Sligo's Lough Gill is the second in our sequence, with twin beers which are very different from each other. I see the brewery has adopted the Serious Art approach to branding that appears to be the latest necessity. Lough Gill beers were good even when the artwork was terrible. Anyway...Walls With Wounds is first, a gose with raspberry and blackberry. I came to this after a large meal -- 'tis the season after all -- hoping for something light and palate-cleansing. It is only 3.2% ABV, which boded well. It's a deep opaque red with a generous topping of pink foam: 440ml will have no problem peeping out of a pint glass. Of fruit, salt and sour, the fruit is unsurprisingly foremost: it's thick and yoghurty, a fresh tartness meeting a sharper lactic sour twang. What prevents it turning cloying is the drying saline charge, balancing the sweet with savoury and enhancing the mild sourness. This isn't the piquant cleanser I really wanted, but it's packed with character and impressively interesting, especially given its modest strength.
The Arnold Schwarzenegger to that Danny DeVito is Lupulin Vibrations, a New England-style double IPA at a whopping 8.4% ABV. The haze is present and correct: an opaque orange-yellow. The heat is hidden well by the fuzz, but not bad gritty fuzz: it's a full, smooth and juicy sort of fuzz. There's a mix of jaffa, lemon peel, custard and a pinch of oily garlic. The strength only makes itself felt after all that has paraded through and it all settles in the gut, exuding fuzzy warmth. On the one hand, hot-garlic NEIPA's aren't my kind of thing. But on the other, this has better subtlety and complexity than most, with minimal dreggy interference. If you must drink this sort of thing, drink this one, and that's as close to an endorsement as you'll get from me.Lough Gill here, as usual, proving itself adept across the range of modern beer styles. I like that more of these are coming out in packaged form and that I don't have to wait for a festival to catch up.
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