Gill trip

Prolific Sligo brewery Lough Gill has three for us today. I tend to associate their output most with fruited sour beers and amped-up pastry stouts, but they're only reverting to type with one of today's selection.

The latest in this year's slew of Irish witbiers is Bán. The name gives it an Irish twist but otherwise it's straight-down-the-line Belgian-style, with wheat, orange peel and coriander. So it goes with the medium-orange hazy appearance, though the aroma lays on the herbs a little more thickly than most of these. Same for the flavour, unsurprisingly, but before you even get to the oily coriander there's the very dry wheat husk to contend with. Witbier shouldn't taste rough but this does. There's a strong bitterness from the hops and no balancing zest or sweetness from the orange. The finish is slightly funky, with a saline sweaty quality. Maybe Hoegaarden has infantilised my palate for witbier, but this is an acquired taste which I was not prepared to try and acquire.

The brewery turned five years old recently, marking the occasion with a re-imagining of one of its original recipes, Thieving Bastards. Five Candles is paler than the precursor, and clearly labelled as an Extra Special Bitter -- I marked TB down originally because I wasn't sure while drinking it what it was meant to be. I'd like to think there would be no mistaking this one: it's a rich amber colour and mixes weighty caramel malt with distinctively English hops which are a little floral and a lot tangy. A serious waxy bitterness in the finish gives it an assertive personality: this is no bland brown bitter. 5% ABV is modest and it tastes bigger, with bags of comforting warmth. It's a very well-made example of ESB and it's nice to see the style represented on the off licence shelves locally. A cask version, now...

That's it for the solid, reliable, 20th century styles. Obviously there has to be some contemporary nonsense, and in fairness Lough Gill does contemporary nonsense better than most. Loconut is an imperial stout of 10.5% ABV with coconut, blueberries and vanilla. Blueberries tend to disappear into the background of beers but they were immediately apparent from the aroma of this one as it poured. They're still there when sniffing the glass, and the coconut too: fresh and greasy, and surprisingly complementary. On tasting... omg blueberries. All the blueberries. Too much blueberries? Quite possibly. It's very jammy and extremely sweet with it. I found myself searching for the stout side of the equation, finding a little chocolate, a tiny pinch of roast, but all of it buried under the mashed blueberries. I was disappointed at first: it's hard drinking; unsubtle, too sweet, and not properly beerlike. The saving grace is the aftertaste: there's a lovely afterglow of fruit-infused milk chocolate that makes the initial difficulties worth suffering through. This isn't Lough Gill's best work in the silly stout genre, but my main takeaway is that proper blueberry stout is possible. I have hope for the future.

Taken together, they're a pleasingly diverse bunch. The colours alone bring us on a journey.