Who's your daddy?

In that this blog is the nearest thing I have to a child, today's the day I get to take it out for a first legal drink. It's 18 years since I started, and I'm not seeing any reason to stop yet.

To mark the occasion, a brewery that has been there almost since the beginning, and has certainly represented the changing nature of Irish beer and the diversity which now comes with it: Galway Hooker. Their limited editions had been quiet for a while but have returned with Black Tide, a blackcurrant porter.

The strength is extremely modest at 4.2% ABV and it's pale with that, a reddish brown, some distance from black. Still it smells roasty, like a proper porter, one significantly stronger. The flavour follows that along similar lines, leading with well-done toast and the crispy bit from roast meat. Anyone expecting a syrupy twang from the blackcurrant will be disappointed, or relieved. Probably relieved. For the record they used real fruit rather than concentrate, which may be why the beer doesn't really taste of that. Only the faintest forest berry note arrives at the end, equal to a parallel pinch of greenly bitter hops.

Galway Hooker is one of those breweries at its best doing classically-styled beers. Market dynamics pushes it into making novelties like this and they've managed to instil a lot of understated classical elegance into it. It's an approach I approve of highly. While it's fun to find them making new beers, I think I'd be buying my eldest a pint of their pale ale to start with.