter peach. All of the wonders of Brett are present and loud in larger-than-life 3D Technicolor. If you like that sort of thing, this one is near perfection.

That got followed quickly by Borderless, another wild one, this time with pineapple, ginger and habanero chilli. The aroma is probably its best feature, being clean, spicy and tart, much like a real Belgian lambic. Pineapple dominates the taste, in that sort of sweaty stringy way you get with real fibrous pineapple. There's no juice and no spicing either, surprisingly. Still, there's nothing wrong with the taste, and that fabulous smell would let me forgive a lot.

Last of the available Nevel offerings while I was there was Alm, a saison brewed with mugwort. It left me none the wiser about how mugwort tastes, because this was a straight-up saison, as far as I could see. It's a modest 5.5% ABV, a pale and hazy yellow colour, and tastes of spicy pepper, mouthwatering melon, before a bitter lemon rind finish. It's crisper than a typical saison, with less of the gritty yeast notes they often show, and certainly tastes lighter than the advertised strength. It's good, though, even if I feel a little shortchanged on the mugwort.

Brewfist made a rare return to Ireland at the festival, and I got to do a little catching up with what they'd been up to since I last drank their beer in 2014. Adding Grapefruit to Spaceman isn't the most radical departure, but there we are. It wasn't worthwhile and this is just a sticky mess tasting like pungently sweet body spray.

Il Grilotalpa was a bit better. This is a hopped-up lager, showing the greenly bitter flavour of Simcoe in quantity, with some cleaner zesty lemon notes too. At 5.2% ABV it should be quite sessionable, but the bitterness and a thick texture would likely prevent that. Only OK, is my verdict.

It's about time we had something dark, so here's Brewfist's Dr Ray, a 10% ABV porter, barrel aged in Italian wine casks, with added vanilla. I was expecting sweet and chocolatey but the barrels have really brought their influence to bear and the aroma is strongly vinous: alcohol and dark grapes. The bitterness level is high, which I suspect may have more to do with roasted grains than hops, and this combines again with the wine to give it a retsina or balsamic resin effect. All the while it's smooth and filling. This is classy, integrated and wonderfully gimmick-free.

Magic Rock brought a couple of hacked versions of their regular beers over from Huddersfield. Spruce Kiss is a gose: an appropriate hazy yellow, and dry, with a zesty lemonade flavour. There's nothing particularly spruce-like about it, though it has a pleasant white-pepper complexity which may be related. It's unexciting but perfectly refreshing at 4.4% ABV.

At the opposite end of the scale we have their Tiramisu Strongman, an 11.2% ABV pastry barley wine, aged in bourbon barrels. The bourbon is very apparent in the aroma, while the flavour adds smooth chocolate and cream. It's all very luxurious until the finish is interrupted by a sharp bitter twang. Maybe it just needs some more maturation. It's still very good, however.

We stay in Yorkshire for Northern Monk's Neapolitan ice cream pale ale. Its 6.2% ABV is a bit serious but the rest is jolly. Frozen strawberry is the main flavour, backed by creamy vanilla though missing the chocolate, and certainly anything hop-related. I was surprised to find it's a genuinely rock-solid enjoyable beer despite the intentional daftness.

The only other English beer to pass my way was Wild's Wineybeest, an imperial stout aged, obviously enough, in a wine barrel -- Burgundy, to be precise. It's one of those wine-barrel beers that really makes the most of the resources available. The base Wildebeest stout is still fully present, especially in the heady fresh-brewed coffee aroma, and then the flavour adds sharp and sweet notes of grapeskin. They sound like they should clash, but while not exactly complementary, the contrast does work well. There's no mistaking that it's 11% ABV either.

Founders bore the burden of representing all of American brewing though I'm not sure the punters were all that interested, as their Double Trouble double IPA took a while to move. It was disappointing, to be honest. Though a clean-looking clear orange colour with a handsome thick layer of foam even on a small pour, it tries too hard to be aggressively bitter. Lime skin is spiced up with a little jasmine but there's no real complexity, just acres of acrid acid set on toffee malt. It might be thrilling if you've just emerged from ten years of IPA abstinence but it didn't do it for me.

Ontario's Muskoka brewery flew the flag for Canada, and I tried their Winter Beard, billed as a "double chocolate cranberry stout". Though the ABV is a relatively tame 8%, this is another creamy, chocolatey wonder. The sweet milk chocolate is balanced nicely by a sharper espresso bitterness, though it still retains its silky smoothness. I couldn't find any cranberry in there anywhere, but I didn't really miss it either.

The beers that travelled furthest to Ballymote came from Stone & Wood in New South Wales. I had Cloud Catcher, a 5.5% ABV pale ale brewed with Galaxy and Ella and tasting lovely and juicy. Fresh ripe peach is the main element, sweet and quenching to begin with, before turning sharp and mouthwatering at the end. Very nicely put together, and a particular shout-out to everyone involved in keeping it so fresh on its 17,000 km journey.

We return to Europe with O'Clock Brewing, based west of Paris not far from Versailles. They had a 5% ABV lime and peppercorn pale ale which really laid on the pepper. Tim-Ut's dry and savoury aroma was the first clue, and then a heavy and somewhat acrid spicing in the flavour. The citrus and pepper didn't really meld well together in this, making it too harsh overall. I have an abnormally large appetite for pepper in beer but I think I found my limit in this one.

The same brewery's Hazy Jet was much more enjoyable. It was advertised as a New England IPA, and while it was certainly cloudy and had a certain creaminess of texture, it was much more about the zesty lemons, giving the whole thing the feel of a lemon meringue pie. Delicious and sinkable, even when the ABV was an excessive 6.5%.

A Swedish imperial stout closes off this post: Hankyman from Malmö Brewing. I'd had a couple of their beers before and wasn't terribly impressed, and the same went for this imperial milk stout. It's 11.2% ABV and has all the density and sugariness that one might expect from the strength and style. Searching for complexity I found a dash of warming Tia Maria and the tiniest tinniest twang of hops, but that's the lot. These high notes fade quickly leaving a wheaty Ready Brek cereal effect behind as the finish. It's an undemanding beer and I would have liked it to do more.

That concludes all the visiting brewers' wares that I tried. In the next post I'll finish off with a look at what the locals brought, as well as a couple of collaborations The White Hag were involved in abroad.