Rotters!

What do you mean there's no after party? My plan for the 2019 Borefts Beer Festival was to skip the Friday and use the spare day instead to go to the Borefts After Party held on Sunday at Kompaan in Rotterdam. Except this year, because the brewery is moving, they cancelled it. I was chagrined, and went to Rotterdam anyway, in the pissing rain, out of spite.

First stop was the bar-on-a-boat Vessel 11. They have a range of house beers here though not everything was available. Classic Red was served on cask but wasn't terribly well kept, arriving murky and headless. It's 4.8% ABV and bitter to the point of tartness, though with lots of floral perfume flavour to offset that. Overall there's a bit of a rough homebrew vibe off this, but it has a certain raw charm as well.

L-R: Session Stout, IPA, Classic Red

V11 IPA is a bright orange colour and all of 6.4% ABV. This is a much cleaner and more polished affair all round: hooray for keg dispense, saviour of beer! There's a decent layer of foam, and fresh flavours of cantaloupe and mango. A mild orange-pith bitterness provides just the right amount of balance without interfering. It doesn't taste anything like the strength and I would happily have gone for another in a bigger measure.

It's back to the cask for V11 Session Stout, so bye-bye head retention, and indeed carbonation generally: this arrived quite flat. There's a small herbal complexity with a touch of cola nut but it should be doing more at 5.5% ABV. Burnt caramel and slight clove effect finishes it off. There are no off flavours, and I think what's there would be beneficially boosted if they got the carbonation right.

The Gebrouwen door Vrouwen brand, run by two sisters from Amsterdam, seems to be becoming more prevalent on the Dutch beer scene. Here I tried Gember Goud ("Ginger Gold"), a pale ale with added ginger. It's a meek 4.6% ABV and yellow with just a slight haze. The aroma is like ginger ale mixer more than beer, heavy on the sugar. Refreshing lemon and ginger in the foretaste is followed by a more serious throat-burn. While it offers thirst-quenching summer fun there's also real character, and it's not bland or designed to fill an unfussy market niche.

Our next stop was Bokaal, quite a hip and modern beer café, glass-walled on three sides. Left to right, then, Hijs IPA is by Drift Brouwers and is an orthodox 6.5% ABV. I was wary of the toffee aroma, taking it as a sign this would be under-hopped. And while it's no US-style citrus explosion it does have a complex character all its own. A cedar and incense spiciness is at the heart of it, accentuated with a pleasingly thick and greasy mouthfeel. Although it's bitter enough to count as an IPA there's a touch of dubbel-style fig as well. This is a stately and charming beer, coming more from the Low Countries tradition of brewing than any fast foreign fashion.

Beer and beards, right? I had no idea there's an entire beard-themed beer brand in the Netherlands: De Bebaarde Brouwer. It makes Stoppelbaard Stout, 6.5% ABV and insanely fizzy, turning it annoyingly difficult to pour. There's a bitter dark chocolate aroma and a flavour rich with churro sauce, all of which would be lovely on a smooth base but the hyperactive carbonation here really harshes the mellow. A milky coffee sweetness emerges as it flattens out, but by then everyone was bored with its shenanigans. Sort your conditioning out, beardos.

Finally for here, Seagull, a pale ale from 4 Islands Brewing, a local contract operation. It's a clear lemon yellow with a meringue aroma. The flavour offers soft peach and plum, muted a little by a hard carbonic bite, and finishing on a sterner pith. This is another happy-summer-sunshine beer, even though the bitter sets it a little out of kilter. Good rather than brilliant, I'd say.

Back out into the deluge then, and along the banks of the Rotte to Noordt, a modern shed-like construction in the courtyard of some apartments. Most of the building is a shiny production brewery but there's a front shop with a small taproom.

Left to right again we have Lager Single Hop Mandarina Bavaria, which seems explanatory enough but they've also badged it as an India pale lager. It's oddly dark, a clear copper brown shade. The aroma begins early with the oily hop resins and the texture is correspondingly thick, completely out of character for a lager at 5% ABV. I wouldn't have classed Mandarina as an especially dank hop, but whatever way they've used it here is weedy as hell, albeit shot through with orange oil. It's quite a pleasant effect. File under "good pale ale" rather than anything lagery, however.

L-R: Lager Single Hop, 7 Hops, Madagascar

While we're playing fast and loose with styles, 7 Hops is called a "double pale ale" which seems unnecessarily confusing. It's 7% ABV and, godammit, an IPA. I can see what they're getting at, though: it's light and clean, with a jaffa zestiness and undertones of coconut, hazelnut and red apple. I reckon there's a sweet spot when combining hop varieties: single-hop beers are often one-dimensional, while those with seven or more lose any hop distinctiveness, becoming the flavour equivalent of brown plasticine. This one is fine, but if a lot of effort went in to designing the recipe it wasn't really worth it.

Two pales and a dark: that's the system, so we finish Noordt on their Madagascar Dark Chocolate Porter. At 8% ABV and with an M&S-soft-foodporn name one might expect a certain richness, but for some reason breweries that call imperial-stout-strength beer "porter" tend to make them very dry. This one is all cocoa powder and burnt toast, with a sort of salty chocolate effect that tastes cheap, not luxurious. It's drinkable, and not technically flawed, but quite rough and difficult.

Noordt didn't hugely impress me with this randomly-chosen three, but they seem quite busy and with a big range. I fully accept that they may have much better offerings on the go.

The final stop was Proeflokaal Reijngoud, a sporty corner pub seemingly tied to the Reijngoud brewery elsewhere in town but which didn't sell any Reijngoud beers. Anyone know what that's about?

Let's start with the stout this time: Kompaan's Bloed Broeders, 9.1% ABV and as imperial as you like. It's a deep black colour and fairly flat. There's enough carbonation to push out a rich coffee aroma. From that follows a sumptuous flavour, mixing chocolate, raisin, mocha and Turkish delight, and while it's not off-the-charts strong it does provide a very satisfying warmth. This isn't an extreme stout, just a very well-made one. I can almost forgive them calling off the festival.

I could not go past Brło Berliner Weisse when I saw it on the menu, it being one of those contemporary reference beers / modern classics which I'd never had. And I wasn't hugely impressed by it. It's 4% ABV and a clear golden colour. The aroma is mildly tart with a grainy cracker side that's par for the course with these. A light sourness sits next to a chalky alkalinity, with a squeeze of lemon juice, a swoosh of celery and a watery finish. It's fine but I was expecting something much more involved.

That just leaves the thirsty tiger. Ramses's Den Dorstige Tijger is an IPA, a deep dark red one at 6% ABV. Unsurprisingly from the appearance it's thick and jammy, the innocent floral perfume getting squashed quickly by a heavy herbal bitterness with harsher notes of aspirin. It's tough drinking but certainly holds one's attention to the end.

And that, indeed, is the end for this trip. Despite what I said after my last visit, Rotterdam is hard work to make the most of, being spread out in that mid-20th-century urban planning way. If you're going, do your homework better than I did.