Playing at craft

An afternoon out and about in central Dublin 8 brought me in contact with the craft-style offerings of two multinational breweries and a chance to see how the big guys are doing when it comes to the speciality beer space.

One of them was, of course, Guinness Open Gate brewery, a regular purveyor of playful small-batch oddities from the behemoth's pilot kit. On this visit that started with their Choc Mint Stout, and I thought I knew what to expect from this 4.5% ABV fellow: it's not an original concept. The execution, however, was pretty special. I got none of the promised chocolate or lactose sweetness, nor the body one would expect from the latter, and instead a huge and almost burning blast of concentrated mint oils. The effect was far too close to toothpaste to be enjoyable as a beer. There's no softness here; no childhood mint choc ice memories, only cruel and uncompromising mint, weaponised and sent to scorch your palate. No thank you.

There was also a Scottish style pale ale on, called 80/- Shilling -- yes, "eighty shilling shilling". It's about the same strength as the previous beer and is an unattractive murky muddy brown. The flavour is mercifully clean, but not very interesting. One expects hops from a pale ale and malt from a Scottish-style amber-coloured ale, and this shows little of either. There's brown sugar and black tea, finishing up so speedily as to resemble a lager. I suppose one could be happy that there's no "scotch ale" gimmickry or cloying toffee, but I thought it came down too far on the other side, being boring and characterless.

The same cannot be said for the beer beside it: Brett Stout. This is a powerful 8.6% ABV though is just as light as the others. The Brettanomyces has been busy with the fermentables then, leaving little behind. What you get in exchange is a massive amount of complex floral and woody spices: cedar, pepper, clove, nutmeg, lavender and good old-fashioned Orval horse blankets. Indeed, the Orval parallels are significant in the whole thing. There's a bit of caramel and some faint chocolate but otherwise it doesn't really bring much stout to the picture. I didn't miss that, however: the Brett flavours are a riot of delight and leave little to be desired in this. Small batch beer should be fun, and this one definitely is.

Down the street at Dudley's they had an unfamiliar beer from Franciscan Well, called Well Hazy. The Molson Coors brewery in Cork has been very quiet lately. It looks to have dropped the recently-adopted flagship lager Archway and cut the canned range back to two: Rebel Red and Chieftain. At least they're still making a play for tap space with something interesting. This is quite interesting. It's a hazy pale ale of just 4% ABV and instead of fruit, as one might expect, the flavour mixes spicy gunpowder or match heads with a clean and dry tannic tea-like quality. It makes for something extremely gulpable and supremely thirst-quenching, in a way that hazy pale ales rarely are. I can see this as an excellent option in bars that don't have anything worthwhile from the independents. Dudley's isn't one of those, but I'm still glad I took this for a spin.

One very good beer each from MC and Big D, then. This may not be a pattern, but I'll take it when it's on offer.