The seven eleven

DOT Brew celebrated seven years in the brewing business in May with a tap takeover at Against the Grain. Seven beers were on offer, of course, of which five were new to me. Flights of four seemed to be the preferred dispense method, so that's how I started.

This is one of those brewers who makes beers, not styles, so exactly what the 3.2% ABV Plausible Session was meant to resemble I am not sure. My best guess is a table beer: the strength matches, as does the yellowy murk and dry, slightly gritty, character. That said, the hops do play a central role, making it quite lemony, with a creamy lemon curd foretaste and some bitterer hazy lemonade after. The name works: this is an unfussy and very drinkable beer, mostly clean flavoured and light without being thin.

Not long after the event, DOT had a very similarly-specc'd beer out in cans: Simple Session. This is also 3.2% ABV and yellowly murky. At least with a can label, I know that Hüll Melon, Idaho 7 and Centennial are the hops. It smells exotic and perfumey, of white peach and jasmine. That rounds out on tasting, giving the full grape effect I associate with Hüll Melon, and more than a hint of melon as well. That's pleasant as it goes, but the beer does suffer from the same interfering grittiness as the one above. Still, that's better than thinness or harshness: they've avoided that well.

Back to the flight and the next one needs a big asterisk on my review. I had already drank it when DOT's head honcho Shane stormed into the pub, declared it unfit for consumption and insisted on buying everyone who had tasted it a replacement drink (really!). For my part I thought it, Oak Pale, was OK. Yes, it looked green, sickly and murky, like a sample of sludge from the bottom of the tank (which, apparently, is pretty much what it was) but then lots of beers these days look like that, and some of them cost €8 a can. Anyway, it didn't taste like an oaked pale ale, but like a crisp and grassy pilsner. I was fine with that and moved on, but I will give this a proper review if I see it again.

The last time I was drinking draught DOT it was a verjus-infused sour beer, which came with a promise of a new and improved version on the way. And here it was: Verjus Take II, 4.6% ABV and a clear copper colour. I assume that raspberries were included again but this didn't taste at all of raspberry. Instead it's thick and sweet, tasting first of stewed apple and white grapes with a peach and lychee tang on the finish. It's subtle and not very sour but very tasty and definitely an improvement on the original.



I don't recall DOT having a sixth birthday, but the fourth and fifth came with a Barrel Aged Birthday Cake imperial chocolate milk stout. The gravity dropped a little between them and here plummets to just 9.6% ABV. The beer doesn't suffer from this, however, being extremely cake-like, with an almost crumbly, floury texture. It tastes somewhere in the midst of chocolate cake and coffee cake, full and creamy but not hot, and with a dash of honeyish Irish whiskey as a bonus. Stop the product development here: this one has been perfected.

With my flight landed, it was time for a proper glass of the final remaining beer, a cold IPA called Brrr... There still isn't much consensus about what this sub-style should actually be, but one thing I've noticed is that few of them are terribly exciting. Yes, the intense cleanness gives the hops plenty of elbow room, and here that's expressed as lemon and lime candy with a sharp edge of raw onion, but it's a bit one-dimensional with it. There's a reason modern IPA brewers have tended to give them quite beefy malt chassis, and this 5.6%-er would have benefited from one of those. Let's see how many more birthdays cold IPA is still around for.

I saved a few food miles with the next one. Having won the raffle on the night, I dropped around to the brewery a few days later to collect a t-shirt. Shane was kind enough to throw in a couple of beers, including House Helles, brewed for Sweeney's in Fairview, saving me the trouble of trekking across the city in search of it. It's a deep red-gold colour, very much on the dark side for Helles. There's a heavy grain crunch in the aroma, with a bite of pils-like cut grass. The flavour too is wholesome and chewy, blending golden syrup, oat cookies, rye bread and zinc. It's not quite the light thirst-quencher I was expecting, but I like the serious gravitas on display here instead.

In addition to the Farmhouse Ale produced for Aldi, there was another release in the Spin Off Series, a Cold IPA. This is a light 5.2% ABV and pale yellow with a faint haze. Served fridge-cold, the aroma manages to be both crisp and sweetly peachy, which is inviting. Crispness is absolutely the watchword on tasting, and the mouthfeel is superbly light and clean, just like a smooth and finely-honed lager. Onto this is grafted the fresh IPA hops, the peachy stonefruit landing first, then overtaken by a sharp citrus -- lime rind in particular -- and once again, like many cold IPAs I've encountered, there's a twang of raw white onion in the finish. That is at least brief; overall it's very tasty and offers great complexity and overall high quality for only €2.50 a can. And, like the Farmhouse Ale, it's an excellent to-style education piece for the mass market.

It would have been good to end the post there and get it published some time in early June, but the cans kept coming. Next I have something called Sea Sour, a sour ale brewed with raspberries and sea buckthorn, given some ageing time in white wine barrels and finishing up at 4.6% ABV. It's a pale pink in the glass and smells juicy in a summer fruit salad sort of way, suggesting strawberries and grapes as much as raspberry. The texture is light and quenching with soft carbonation and aided by a mild tartness which ensures it's clean but doesn't go so far as to make it challenging. The fruit is still there, and the sour side tarts up the raspberries to taste more like cranberries. In the background I could just about detect traces of oak-laced white wine, something which doesn't dovetail with the rest of the picture but doesn't interfere either. For all that the recipe is complicated, and I don't doubt that every process and ingredient makes a contribution, this is a supremely easy-drinking summer refresher, to the point where I suggest serving it on the veranda in a big jug with ice and maybe a sprig of rosemary.

Two of DOT's regular Teeling collaborations to bring us out. The first is Gr8 Tasting Pale Ale, released recently to mark eight years of whiskey production at the Dublin distillery. It's a pale yellow job, hazy with a pile of fine white foam on top. The aroma is quite grainy, smelling wholesomely of unmalted barley and oats. The taste was plain at first but has a growing sweetness, the porridge becoming a cream-filled spongecake with pineapple icing. It's missing any real hop character, either as bitterness or "juice", and that's a little disappointing. Equally the whiskey barrel side is subtle to the point of invisible. Given what it is, and the name, I expected something more impressive. Yes it's only 4.3% ABV, but was also €5.50 for a small can. I felt a bit gypped.

For Christmas last year, the brewery released Teeling Festive, which I never got around to picking up. It looks like they overlooked a case or two as it was also available in the distillery giftshop when I went in for the above. This is a blend of an amber ale and a porter, utilising single malt barrels as well as ones previously used for Teeling's peaty Blackpitts. I expected that would have a big effect, and sure enough it smells strongly of disinfectant, with a sweet brown sugar backing. And it doesn't do anything more interesting than that on tasting. A smooth mouthfeel is the base for lots of chemical-laden peaty smoke plus sticky toffee and a faint coating of chocolate. It's shocking at first, but I was into it by the end. It would certainly have worked better in the depths of winter than the height of summer. One for serious smoke aficionados only, I think, or those interested in just how much impact a whiskey barrel can have on a beer.

Cheers to the DOT team, the AtG team, and all the usual camp followers for a fun evening out.