The reboot is on the other foot

It's catch-up time with BRÚ today, a couple of brand new beers and some rejigged old ones too.

It joins the select number of Irish breweries to have released a grodziskie, with Old Times. This Polish-style smoked wheat beer is usually cloudy but it poured clear for me, a small quantity of lees having settled to the bottom of the can. There's a balanced and sweet smokiness, a little kippery but enticing nonetheless. The flavour similarly gets the balance just right. The goal here is quaffable, sessionable refreshment and 3.8% ABV has a lot to do with how it's achieved. Serving it cold as the first beer on a warm day also really optimised it. And then the clean smoke is at the centre but not any way cloying or overdone. Behind it there's a twist of zesty lemon and a complementary herbal note from the inclusion of coriander. The unusual flavour profile suggests it's not likely to become a regular part of the BRÚ line-up, but I think it deserves to become a go-to drinking beer rather than an exotic novelty.

From our savoury starter, straight to dessert. Version 1 of Blurry Furry was a Berliner weisse with added blueberry; the second is more ambitious, mixing Passion Fruit, Orange and Guava. It looks quite serious: a crystalline orange rather than the opaque smoothie effect you often get with these. The guava loses out a bit but there's plenty of the other pair: juicy and sweet passionfruit with a citrus orange spritz. The tartness is restrained and it's missing the mineral cleanness I enjoy in light sour beers, offering instead a restrained crispness. Overall it's pretty good: another clean and undemanding 3.8%-er, refreshing but with plenty of interesting things going on. 

To IPA, then, and number three in BRÚ's Hop Bomb series. This was created with the Pinks Boots Society and uses Cashmere, Ahtanum, Citra, Loral and Sabro. There's a lot happening there, but it melds together well in the glass: primarily fruity, with luscious satsuma, apricot and pineapple, then a hardy blast of coconut as Sabro makes itself felt, and then just as it begins to seem like we're taking a ride on the dessert trolley a harder dank and oily bitterness finishes it off. I found the coconut getting obnoxiously loud as the beer went on, unbalancing it a little, but at the same time what you get is all hop, as befits the name. All things considered it's a good mix of modern hop flavours, and another triumph of understated complexity from the brewery.

Finally, we take the opposite approach with single-hopper King Talus, the second collaboration with top Dublin offy Craft Central. Nelson is a tough act to follow but this does a pretty good job. It's pale and slightly hazy, 5.7% ABV, and smelling of ripe tropical fruit with a harder mineral edge, not that far from Nelson Sauvin, in fact. Pith is the hub of the flavour: an initially hard citric bitterness that softens after a moment into tangy grapefruit and lemon. There's a slight plastic twang on the finish but I think it's just a function of the intense bitterness and can't be counted as an off-flavour. Bold and uncompromising bitter beers like this are a little out of fashion at the moment, west coast revival notwithstanding. This one was rather refreshing, in every sense.

I was not expecting a clear run of four superb beers but that's what BRÚ has provided here. As an Irish micro, it may be big and established and leans well into the mainstream, but thanks to its heritage with the more innovative Carrig Brewing it can absolutely turn out specialties with the best of them.