Don't call it a comeback

New pale ales from Irish breweries are back on the shelves after a winter hiatus. Here's what I've picked up in the last couple of months.

They like a session IPA at Kinnegar. Brewers At Play No. 29 is one, as were 7, 8, 14, 18 and 22 in the sequence. Play to your low strengths, you might say. This is 4% ABV and a murky orange colour. There's a lovely bright and fresh mandarin aroma and lots of fizz. The flavour is understated, offering little beyond a basic orangeade note, only a touch of vanilla, finishing a bit watery with a carbonic bite. Still, it's designed to be refreshing and absolutely nails the brief: no frills where none are required.

Western Herd has got hold of some kveik and made an IPA called Magnus Barefoot, because Norway or something. It's a very opaque yellow and short on head. The aroma is an interesting mix of citrus pith and softer stonefruit so I wasn't sure what kind of IPA I was actually going to get. Turns out it was neither of those things. The first flavour is a spicy cinnamon and aftershave kick, followed by a rasping talcum dryness. Where are the hops? There's a little of the pithy orange from the aroma hovering in the background but it doesn't last long. And... that's it. The beer is a lot less exciting than the can art. It's a mercy it's only 5.6% ABV so doesn't take up too much of one's capacity. I get that kveik is all about turning beer around quickly but this tastes raw and unfinished rather than fresh.   

"WEST COAST HAZY IPA" in block capitals on the label is unnecessarily upsetting. But so it is with Wave Sweeper, new from The White Hag. Breweries seem to be putting a concerted effort into aligning the features of east and west coast IPA, though with little success that I've seen. Let's see how this one goes. It looks eastern: pale yellow and completely opaque. The aroma has a certain lemony crispness, though there's also a hint of lemon curd's vanilla. The flavour dispenses with any sweet aspects and tries hard to present nothing but sharp lime and grapefruit with a little pine resin herbal complexity. Unfortunately there's a savoury twang from the murk which gets in the way and prevents it tasting like a properly clean west coaster. A gallant effort, but I still think east and west should continue their separate IPA ways.

There's no stylistic prevarication with White Hag's Danaan, released around the same time and badged simply as a "juicy IPA". I got a pint of it at UnderDog and thought it was no such thing. The flavour began with a strong hit of garlic, backed by other green vegetables: celery and spinach, primarily. The aroma too brings the allium, although there it's more of a white onion thing. And then there's a rasp of bitter murky dregs for an even less enjoyable kind of savouriness. I have no doubt that this is the very heights of fashion and may well be just how haze aficionados like it, but as far as I was concerned the juice was entirely AWOL and it's very much not to my taste.

Let's see if Hopfully can do any better. First of today's set from them is Softseats, one which looks the proper opaque shade of pale yellow. It's no lightweight at 6.8% ABV but it smells innocently sweet, of vanilla in particular. "Innocent" is a good descriptor for the taste too: there's nothing sharp, harsh or untoward here, all is smooth and gentle. It's a little lacking on the fruit side, offering not much more than a a touch of ripe banana and a rub of mandarin pith. The rest is custard, with a hint of marzipan around the edges. I like how it doesn't try to do anything clever and instead is just a nice beer to drink -- some hazy IPAs give the impression of trying to be God's gift to brewing and the epitome of hop utilisation. This is just tasty and I respect that a lot.

While there's no inherent reason not to mess about with the basics of New England IPA, coffee is a strange choice of addition but that's what Hopfully has gone for with Longlegs. It looks perfectly normal: an even opaque yellow colour. The texture is pleasantly soft and creamy -- on the good side of normal for the style. And then the foretaste is a powerful and unsubtle blast of freshly brewed coffee. This is creamy too, like a latte. Only a minor tropical tang on the finish brings us back to the basics. It's a bit of a mad chimera, and it absolutely shouldn't work, but it does. Above all it's fun, and more than a little silly, but fair play to the brewery for giving it a go.

