All the things

These round-ups are never long filling out. Here's all the recent(ish) releases from Irish micros that have come way way since the last one.

New Ireland has returned to the fray with a re-release of its Savage pale ale, and a new saison: Survivor, both now in cans. Survivor is a fizzy beast -- even a pint glass wasn't enough to allow pouring in one go. It lists tea on the ingredients and the blurb mentions bergamot, so I'm guessing Earl Grey. It works great: a bright and spritzy burst of citrus on top of the dry earthy saison flavour. I found it superbly thirst-quenching, though it's an unreasonable 6% ABV. It probably needs that for the satisfyingly full body, mind. The second pour dropped the lees into the glass, increasing the saison grittiness and lessening the fruit proportionally. Both approaches are valid. Great beer, overall.

White Hag are pressing the right buttons with the description of Oscar. First off, they're calling it a "table IPA" calling to mind the magnificent "table saison" they created with Brew By Numbers last summer. And secondly the blurb says it's a scaled down (2.6% ABV) version of the flawless Little Fawn. All signs point to something wonderful. And it smells wonderful too: the same dive-in mandarin and kiwi juiciness that Little Fawn enjoys. It's a leeeetle bit watery at the front, but only for a second. Then stand by as the juice rushes in. It's not the thick smoothie effect of thick New England IPAs, but nor is it thinly-diluted cordial. It's freshly squeezed mango, grapefruit and tangerine with the bits filtered out. The finish is quicker than Little Fawn, and the flavour a little less involved, but considering the drop in ABV this is an amazing piece of work. Four tall cans for €10 in Stephen Street News. Drink it all summer long.

The newest arty pale ale from O Brother is called Bale Out: 5.3% ABV and a hazy pale yellow. It's extremely sweet, beyond fruit and into artificially flavoured fruit candy. Fake banana and fake pineapple are the mainstays; a bit of mallow foam, a bit of jelly chew. There's a creamy texture to go with that, and the faintest green bitterness on the very end, but nothing that approximates balance. I'm not averse to this sort of hazy tropical pale ale -- I'll happily cite Trouble's Ambush as a prime local example -- but this one tips over the edge into not being beer-like enough.

Its companion piece is Plucky No. 8: a double IPA, 9.2% ABV, fermented with kveik. It's an opaque banana yellow and is very sweet, in the contemporary style. Again, bitterness doesn't feature in a big way, and whatever citrus hops they've used give it more creaminess, like lemon curd. There's a certain alcohol heat, but not a burn, and it certainly tastes nothing like the stated ABV. A slight buzz of garlic finishes it off. Fans of custardy New England double IPAs will be all over this: it delivers everything they want. I'm not a huge fan of the genre but I could tell this is a good one. As well as the lack of burn there's no yeasty interference from the murk. Less sweetness and more bitterness would be an improvement for me, but it's very accessible, tasty and enjoyable.

Lough Gill re-upped their Cashmere and Idaho-7 no-boil IPA which was such a success at the Alltech festival back in the spring. This time the ABV is up to 7.1% and it has a name: Craftsman. It's a hazy yellow colour and pushes masses of peach and pineapple flavours right from the start. There's a roughness around the edges, however; a gritty savoury thing and an alcohol heat which shouldn't really be surprising. Although it's good, I think the lower ABV suited the formula better.

By law each of these round-ups must include an Irish brut IPA -- I wouldn't drink them otherwise. Third Barrel's Too Brutylicious is better than most, however. They've achieved a good balance here between hop fruit and dryness, and haven't enzyme'd all the character out of it. It's a pale hazy amber colour and 5.9% ABV. Lots of busy foam piled up as I poured, eventually settling to a respectable lasting head. An orange-skin bitterness is the first part of the flavour to land -- the sort you'd find in an old-school San Diego IPA. The brut-ness scorches across the palate after it, a rough rasp of metal and sandpaper: unnecessary and adding nothing positive. The beer succeeds in spite, not because, of it. It's full bodied but refreshing, and there's enough residual sugar to carry the hopping into a long finish. A light touch on the brut is the way to go with these, for as long as the fashion lasts.

So let's see how Black's get on with their third brut IPA. I'm not sure the second version of Super Dry can be improved upon. Grand Slam was created for the Six Nations back in February. It's 6% ABV, hopped with a power combo of Citra, Mosaic and Simcoe, and a clear golden colour. There's an almost lager-like quality to the dryness: simple and clean, though obviously with American C-hop flavours on top, rather than noble ones. It doesn't taste drained like many of these do, but it's not very exciting either. I enjoyed the bottle quickly but wanted something with a bit more kick after it.

New sour and hoppy beers are sadly thin on the ground so I was all over Ain't No TANG! when Third Circle released it recently. They describe it as a "tart NE pale", and while there's no lactose among the ingredients it does have that milkshakey vanilla aroma amongst the stonefruit hopping. I was expecting sweet and gummy to taste but the sourness really comes to the fore: clean and tangy, the body remarkably light and crisp. The hops are tangerine and honeydew in the finish, which is nice, but annoyingly caraway up front. That would have bothered me more, but for the way the tartness moves the flavours along, with nothing lingering on the palate very long. It's refreshing and enjoyable; great for the summer.

Kelly's Mountain Brewery went out of business late last year. I hadn't realised that there was one last beer from them out there: the poignantly-named Dreamers, an American-style pale ale, draped in funereal purple. I bought and drank it on the day the best-before was up. It was a big gusher, foaming everywhere and taking an indecently long time to get in the glass. When it got there, a dun and hazy reddish, it tasted of strawberries -- still with plenty of hop fruit freshness -- plus a pleasing dry tea quality. It's much more like an English bitter than anything American: happy and wholesome. That effect is helped by a texture which is soft despite the big carbonation. I was rarely a huge fan of this brewery's work, but this is one of their best. Sorry to see them go.

