The Twelve Brewers of Christmas 1: Larkins

It's a couple of years since I've done this, but the beer fridge was sufficiently stocked this year to revive the tradition. Twelve blog posts, each featuring a different Irish brewer, and the autumn and winter releases thereof.

We began in Wicklow at Larkin's who have produced a set of pastry stouts, each with extra ensweetening features, and competitively priced at less than €4 a can.

I like a blueberry or two, especially when the beer actually tastes of it, so I started on Blueberry Bliss Bomb. Like all of this set it's 8% ABV and, er, black. I do get the blueberry concentrate on the aroma, as well as a powerful yet generic treacly sweetness. Subtlety is not the name of the game here. To taste, it's not massively sweet, lacking the milk chocolate and hazelnut I tend to expect in pastry stouts. There's a medium savoury bitterness, roasted to the point of burnt, before the dark syrup and caramel kick in. If it wasn't so big in all directions, you might even call it balanced. The blueberry is still there, thickly chocolate-coated and bursting with sugar, but also recognisable as fruit. It could have been worse. While it doesn't qualify as an any way dry or bitter stout, it's not as sweet as they can be made. I wasn't expecting much different from the rest.

And while Vanilla Vortex isn't a huge variation from it, it's not the same. The base doesn't have the burnt caramel of the previous one, leaving it clean of any acridness. This is altogether smoother fare, letting the lighter side of chocolate and toffee take the reins. Much like the blueberries as above, the headline ingredient isn't intrusive; I'm not even sure I would be able to tell this stout-with-vanilla from any other strong sweet stout, most of which tend to taste of vanilla anyway. Best of all, there's no sickly vanilla aroma, which I instinctively expect in beers like this and was poised to excoriate. Instead it smells of nothing very much, and that works for me.

I didn't think much about why the next one was called Emerald Cream Dream, and then when I went to open it, I spotted "Irish cream compound" on the ingredients. Yum. So it's a Baileys imperial stout, then? I'm surprised it hasn't been done before; though less so if it has been and I just blocked out the memory. Anyway, it pours nicely dense and dark, forming a big creamy head at first, though it fades indecently quickly. The aroma offers little more exciting than basic chocolate, and maybe some extra booze from the whiskey flavour. That woody spirit is more pronounced on tasting, though there's tonnes of chocolate too. While I'm happy the vanilla is on the low side, it does mean that I would never have guessed it's supposed to be cream liqueur flavoured. The finish is fairly short, but it does bring the whiskey back, which is fun. Overall it's quite enjoyable, once again avoiding the cloying excesses that might tempt other breweries when attempting something similar.

We finish the set with the cookie dough one, named Doughlicious Delight, which writes a pretty big cheque. It looks the same as the others. and there's nothing especially different about the sticky chocolate aroma. The flavour offers a very nicely balanced mix of vanilla and coffee, like a fine affogato. I confess I have never eaten cookie dough so I don't know if it's meant to taste like this. It's good though: not overly sweet; sticky, but not cloyingly so, and with very real chocolate and coffee flavours. It's no high level beer, but like all of these, it's tremendously enjoyable, especially for the price point.

They're a sticky bunch, and not exactly international-grade pastry stout. But for the price they offer a little taste of what's out there. I'm here for gateway pastry stout. There's one more big stout, from a different genre, to finish us off.

As the above shows, Larkin's usually has colourful names for its beers. This last one, however, is starkly titled Barrel Aged Imperial Stout. And that's what it is, given a full year in "single use" bourbon barrels, on what is presumably their second use. It's 10% ABV and looks it, pouring thickly, with a tall and dense head. The aroma is very alcoholic, the whiskey concentrated almost to the level of solvent. A harsh flavour follows, where the wood is dry, splintery and raw, and leading into an unpleasant bitter twang of putty and zinc. I'm usually all in favour of serious and grown-up stouts, but this goes too far in that direction. After half an hour or so in the glass it does soften a little, and there's a faint chocolate and whiskey-liqueur element. The harshness remains, however. I genuinely never thought I would be wishing for the blueberries and doughnuts, but this is in desperate need of a friendlier face.

Brewer 2 of the twelve arrives tomorrow.