Farmhouse fruit

Ireland's pale ales are released with such frequency as to necessitate a regular round-up on here. Maybe it's just because it's summer, but it's looking like the same may be necessary for wild fruit beers. I've built up quite a collection of them, and while I'm sure none are likely to explode, I do need to drink them. Let's get started.

Ballykilcavan was the first of this lot to come my way. Clancy's Cans #5 is a Hibiscus & Grapefruit Farmhouse Ale, which is an intriguing combination. It's on the strong side for this sort of thing at 4.8% ABV and a bright and cheery shade of purpleish pink. The aroma is no more than mildly tart and the texture thin, which I guess is to make it summery and refreshing: definitely preferable to the hot jam some of these get off on. A dry quality goes along with that, and despite the colour it's the grapefruit that's loudest: peppery spice meeting acidic spritz. The cherry/raspberry effect of the hibiscus adds no more than a topping on this. It's not really sour, though there is a gritty, earthy saison side, giving it the wild dimension. Overall it's rather jolly. Grapefruit in saison is a tried and tested formula, and that's pretty much what you get here, wearing a pink jacket.

I'm a fan of the daft bubblegum flavour of prickly pear so was delighted to see Rye River include it in their early summer seasonal special, High Noon. It's joined by blood orange in the 4.5%-er but other than the pinkish tint I sense little sign of it. Produced by mixed fermentation, the beer is primarily sour, with a soft and super-clean tartness the main feature. I approve of that in fruited ones. While there's a sweet side, I don't think I'd be able to pick out which fruits were involved. And to be honest, I don't care. I drank this outside on a far-too-warm evening and it was just what I needed. The coldness, the tartness, the fizz: a perfect formula for refreshment. Complexity can take a back seat for now.

Lough Gill is perhaps the most prolific of the sweet 'n' sour crew. The latest is raspberry flavoured and called Ripple. This is 4.7% ABV and a deep, clear, blood-red colour. The pink foam on top is short-lived and after a second you're left with what looks like a glass of Ribena. The raspberry aroma is sweet but not overpowering and there's a pleasing pinch of tartness at the front of the flavour. It turns sweeter afterwards yet retains a hard mineral tang, with enough sour to keep things clean and refreshing all the way through. The raspberry tastes natural while the lactose keeps a low profile. It's an all-round good 'un; not a masterpiece of mixed-fermentation complexity or anything, but a very decent fruity thirst-quencher.

It's four from Hopfully next. First up, No Cars Fruited Gose with another off-kilter fruit combination: the sharpness of lime against the sweetness of passionfruit. Does it work? Yes, actually. Delightfully. They're separate in the aroma but the combined effect is like a classy cloudy lemonade: a raw and intense citrus bitterness loaded up with sugar for balance. On tasting the passionfruit lands first, adding as much to the texture as the flavour, giving it a kind of smoothie effect. The lime arrives late on this soft texture and gives all the flavour with little of the acidic kick. It's a fun combination, weighty yet refreshing and well balanced. What's missing from the picture is any sourness. While it does contain salt and coriander, there's also lactose and vanilla, so I can't see any justification for slapping the gose designation on it. But whatever: it's delicious. I'm guessing there was a lot of experimentation before they settled on lime and passionfruit in the perfect ratio.

Shortly before this came out there was also No Cars Triple Fruited Gose , this one with peach and cherry to go with the lime, coriander, salt and lactose. No vanilla, though. Wouldn't want to go overboard with silly ingredients. The cherry gives it a pink colour and it smells surprisingly savoury: a sort of grainy rye-cracker kind of thing. There's a hint of that in the flavour: a crispness that helps balances the sweet side. That sweetness is primarily the cherry's doing: a gooey maraschino jam at the centre with an edge of lime and a little ice cream from the lactose. Again it lacks a proper sour bite and we don't hear much from the peach, but I like cherries and I'm glad they're in the driving seat, with the limes reading the map. It's not as good as the previous one, though, being busier and less sure of what it's doing. It's fine though.

I almost omitted No Cars Dry Hopped Gose from this post for lack of fruit but a glance at the small print tells me there's lime in this one, alongside salt and coriander, plus Simcoe, Mosaic, Azacca and Comet hops. Oh and lactose. Always with the lactose. This is the palest of the three, being an almost greenish shade of murky yellow. There's a lovely aroma of citrus fruit meeting acidic tartness and a saline mouthfeel, like proper lime-and-lactose-free gose. The lime punches hard in the flavour, coming across concentrated and sugary. But the herb, the hops and, especially, the salt help to balance it. It took me a moment to twig that this tastes like a Margarita, with similar refreshment superpowers. While one might hope for a bigger hop character from something describing itself as "dry hopped", every ingredient does pull its weight and the result is very tasty.

For the latest No Cars, Hopfully put the Lime with a Coconut. I drank them both together. It looks like they wanted to double up on that coconut too as it's hopped with Sabro. Both the headline ingredients are very prominent in the aroma, set on a cleanly tart base. Surprisingly, the coconut takes a bit of a back seat when it comes to the foretaste, with lots of lime and salt for the Margarita effect again. The lactose is adding a little substance to the mouthfeel -- required at 3.5% ABV -- but thankfully no flavour; citric and bacterial sourness ruling supreme. I had this down as extremely similar to the previous one until the very end where there's a cheeky pinch of desiccated coconut. I'm not sure it adds anything useful. This is fine but I had lost interest in the series by the time I'd got this far.

We finish on a whopper from Third Barrel: 6.5% ABV of raspberry and mango called On To The Next One! It looks like a Bloody Mary in the glass, thick and opaquely scarlet. There's lots of raspberry in the aroma, as one would expect, and it's cut with something softer but I wouldn't be able to guess mango without being told. This isn't a combination I have encountered before but it smells promising. What's disappointing is there's almost no sourness to taste. There's a tang, sure, but it's easily attributable to the berries. Though not full-on sticky jam it is closer to a smoothie than raspberryade. That tropical buzz I detected in the aroma helps keep the raspberry somewhat in check, but again there wasn't anything specifically mango about it. A peppery spice gives the finish a kick, though I could still be thinking about Bloody Marys again. That happens. By the end I was enjoying it; dialled-back sourness is less of a problem when there aren't shovelfuls of lactose rubbing salt in the wound.

This sort of beer gets a lot of stick, and while I'm sure a proportion of it is deserved, there's some very good examples in the genre. This was just a few examples.