Where you been?

It's almost three months since I last did a pale ale roundup, and with an even ten candidates in the backlog it's time to get a new one published. Here's what a selection of the busiest Irish brewers having been doing in this space.

The session begins, appropriately, with the latest from Kinnegar: Brewers At Play 22: Hazy Session IPA. There's a look of table beer about this one -- an anaemic yellow colour -- though it's the full 4.5% ABV so if anything on the strong side for the style. It smells sweet and chewy, channelling the fluffy candy vibes of big New England IPA, with a hint of pithy bitterness in the background. That pith, or maybe rind, is the main feature of the flavour, wasting no time in delivering a bitter happyslap to the palate. This settles after a second to a calmer meringue-pie tart sweetness with some interesting garlic and herb savoury notes. The finish brings us back to table beer with a dry and gritty rawness. There's a lot going on in this small package, and it won't be for everyone, but I think it works. They've clearly charged it heftily with an indecent amount of hops. 

Dublin airport's on-again off-again relationship with decent beer reached a new high point with the opening of Tap + Brew in Terminal 1 airside, a spacious bar where The White Hag is the principal beer supplier. Five of their beers are on tap, including an exclusive pale ale called Altitude. Though only 4.8% ABV it's quite weighty looking, a deep shade of amber. The flavour is a very straightforward mandarin-segment juiciness, finishing quickly and plainly with a carbonic bite. There are similarities with Little Fawn in the accessible fruitiness and the hops doing one thing and doing it well. Either is excellently suited as a gulp-and-go airport beer.

The O'Hara's Hop Adventure series, running since 2015, rumbles on. The latest variety getting the treatment is Talus. As usual it's 5% ABV and a pale golden in colour with a medium haze. It smells a little sickly: a hard-candy or cordial sort of sweetness. Worrying. Luckily the flavour is much cleaner, with a crisp fizz clearing away any sugar or resin excesses. The central character is delightfully pithy, the cordial calmed into more of a posh squash, tasting of real oranges and lemons. I think this shows off the hop very well, but perhaps more importantly it's wonderfully refreshing, arriving just in time for the warm weather.

Just like Hope's Summer Seasonal 2022. They've gone back to American pale ale like in 2020, except they've upped the ABV to 5.5% and cut the bitterness down to a paltry 17.6 IBUs. Behind the number there's a stated intent of making it juicy with El Dorado, Azacca and Idaho 7, with a bit of Citra because why not? The result is a darker amber than easy-going summer beer would normally be, and quite weightily textured. I didn't think it juicy as such, but it's very sweet, with dominant notes of strawberry and vanilla. It's almost cloying, though a mineral rasp in the finish offsets the sweetness a bit. Regardless, I'm not at all sure that this would be suitably refreshing on a hot day. It could substitute for an ice cream though, so there's that.

You'll Pay With Your Souls intones O Brother. No, I'll pay with my debit card: €5.25 for a 5.3% ABV Simcoe pale ale, which is a bit steep to be honest. It's a wan and hazy yellow and smells lightly lemony; pleasant, but not over-a-fiver pleasant. The flavour has some happier extra dimensions: dank resins, candied lemons, dill, rosemary and tumeric. That's a lot going on for a single-hopper. It's a bit of a time-tunnel beer, bringing me right back to when Simcoe was the cutting edge of hopping. I didn't like it then, finding it harsh and threatening. Now this old grizzled palate is much more able to deal, and it seems charming and retro. Retro really doesn't take long in the IPA world. On balance this is fun and enjoyable, and nowhere near as serious as the daft name implies.

