A sliding scale

With its abstract art, sweet fruit beers, pastry stouts and endless IPAs, Lough Gill has grown into a brewery unashamed to chase international beer trends. Well, there has to be at least one per country, like an airline or a bar with a Frank Zappa quote on the menu. Here are three examples of their recent output.

First up is You're Not Welcome, 5.3% ABV and brewed with mango and blueberry, but looking the greyish pink of blended strawberries, and smelling similar: sweet but with a tartly acidic edge. I was hoping it might be properly sour to taste but the lactose puts paid to that from the first sip. We move from freshly mulched strawberries to cheap raspberry ripple ice cream: sugar, artificial vanilla flavouring and pink fruit goo. It's a long way from any real fruit, never mind the fancy ones named. There is at least enough of a tang on the finish that it doesn't get sickly, and I think there's a welcome bite of hop bitterness too. That said, with this flavour profile, I probably would have preferred it to be full-on viscous soup. As is, it tastes like an earnest attempt at a serious fruit beer which turned out a bit silly. There are worse complaints to have, I guess.

Punishment is one of several things I'm a glutton for, so cracked straight on with an even stronger version of something similar. Wound Runner is, most importantly, 7.2% ABV. At least it looks, broadly, like a real beer, being a hazy orange colour. No pigment is provided by the peach, pineapple and passionfruit it's brewed with. Passionfruit, of course, is the up and down of the aroma, giving it a crisp and cold palate-cleansing sorbet effect. It's definitely cleaner and sharper than the previous, with no sign of all the extra booze. The lactose is sufficiently understated to let it taste properly tropical, and less like a 1980s budget dessert. It was lashing rain outside when I drank it and it provided a welcome beam of warm sunlight. While it's none of your fancy mixed-fermentation fruit beer, it's as good as the basic lactose-based model gets.

And then a hazy IPA to finish. Blue Blue Sky is hopped with Cashmere and two names I don't recognise: Luminosa and Pacific Sunrise. The latter is a Kiwi, and boy does this beer smell like New Zealand product, all high-octane kerosene and tangy white grape skin. I didn't think the world needed a more intense version of Nelson Sauvin but it may have got one. The flavour has that fossil-fuel oily thing, yet also manages to add juicy guava and apricot plus a very American pine-resin dankness. For me, those three elements are quite separate, yet meld into each other in a completely harmonious way. It's a hoptical illusion and I love it. I think the key here is freshness: I bought it and drank it within a couple of weeks of canning, and everything about it is brighter and more colourful as a result. I'm sure the sizeable 6.3% ABV is a factor in how intense the hopping is, and yet it drinks like a much lighter beer. Everything here is just as it should be, and there's no room for even a sniff of an off flavour. When it comes to hazy IPA, it takes a lot to impress me, and Lough Gill has done it with this. At the end of the glass I felt like giving it a standing ovation.

The fruit beers are par for the course, and fine for the fans. That IPA, however, should be drank by everyone. It's on tap at UnderDog this week, as it happens.