Leaps and boundaries

As chairman of Beoir, I get first call on where the AGM should be. This year, the place that had been niggling my need-to-visit sense, was Belfast. It has developed its brewery-based beer scene quite significantly in recent years, and I wanted a look at that.

The day began at the Boundary Taproom on the Newtownards Road. It's a taproom very much in the taproom style: a cleared-out industrial space, minimally decorated and furnished with folding tables and benches. Boundary is noteworthy for the sheer number of different beers it produces, and there were about twenty on the draught menu, with a couple of guests.

I picked the table beer to start, Love Is Here. I haven't had one like this in quite a while: pale and opaque with an almost powdery savoury dryness, very like the classic "London murky" of the last decade. There's a strongly sweet vanilla element too, perhaps showing the influence of the New England IPA era, and a little candied lemon for balance. On the plus side it's only 2.6% ABV yet has a nicely full and satisfying texture. The down side, for me anyway, was the taste: at once both harshly dreggy and overly sweet. I shouldn't even be considering whether a beer of this sort is cloying, but there I was. Is this sort of thing even fashionable any more? I hope not.

I could have moved on to a variety of hoppy delights but chose a saison as my second and final here. No One Knows is 5.7% ABV and doesn't look significantly different to the previous one: yellow and murky again. I like my saisons crisp and peppery; this one is loaded with banana esters, making it rather sickly, like a lacklustre weissbier. There's a tiny hint of pale toast in the finish, but it's not properly dry and not at all what I'm after in saison.

Maybe I chose unwisely, but I hoped for better from both of these. It may be that the brewery needs to put more effort into honing styles that aren't IPA.

Not far down the street is the bar of Bullhouse brewery, called Bullhouse East. The compact one-room affair was already buzzing by the time we arrived after 2pm.

Of course I should have been focusing on the brewery's own wares, but I couldn't pass up a beer I have been unsuccessfully hunting for several months: Football Special by Trouble Brewing. I know a bit of the background to this one. Football Special is the name of a soft drink, produced for generations now, by McDaid's in Co. Donegal: a sort of Irish Irn Bru. In the late '00s, McDaid's had planned to expand into brewing, and they attended a course in England, alongside the brewers who went on to found Trouble. Perhaps the connection dates back to then.

Anyway, the beer is described simply as "sour" and is 4% ABV. I guess the clean base is the reason it really does taste a lot like Football Special: an amalgam of assorted fruit flavours, thrown together into a brown cocktail which doesn't taste like any of its ingredients came from plants. A strong caramel sweetness dominates, and then the fruit candy joins it, before an abrupt finish. I would say you need to have been raised on Football Special to enjoy this. I was, and I still found it a bit cloying. Still, it delivers accurately on the promise of the novelty and I can't say I wasn't warned.

I definitely needed a Bullhouse beer next, and also needed a stout, so satisfied both requirements with the export stout El Capitan. 7.5% ABV is an orthodox strength for one of these, and the mouthfeel is spot-on too: all the creamy richness you could ask for. The flavour is chocolate forward, but doesn't skimp on the roast, building both sides into caramel and tar, respectively, with a hint of vegetal hop. Yum. A warm and smooth finish takes us out. This shows the same effortless expert quality as O'Hara's Leann Folláin but with some extra punch. I approve.

We had an appointment next at Out of Office. This is a fun little set-up: on the ground floor is the Ulster Sports Club, a very retro 1970s bar, all wood-panels and green leather. There's no longer a pall of cigarette smoke and the rattle of the racing papers, but there may as well be. Two floors up there's the compact Out of Office brewery and an adjacent mini taproom, decked out clinically in white tiling as a marked contrast to downstairs. Brewer Katie introduced us to the set-up, which was followed by tasters at the bar.

First out there was a sour beer with cherry and rose petal called Kelly From Marketing. It's quite a simple one of these: 4% ABV and with the emphasis on the tartness, rather than the fruit or flower. If anything, I got a hint of raspberry in the finish, but otherwise it's clean and fizzy with plenty of tang, and I have no problem with that.

A hazy IPA followed, called NSFW. This one meets the basic requirements but I wasn't really a fan. There's loads of vanilla and only a hint of lemon curd to represent the hops at all. I liked the soft and pillowy effervescence, but it's just too sweet to be good. A slight plastic tang on the finish confirmed my low opinion. This style was designed to show off hop freshness, and that was thoroughly concealed in this example.

It's a very dark brown ale to finish: the stout-like Indie Füdge. That's not a heavy metal umlaut; this was created in collaboration with the posh east-Ulster grocery chain Indie Füde. It's as dense as it looks, and heavy on the caramel, with a lacing of espresso and a touch of roast. There's a claim it's in the American style, which would suggest a stronger hop character than it has, but it's not lacking complexity and does a good job of being a hefty brown ale of 6% ABV.

A palate cleanser was called for after that, and I went for the house lager Lesser Spotted. There's a certain gimmick here in that it's served from the tank, but it's put to good use because this comes across as extremely Czech-style, softly textured with a candyfloss malt sweetness, although floral rather than grassy in the hop department, with violet and honeysuckle on offer. Its position at the top of the menu board suggests it's occupying that lager slot for unadventurous drinkers. They've never had it so good.

We just had time to hit one more brewery before home time, and that was at The Deer's Head, where Bell's Brewery's smart copper-clad kit sits behind glass, displaying it to a pub that's just as smart: traditional yet modern and tidy. How very Belfast.

Not knowing how many I'd be here for, I got the stout into me first. Black Bull looked like it didn't stray too far from the basics, being 4.8% ABV and the requisite shade of black. Happily, the brewery has eschewed flavour-killing nitrogen and carbonated it instead. There's only a token dry roasted element, and instead it goes for an almost sticky, treacle-like dark malt quality. Behind this is a medicine cabinet floral effect, all lavender and rosewater, like Granny's powder. The density and complexity put me in mind of some of The Kernel's best work in this genre, though they tend to do higher strength ones. For a house stout in a brewpub, this is stellar.

I needed to try more, and conscious of the clock, got two halves for the old chug-and-scribble. First, I couldn't resist the pumpkin beer, Plough. It seemed quite incongruous to find a novelty beer under such an elegant brand. It's 5.6% ABV, amber coloured and quite clear. There's a decent but unexciting red ale caramel and toffee first, and then a perfunctory spicing with cinnamon and/or nutmeg. It's fine, offering the accessible pumpkin spice thing without going overboard. I'm sure it got the crowds in during October.

Doubtless there's a fun story behind the name of Monkey Shaving the Goat, the session IPA, but you'll have to look it up yourself. All I can tell you is that it's 4.3% ABV, soft and light-bodied, with zesty lemon notes of sherbet and meringue pie filling, adding a crisp biscuit finish. It's clean, well-balanced and unchallenging, which I guess is the whole point of session IPA. I would have liked a little more hop punch, however.

Regardless, time was up and there was a train to catch. Once on board I opened a can gifted to me by Mr Thomas Carroll, who doesn't like Baltic porters. Weirdo. This is from Basqueland and is called The Adventures of Mr Malty. It's a proper 7.2% ABV but quite a sweet example of the style, with loads of fudge and an estery fruit finish. Herbal bitterness and lager cleanness, both of which I would deem necessary hallmarks of the style, do not feature. Ignore the Baltic side and you still have a fairly decent strong porter, however. And at that stage in proceedings I wasn't going to be fussy.

Belfast, then, exceeded my expectations. All four destinations are worth your while, though might be best spread over more than one afternoon. Our route of starting at the taprooms and moving to a more comfortable pub afterwards is very much advised, however.