All angles

I mentioned yesterday that the EBCU was in town last month. The weekend involved considerably more beers than at Open Gate.

Hosting Friday's meeting was Rascals, and afterwards I just had time to grab one new offering from them: Pilot 69: Sour IPA. This is a light 4.4% ABV and a hazy pale yellow. The haze brings a certain chalky dryness which I didn't appreciate, but there's plenty of tart fruity fun also; just puckering enough, with overtones of lemon meringue pie. Beers like this aren't meant to be masterpieces of complexity or understatement and this one is exactly as casually tasty as they should be.

At lunch, the guests brought some beers for tasting from their home countries. The newly-elected chairman, André Brunnsberg, provided one he had collaborated on with a brewery in his native Finland. Tuomas is described as an American-style porter and comes from the Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas brewery in the south-west, not far from Turku. My first question was whether it's cool-fermented (it's not) because there's a fabulous clean crispness right from the start and throughout. A seam of liquorice adds to the Baltic porter effect, and then it finishes dry with just the right amount of roast. I'd have thought it would have a bit more hop poke to justify the "American" label, but I didn't miss it either. This is delicious easy drinking and only slightly overclocked at 5.5% ABV.

The Poles brought a Grodziskie, which shouldn't be surprising except they picked the weirdest example they could find. It's from Trzech Kumpli and the full name is Piwo w Stylu Grodziskie z Grillowanymi Cytrynami i Czerwonym Pieprzem, so "Grodziskie Style Beer with Grilled Lemons and Red Pepper". Yum. Despite the daft recipe it does manage to retain the essential characteristics of Poland's native smoked wheat beer. It's still only 2.9% ABV, for one thing, and pale and hazy. There's lots of smoke which turns a little rubbery on the end, but not excessively so. I couldn't see where the lemons went, but the peppers are present, seasoning the smoke but not interfering with the basics. I'm not sure I would recommend this beer, exactly, but I got a laugh from it.

The same brewery also has a much more prosaic IPA, called Pan IPAni. Not that it's bland or boring, just that 6% ABV hazy IPAs with wheat are brewed by other people. This has all the features of the genre that you love/hate dialled up high. It's very hazy, for one, and there's lots of sweet vanilla plus enough of a concentrated garlic effect to scorch the palate slightly. Not easy drinking, then, but one of those beers where I found the sheer audacious bigness of the taste makes it worthwhile.

From Rascals we went on a picturesque excursion along the Luas Red Line, to Urban Brewing. They had their Oktoberfest lagers back on -- Festbier and Märzen -- plus a couple of new things, including Club Pale Ale. I never got an explanation for the name so you'll have to use your imagination. It's 4.4% ABV and single-hopped with Mosaic. Maybe it's a reference to the brand of orangeade, because it's quite sweet and tastes of orange peel more than anything else. While it's quite simple, and no showcase for the delights of Mosaic, it offers decent casual refreshment.

The next one is a bit more involved: Dunkel Roggen. I expected heavy from this dark rye beer but wasn't prepared for quite how sweet it is. Brown banana is the principal flavour and that's not something one can drink a lot of in one go. There's a mild touch of dry roast in the finish but not enough to balance it. The big surprise is it's only 4% ABV. For such a weakling it made me work hard.

Finally, a collaboration. Urban had Hopfully in to create a Mango Sour. I don't doubt that it was made with what it claims to be made with, but I got a lot more coconut and pineapple from the flavour than mango. While not sour exactly, it is at least fairly dry, with a slightly gritty floury texture. The only off-putting bit was an unsettling whiff of cheese in the aroma, surely not hop-derived because it wouldn't have enough hops for that. Some weird effect of fermenting fruit purée, I guess. I quite liked this, though if they'd badged it as a piña colada beer in the first place I would have been even more on board.

That's quite a decently wide selection for a day's international drinking with international friends, and I didn't even mention the sahti.