Kinnegar and friends

It's off to Kinnegarland today, to find out what the busy bunnies of Letterkenny have been up to.

Most recently, the Brewers at Play series saw the simultaneous release of numbers 5 and 6. The former is an Apricot Rosemary Sour, created for the Brewgooder project, best known (to me anyway) for the charity lager BrewDog makes for them. This one is a bright and opaque orange colour in the glass, looking and smelling like a fruit cordial. The smell is so sweet I'm not sure I would have identified it as apricot over any other concentrate. That slick and sickly syrup is at the front of the queue on tasting, but it's not the be-all and end-all. A herbal complexity rises behind it, oily and bitter, tasting more like the sharp pine of a classic west coast IPA than novelty rosemary. There's a certain perfumed spice too: an exotic waft of cedar or incense. It's not sour, showing only the fainest tang of acidity. This sort of thing is often quite thin, but here 5% ABV gives it a full and smooth body, carrying the complexity well. It's still a daft novelty, no doubt, but that rosemary adds a dimension of taste that's unusual, creative, and very enjoyable. Sweet fruit "sours" are ubiquitous these days; the opposite side of the hazy IPA coin. It's very pleasing to find one brewer doing something genuinely interesting with the format.

B@P 6 is called Uncle Grumpy, a collaboration with Boundary, and rosemary features again, this time in a saison. The ABV has dropped to 4.5% while the beer has dropped bright: a cheery clear golden colour. Primarily this is one of those dry and peppery saisons; very authentically Belgian tasting. The rosemary oil is apparent in the aroma, pushed up by a very active carbonation. It's sharp on a number of fronts: the fizz, the herb and the earthy saison character. Rosemary helps round it out, taking some of the edge off and lessening the severity. While it's unusual, it's not novelty for its own sake, and I could imagine a Belgian brewer making something very similar, if none have already. I wouldn't go so far as to call it an improvement on classic saison, but it's a fun and playful twist, and it was worth doing.

We finish on an interloper: Big Blue is from Edinburgh's Stewart Brewing and this time Kinnegar is the visiting collaborator. It's 7% ABV and described as a "spiced blueberry stout". Getting blueberry flavour into beer is a challenge at the best of times, doubly so for a stout, and spices? Forget about the fruit. This smells of cakey cinnamon from the very start, and the flavour doesn't get much more interesting: there's a little raisiny sweetness, some bitter roast and the loud cinnamon shouting over the top of both. None of it really stands out though, and the whole picture is less complex than I would expect for something of this strength. The texture is good -- full and soft -- but it doesn't make up for the lack of flavour integration. This is one of those kerr-azy collaborations brewers come up with collectively but which don't do the drinkers -- well, this drinker -- any favours.

I hope Kinnegar has some of that rosemary left over. There's a whole world of recipes it could be brought into.