For a whole variety of reasons we don't see many Irish triple IPAs, some of which were explained by Larkin's Brewing owner Cillian when I visited recently: it's a lot of effort to get the desired gravity. And this example, Live Till You Die, has plenty of gravity, finishing up at 10.75% ABV. New England-style IPAs, of which this is one, tend to be quite a bright and pale yellow; this is a darker, brooding ochre. The aroma is less serious: a fun and zippy burst of jaffa and satsuma. The flavour is more restrained, hopwise, and it's the thick malt and big booze which dominate, nudging this towards barley wine territory. The orangey thing is still there, rendered cordial-like. Funny, it's not a flavour I associate with resinous Simcoe, but that's the sole hop used. While this one isn't a riot of hops, it is enjoyable: clean and warming without being hot, though probably better suited to winter than high summer.

And speaking of summer, I got a seriously sunny seasonal vibe from the new ones out of Ballykilcavan, the Laois farm-brewery's first foray into cans. Millhouse is the lighter of them: a session IPA of just 3.5% ABV. It seemed a bit watery and dead on pouring, a wan hazy orange colour and a reluctance to form a head. The aroma is a punchy tangerine sweetness with chew-candy overtones, while the texture is as thin as I feared, providing very little platform for the flavour. There's more of that fruit candy on tasting, tailing off quickly to a hard pithy bitterness with a dusting of sesame and onion. Not great, but at least it doesn't hang around on the palate. The balance is out of kilter here: it somehow manages to be overly sweet while missing a portion or two of malt. It is still drinkable despite this, and is even properly refreshing. Far from the best of its kind, though.

If the low gravity was the problem then Secret Passion should have that sussed, being a double dry-hopped pale ale of 6.5% ABV, featuring added passionfruit and peach. It's certainly livelier, pouring more thickly, with a fun pink blush to the colour. The aroma is understated: just a whiff of peach concentrate and nothing resembling hops. The texture is as heavy as expected, showing a similar gloopiness as super-strength tramp-lager, with the attendant heat. Fruit syrup is the first flavour to arrive, giving the profile an air of tinned fruit salad. There's a layer of vanilla too, and when added to the creamy texture and the alcoholic liqueur buzz, it ends up as a trifle of a beer. That took me a while to get used to, but I began to enjoy it once I did. A little like the triple IPA above, it's perhaps too warming for the summer and its particular brand of heavy ripe fruit would work well in colder weather. On the down side, for what's supposed to be in a hop-forward style, there's very little hop character.

Another pair of new cans came from Hopfully, now relocated from Dublin to Lough Gill in Sligo. Both are named Better Call Sour. Pomegranate and Basil is the weaker of the two at 5.5% ABV. It's a pleasing pinkish copper colour, and unsurprisingly the savoury basil is front and centre in the aroma. The first sip delivers a distinct but not extreme tartness. The fruit follows this, and though it does genuinely have the dry pinch of real pomegranate, I'm not sure I would have been able to identify it. There's only a flash of it before the basil arrives: not fresh and leafy but tasting cooked and soggy -- I don't think it adds anything positive. Ditch the herb and up the pomegranate would be my recommendation for this. It is interesting, though: twists like this on fruited sour beer are too rare and to be welcomed.

The other fruit/herb combo is Peach and Sage, with the ABV, for some reason, going up to 5.9%. It's a lovely clear bright golden colour with a handsome layer of steady foam on top. Sage is a bit of a beast and tends to dominate anything it's put into. Not so here, though. Yes it's there, adding a sweet meadowy character to the whole thing, but it's not the main act. Once again it's the clean, tooth-stripping sourness that rules. The peach is pretty much absent, however. This could almost pass as a plain Berliner weisse at half the strength. As such, I liked it. A little more fruit character -- peach or whatever -- would be nice, but it's a rock-solid balanced and summery sour beer as is.

This year's second Rye River special edition was launched in late June in the unlikely surrounds of The Bottler's Bank in Rathgar. It's not far out of my way so I dropped in for a sample. This is a very highly hopped India pale lager called Jigsaw. Though only slightly hazy, it's very heavy-textured, with an almost greasy feel, presumably from the bales of Mosaic that were thrown in. The hop's subtle mango and apricot notes are rather overwhelmed by cannabis resins and a vegetal bitterness. It had definitely lost whatever lager-like qualities it once had, but approach it as an American-style pale ale and it's a fantastic example. One to get hold of when it's fresh, though, I'd say.

Everything has been pretty pale so far. Simon brought a bit of darkness to UnderDog on the occasion of the pub's second birthday: Anarres, an imperial stout based on their formidable Utopian. This 11%-er was over a year old and had turned somewhat autolytic in that time, showing notes of Bovril and gravy. Thankfully there was enough other character to prevent that from taking over. Predominantly, it had the palate-sucking dryness of extremely high-cocoa dark chocolate and a hard liquorice bitterness. Drinking this is serious business and it's very much not for the pastry-guzzlers. And all the better for that, frankly. Cheers Simon.

After all that, some non-alcoholic refreshment to finish. Wicklow Wolf have rejigged the recent Moonlight 1% ABV Coffee Ale into Moonlight Hoppy Ale, halving the alcohol and turning it a bright pale orange. Lactose is the secret weapon against alcohol-free sweetness. It smells powdery: citric like sherbet and bitter like aspirin. And it's still thin, the lactose doing not much more than adding a flavour and feel of old-school yellow vanilla ice cream. Thankfully the bitterness is restrained in the flavour, with only a tiny hint of that aspirin, and there's even a proper hop resin acidity. I found it unconvincing as a beer substitute but it would still do in a pinch when you want hops but not booze.

A valid choice, but not for me.