Journey to the Centre

Events are back! Hurrah! My first out-of-town Irish beer excursion since February 2020 was to Athlone, for the third birthday of Dead Centre Brewing's bar, and a first in-person social event by one of the pandemic's great success stories, Craic Beer Community. CBC had teamed up with a number of Irish breweries to create a set of specially-created beers and this was an opportunity to try some of them on tap.

But before that, and since I was early, some new ones from Dead Centre itself. Brand new was a stout, named after a long-gone Athlone brewery: Messrs Boswell. As it's a very sessionable 3.9% ABV I figured a pint was called for. There's a very light touch on the nitrogen here, making it smooth but not excessively foamy. It's pretty much on point for an everyday drinking stout, hitting the right notes of chocolate, coffee and dry cereal with a pinch of Guinness-like sourness that tends to be missing from other microbrewed examples. While designed to be accessible and unchallenging, there's enough of interest here to make it properly engaging. Nicely done.

I followed that with an English-style bitter called Six Decades. I wasn't so impressed with this, and I think that the cold keg serve didn't do it any favours. At 4.5% ABV it's on the strong side for the genre, and while accomplished bitter brewers across the water can build in a lot of character on that spec, this one is a little thin and dull. A modicum of marmalade isn't quite enough to give it a personality and I found myself at the bottom of my pint without much else to say about it, and not for want of trying. Moving on...

Triple A was next, billed as a brown ale but not very brown with it, an only slightly darker shade of amber than the bitter. That hides the whopping ABV of 7.3%. Classic American hops Cascade and Centennial meet traditional English Northern Brewer, resulting in a curious but perfectly pleasant minty herbal foretaste with a peppery spice after. Some citrus arrives late, but no more intense than you'd get from lemon sherbet. I like a good bit of chocolate and coffee in a brown ale and that's not on offer here, with merely a light caramel effect as the only nod to its dark malts. Maybe again it was the cold draught serve to blame, but I expected more from this. Perhaps the canned version is a better option.

Finally from the regular line-up there was Trif3cta. Stylewise it's its own thing, described on the badge as a "dark ale with ginger and lime, aged in rum barrels", so kind of like a Dark & Stormy cocktail, then, only stronger at 8.3% ABV. Here's the brownness I would have liked in the previous one: a deep and rich shade, and there's a smoothness of texture which matches that perfectly. Despite the spice and spirit, it's the lime which greets the palate first, setting a lovely clean spritz on which it builds the heavier and sweeter malt. Add in the ginger and you get a kind of ginger cake effect which I really enjoyed. While I like rum, I tend not to be much of a fan of other rum-aged drinks -- they can be a bit cloying and overpowering. This isn't one of those, and while I'm sure the rum makes a contribution, the beer doesn't honk of it. Only the fact that the evening was still young had me taking my time over this, because it's very tasty and dangerously easy to drink.

And so to the three specials. Brewery representatives were conveniently on hand to talk us through what they had made.

Of the three, I was particularly interested in Hope's Craic'd Black Pepper Saison: I like black pepper flavours in beer, whether from peppercorns or a spicy Belgian farmhouse yeast, and this promised both. Alas it delivered neither. The pale blonde 6%-er tastes predominantly of banana. Richie said he didn't fancy letting a voracious saison yeast loose in the brewery so went with something plainer, a descendant or close relative of La Chouffe's yeast. That should have given some modicum of spice but I really couldn't taste it. The pepper flavour from the pepper was present to an extent, but without the kick I craved. The result is a very average sort of sweet blonde ale and not something I would normally cross half the country to taste.

Ballykilcavan had brought their own cask engine to serve Export Bambrick's, a souped up 8% ABV version of their flagship brown ale. Between the recipe upgrade and the dispense, the beer's complexity level shot upwards, so as well as caramel and chocolate, I was getting raspberry, strawberry, cork oak and a warm savoury beefiness as well. There was a real sense of old-fashioned beer about this, far from the homogeneity of style strictures and consistent production, and the result was all the better for it. A freshly drawn tot of this would be an excellent finisher to any evening's drinking.

But my evening wasn't quite done. By law there has to be an IPA in the line-up, and Dead Centre did the honours there with Daredevil, a red one. Red IPA isn't usually my thing but this was a good one, letting the Centennial and Amarillo hops do the talking without any toffee interference from the crystal malt. A raspberry sharpness in the foretaste was the only way it tasted red, while after that it was all dank and oily hops coating the palate and creating a long resinous finish. Someone voiced a comparison with BrewDog's 5 AM Saint, back when that was bold and impressive, and I concur: this had a similar level of wow factor.

The beer aside, it was wonderful to just get out and about of a Saturday, and to catch up with beer friends I haven't seen since The Unpleasantness started. A big thanks to Liam and the Dead Centre team for hosting, and Brian of Craic Beer Community for being the catalyst. Less thanks to Irish Rail for making my train home into a bus replacement. I've now seen parts of the midlands no one should ever have to see.