They take us further from IPA purity with Electrick Sheep, a sour one, no less. It's a big beast at 7% ABV and hopped with Citra, Amarillo and Galaxy. The high gravity makes its presence felt in the texture, which is heavy and cordial-like with quite a significant sweetness. The sour isn't long behind and is a very simple and straightforward jolt of something that tastes a lot like lemon juice but is actually the work of lactobacillus plantarum, according to the can. I like sour IPA but I like them to be refreshing, and this one is just too heavy for that. Neither the souring culture nor the hops add enough complexity for it to really get off the ground. It's OK -- a fun and weighty party-in-the-mouth palate-thumper -- but I would have liked more subtlety and nuance. 

Lough Gill has given us something altogether more serious with Look West, in that rare substyle, red IPA. Canadian brewery Spearhead gets their logo on the label too. This 6.5%-er is a red IPA to its bones, and it provided me with an opportunity to analyse why I don't get on with the style. Which I will now explain to you. I like American amber ale, to which it's related, for the mix of fudgey malt and sparking hop pizzazz. When you dial all of that up into a red IPA the spark gets dampened and the result is both harshly bitter and cloyingly sweet. That's what this is. Nobody eats toffee with a side of grapefruit; the flavours simply don't get along. The result here is sweaty, rubbery, sticky and hot. I'm sure it's exactly what the brewer meant it to be but it doesn't suit this blogger's palate one little bit.

Here's hoping for better with the brewery's latest hazy IPA, Yellow Warning, brewed in collaboration with La Muette in France. It's not yellow, it's orange, and not quite full-on hazy. Citra and Sabro are the hops, and the zest from the former is beautifully loud and bright in the aroma. Where's the Sabro? In the flavour: a sizeable dollop of dessertish coconut, front and centre. Behind it, the pith which Sabro also brings, though mild rather than sharp. And that's it. While it's 6.3% ABV, the body is light and the taste balanced and accessible with no savoury side, which is great. Maybe because it was the first beer of my weekend (not that you asked) but I found this downright gluggable, in a way that something of this strength probably shouldn't be. 

The Lough Gill offer tops out at 8.2% ABV and a double IPA called Tasmanian Dive. The name is a reference to its use of Galaxy and Eclipse hops from Oz. It's a very fashionable shade of opaque eggy yellow and the alcohol makes its presence felt right from the get-go, in the aroma. It's there with quite a liqueurish and sticky-smelling tropical syrup thing. I get an immediate sense that this one will be hard work. The mouthfeel is nicely light and fizzy, not allowing that big gravity to cloy the palate. There's a large and immediate hit of bitter herbal acidity, all garlic and ginger. The fruit behind this is similarly bitter, going for zest and spritz rather than juicy tropicality. The booze suggested in the aroma doesn't really show up in the taste. Instead, it all fades quickly, which is the only disappointing feature of an otherwise highly enjoyable assertive double IPA.

Cold IPA next, and Galway Bay is refusing to take a side in the cold IPA cold war, choosing to use both lager and ale yeast in its first example, called I Hear You Like IPA. More importantly, Simcoe, Colombus and Strata are the hops. Much like with brut IPA before it, I'm beginning to think that "cold" means nothing more than very very pale. Because this is a very very pale yellow, barely misted with haze. Simcoe's signature piney resins occupy the aroma, and the flavour has a certain dankness to match that. Another pattern I'm noticing is onion, and it's perhaps not surprising that if you make a very hop-forward crisp and clean beer, the hops will take it as an invitation to be sharp and tangy. In the full understanding of how little such things count for most IPA drinkers, this is quite unbalanced, and left me hankering for more malt to offset the hopping in both taste and texture. It's not bad, but is a bit efforty -- making a cold IPA because that's what people are doing nowadays. It's not an improvement on IPA. Yes, I am old.

