National celebration

This year, the St Patrick's Day long weekend coincides with the opening of the seventh Alltech festival at the Convention Centre. To celebrate, I'm bringing you a week of posts about Irish beers, beginning with this mixed assortment.

The White Hag kicks it off, making the move to 440ml cans for the first time with Fionn, a double IPA. It's densely hazy, of course, though no nod towards New England is made on the label copy. The aroma is an equal mix of vanilla, grapefruit and garlic, while the flavour, experienced cold, is a mix of soft sweet pineapple flesh and a harder, more acidic grapefruit and lime. I was a bit clumsy with my pour so got more yeast dregs than necessary, which spoiled things, but it's cleaner if you treat it gently. It's a middle-of-the-road modern IPA; you've tasted it before. But apparently it's the first in a series. I don't know where it's going to go, but maybe wait for the next one.

Also in a four-forty is Third Barrel's Is This Real Life?, pitched squarely at the three letter acronym fans as a DDH IPA. 6.1% ABV gives it plenty of scope to pile in the hops, and pile them in it does. In defiance of fashion it's full-on bitter and spicy, sparking with notes of grapefruit, peppercorn and dry grass. While the flavour is on the severe side, its aroma is so fresh and rounded that's forgivable. This is a can of pure west coast joy. I don't remember enjoying this type of beer so much when they were commonplace, but now they're a rarity it's a breath of fresh air. Fresh, piney, green air.

Can three for today comes from Whiplash and is a pale ale of 4.3% ABV called Small Moments. It poured a sickly opaque yellow colour and had an odd, but not unpleasant, aroma: spicy perfumed notes of jasmine, violet and bergamot. There's some of that in the flavour, which is nice, and some smooth tropical juice in the finish. There's a "but" coming, however: the big and obvious one. Yeast bite, dirty and sharp, sucks much of the fun out of it; the concentrated garlic oil adds nothing positive either. This is yet another modern hop-forward beer which leaves me fantasising about the brewery finishing it, letting the dregs drop out until it's clean and clear. It does round out a little as it warms but never quite transcends the things I didn't like about it. Ho hum.

Trouble dropped one of their too-rare new releases in the form of Peach Out, described, intriguingly, as a peach and white chocolate IPA. It has a New Englandy appearance: a bright murky orange with little effort at a head. The chocolate is very apparent in the aroma and absolutely dominates the flavour: sweet and creamy, like a Milky Bar. Next to this sits the fruit and hops, combined into a zesty, jammy mix of satsuma and apricots.  The combination is very strange indeed, and won't be for everyone, but it worked for me. The texture is light enough that it doesn't get cloying, and there's a certain balancing savoury pepper spice in the finish, which I'm guessing is the residual yeast: welcome, for once. I'm impressed by how it manages to taste as strongly of chocolate as any chocolate stout without losing sight of the whole pale ale genre. Weird, no question, but fun with it.

Larkin's makes a return to lager brewing with Operator, one of the India pale variety. It's a clear golden colour and 5% ABV. There's not much of an aroma, the hops not making their presence known until tasting time. That reveals a crisp lemon sorbet followed by spicy citrus and floral lavender notes, finishing bitterly grassy. That middle bit makes it taste quite un-lager-like, but it is still properly clean and quite delicious. One to enjoy on its own level rather than compare with its peers.

The 4.3% ABV session IPA from Hope has been around a while but has just got new branding and a name: Hop-On. It's yellow with a very slight haze. I found it a little plain when I tried a pint. There's a certain quantity of citrus fruit flavour and bitterness, but not much of either. The finish comes very quickly. I got a spike of yeast bite on the end too. It's easy drinking, for sure, but lacks character, I thought. There are much better versions of this sort of thing around.

The first of a new collaboration series from Eight Degrees landed last week: Yellow Ball, an IPA brewed with American breweries Bale Breaker and Revolution. This is a clear copper colour and sports lots of dank resins right from the get-go. There are bags of tannins behind this, and a long-lasting bitterness, the resins coating the tongue and clinging on tight. With all that crystal malt and grapefruit, it's a bit of a '90s throwback, but enjoyable nonetheless. The surprising bit is that something this straightforward took three breweries to formulate, but I'm not complaining. Rack up the next one.

Some breweries still use bottles. Fancy! St Mel's launched the third in its Black Album sequence of dark beers. It's called Proliferation and is in one of my favourite styles: schwarzbier. The label says it's bottle conditioned and dry hopped, neither of which would be typical, I think. Maybe it was the shape of the glass but it looked like a porter on pouring: a deep red-brown with a generous off-white head -- perhaps a more slender vessel would have convinced me better. I couldn't shake the porter thing on the first sip: lots of roast and quite a creamy texture. It took me a while to notice how clean it was, the crispness absolutely singing and barely an ester to be found. A mild noble bitterness and a touch of chocolate in the finish are the only nods to complexity; otherwise it's a straight and honest dark lager, beautifully refreshing at just 4.8% ABV. A cold draught pint would be just the thing.

We finish back at White Hag, on a Sligo-Cork joint effort, a beer that's seen a bit of the country. The full name is Brett Finished Bourbon Barrel Ale, created by The White Hag for Bradley's off licence in Cork. This started out as the brewery's Yule Ale, so was originally brewed with ginger and cinnamon, but that was two years ago. In the meantime it's spent a year in bourbon oak and another in a Brettanomyces-inoculated wine barrel. Phew. Head retention was lost somewhere along the way and it's almost completely flat: a wineish red-brown. The aroma is quite funky, offering old grapes, old oak and a touch of red wine vinegar. Its texture is thick, befitting the 7.2% ABV, and the flavour has a lot in common with a big and mature Flanders red. There are fresh raspberries up front, then a steady sour burn, bringing in the sweet vanilla oak and luscious grape. The dusty Christmas spicing from the original beer is still apparent too, so no part has been wasted on the journey. For all the complexity, it's not busy, staying smooth and well-integrated; comparable to its Belgian peers. I'm sure it'll get more interesting over time so if you have a bottle put aside, maybe save it for next winter.

That's it for today. More cans tomorrow.