Supermarket own-brand beers aren't known for getting the detail of higher-end styles right, but Dundalk Bay seems to have managed it with their new one for Aldi: Sailor Sam's Hazy IPA. It's the proper shade of pale custard yellow and smells of vanilla and garlic: not pleasant, but exactly what the €7-a-can mob do too. Fair play. The texture is a little thinner than the super-premium stuff, but then it is only 5.5% ABV. Flavourwise, the garlic is pervasive, laced with a slightly harsh butane note, though there's a happier tropical mango in the mix as well, plus the vanilla sweetness. All told it didn't really suit me: it's one of those beers that has everything I don't like about hazy IPA. But I respect the hustle, and somebody out there will appreciate it.

Next, as I hope will become a tradition for these posts, there's a black IPA. Lineman claims that Nagelbett is a "cold" BIPA, jumping on board the cold IPA bandwagon, although it's not actually cold fermented. Shenanigans! The description/confession is on the brewery website here. Photographing it in direct sunlight I discovered that it's more a dark brown than actual black. The tarry roast of good black IPA is present in the aroma, though I also get a definite sense of the dry burnt toast found in schwarzbier, so maybe the "cold" description isn't pure fakery after all. Against that, the texture is rich and creamy -- definitely more ale than lager -- while the flavour is subtle. Bitter dark chocolate smooshes into boiled veg. I waited for the fun peppery spice that normally arrives next, but it's missing, and with it goes one of the joys of black IPA. The finish is clean and quite quick, being another point where the "cold" epithet is earned, but this isn't black IPA as I like it. I'm especially concerned at how it's a substantial 6.4% ABV but doesn't have the depth, warmth or complexity that should come with it. It's fine, and new black IPA is always welcome. This one does get the basics right. However, the novelty factor that the brewery has aimed for didn't really pay off, I reckon.

Stronger still is Krush Groove, an IPA from Rascals, collaboratively brewed with Yeastie Boys. It's an IPA at 7% ABV, promising both New Zealand hops and tropical and citrus flavours. In the glass it's a medium hazy orange colour and smells of sweet cordial with an edge of harder diesel fumes, suggesting Nelson Sauvin is in the house. Both of those are present in the flavour, but on top of them is a hard bitterness, pithy and grassy, making it a clean-edged and uncompromising IPA. The words "west coast" spring to mind, but naww, this shouldn't be reduced to a sub-genre; this is what IPA once was, in its entirety, back when terminology mattered (2011). There's enough fruit fun on offer for this one to stay entertaining, but there's an old-fashioned roughness too, which doesn't pull punches and doesn't care if you enjoy it or not. I did.

"Oat cream IPA" continues to insist it's a thing, and the latest is Lough Gill's I'll Be Late, a powerful iteration at 7.2% ABV. It's pale for all that; an innocent sunny yellow emulsion. Citra, Galaxy and Idaho 7 are the hops, and I think it's the Fanta sweetness of Galaxy that I get most of in the aroma. Sweetness is a built-in feature, of course, and the lactose gives the flavour a definite milkshake stickiness without actually bulking out the body. The hop bitterness -- Citra in force -- clashes with this, the resins bringing an unwelcome second stickiness. I don't get it. The hopping here belongs in a clean and bright IPA and gains nothing from being rendered creamy. I'm all for innovation, but this has been tried before and it's not an improvement on the basics of IPA. Clean it up. Thank you.

We climb aboard the DIPA train, finally, with a new one from Third Barrel: And Dance The Blues. It's a mucky looking one, an unattractive earwax beige, with bonus points for a soupy unevenness of colour. The aroma is cleaner, though, with a strong and uncompromising vegetal, savoury bang of hops, all cabbage and pepper. You get more of that on tasting, in with some gritty, earthy murk notes. Yes: it's one of those, aimed at the more masochistic sort of haze purist. On the plus side, it conceals its 8% ABV well, so there's no nasty burn, a considerable compensation. Overall it's not my sort of thing though just like with Sailor Sam's above, I'm sure it will have fans, all of whom have tasted this sort of thing before and know what they like.

The rate at which new IPAs are being turned out by Irish brewers may indeed be slowing, but there's still plenty of choice on offer.