I don't get to put many new releases from Killarney Brewing up here as their distribution is very limited in my part of the world. On a day trip to exotic Carlow over the Easter break, however, I picked up a bottle of Full Circle, their IPA. "What coast is it?" I yell at the bottle, "TELL ME!" I suspect, however, the recipe predates the IPA civil war, or at least ignores it. There are no oats in the ingredients, the brewery's description mentions both juice and bitterness, and while there's a haze when poured, it's a more old-fashioned sort, signifying a lightly processed beer rather than deliberate trend chasing. The aroma offers a light rasp of lime and grapefruit on a toasty malt base -- all very Sierra Nevada -- and then the flavour adds in some softer sherbet and lemon drizzle cake. There's a little roughness from the murk but it doesn't interrupt the main hop action. On balance I think this leans much more to the more traditional side of American IPA, and does it rather well at only 5% ABV. Characterful yet sessionable is the sweet spot. 

Trouble released something they're calling a "cream soda" pale ale, named Soda Dream. A glance at the ingredients reveals lactose and vanilla, suggesting to me a deliberate avoidance of the divisive word "milkshake" in the branding. Well they can't fool me. The beer is 5.4% ABV and hazy orange. Its aroma is surprisingly bitter, with a juicy tang but no lactose. That does arrive in both the flavour and mouthfeel, that latter being very thick and slick -- milkshakes for sure -- and the taste quite artificial. I don't know which candy of my childhood was loaded up with vanilla essence but this tastes like that one. I'm not a fan. It's too sickly and the promise of citrus made by the aroma is reneged upon. On the plus side, milkshake pale ale fanatics can buy this without asking for a plain paper bag to put it in. 

The latest from Lineman is a hazy IPA called Loose Ends. Not that they've badged it as hazy, of course: that's up to you to find out when you open it. It's hazy to the bone, however, being a pale yellow and smelling of garlic, vanilla and lime peel. For all that the flavour is strangely dry, to the point of being a little acrid, smoky; phenolic, maybe? There's something not quite right about this, which is very unusual for Lineman. My in-house back-up taster didn't detect anything awry so maybe it's just me, in which case I'll simply deem it not to my taste and move on.

IPA enthusiasts Outer Place have gone cold for their seventh: Polar Sequence. The pale gold colour belies a hefty 6.5% ABV, as does the light and accessible mouthfeel. The lager yeast has a slightly detrimental effect on the flavour too, making it finish quickly and cleanly, which is a shame here because the foretaste is lovely. It's a sharply invigorating grapefruit kick laced with naughty dank resins and a hint of white pepper. I wanted it to go on forever, but it insisted on departing abruptly. The malt side of the equation is deliciously crisp, and I guess that's just part of the deal. So while I wanted more from this, it does what it does extremely well and I should be happy with that. 

Number eight from Outer Place, Wildfires, is their eighth IPA but the first in the west-coast style. With everything else they've done being hazy I was a little sceptical about that, and sure enough while it's not murky there's a substantial misting in this one. But does it taste clear? The good news is yes, it pretty much does. The bad news is that the smoky sharpness I noticed above in Loose Ends is also in this, which was brewed on the same kit. It's harder to peek around it, but before it takes over the palate there's some fun heavy pine resin and a leafy bitterness, but no grapefruit or related citrus. And then burnt plastic and old rubber running long into the finish. It's hard to say if this would have worked for me if everything were kosher. I'm still waiting on something properly clear from Outer Place, or maybe even a non-IPA.

Back to the supermarket, finally, and there's a new one in the Journeyman series, produced for Centra and SuperValu by Pearse Lyons. Journeyman Double IPA is 7.5% ABV and a very murky dark orange colour, looking a bit muddy. The aroma is clean, however, presenting a sharply old-school west-coast front, loaded with pine and grapefruit. That meant the foretaste was a surprise, being candy sweet, all cake icing and succulent mandarin. The dryer bitter side waits a moment before appearing, scorching the tongue in the middle section before fading to leave residual dark sugar as the finish. For a supermarket cheapie it's quite well put-together, offering fresh and bold flavours which may not be en vogue at present but are still great fun to encounter.

That's it for now. Keep it hoppy!