Thirteenth night

Coming off the back of the 12 Brewers of Christmas sequence which finished two days ago, 12 more breweries which didn't make that (completely arbitrary) cut.

Dundalk's Mo Chara pub / event space / whatever you're having yourself has collaborated with five different Irish breweries so far, on their "Ár gCairde" series. Now they've got a beer that's all their own, called Mo Chara, and look: stubbies! You don't see them very often here, especially not in the 33cl size, but it's an undeniably cool format. I felt self-conscious pouring this into a glass because it's clearly not intended with that in mind. "Brewed in Town" says the label, so I assumed that either Dundalk Bay or Pearse Lyons were responsible, but it's actually brewed one county to the left, at Brehon in Monaghan.

It's a flawless pale gold in the glass, with a properly Germanic head of fine white bubbles. The session credentials are sealed with its modest 4.2% ABV. The aroma is subtle and Helles-like, with a touch of grain or bread but not much else, and the texture is similarly smooth: half the glass was gone on the first pull. The flavour doesn't offer much for a reviewer to grasp upon, but of course that's absolutely the point. It's utterly clean and on the dry side, but not oppressively so. For hops, look elsewhere. Microbrewed lager can be luck of the draw, and Brehon, as far as I know, doesn't make one of their own. Here, however, they've avoided all the too-regular pitfalls and created a beer that may present as bland to the sad beer geeks, but it's not for them, and I would happily have chugged a second, and a third, in short order. 

Ballykilcavan switched to bottles for their latest, citing the hassle of the upcoming deposit return scheme for cans. I'm not complaining about the extra volume of beer, nor that the beer itself is a dark mild. Endurance is 4.2% ABV and an attractive clear garnet colour with a thin layer of ivory-coloured head. The aroma sets out its stall as sweet, offering up plum and chocolate vapours. Happily it tastes drier, not quite giving the coffee which my favourite milds have, but rather a porter-adjacent light roast. The sweet side of the flavour is not fruit but treacle, dark and sticky tasting, though not actually sticky in texture. Dry and sweet blend together harmoniously, laced at the edges with both dark and milk chocolate plus a very English metallic hop bite ahead of a neat and clean finish. This is excellent, and compares very favourably with Gob Fliuch, the quality mild from Four Provinces. I hope it finds a market, and I think the bottle format will help it to do that.

A brand new brewery for me next, and possibly the first time I've ever drank a beer brewed in my native county of Armagh. McCrackens is in Portadown and McCrackens Black their stout. The can says to pour it in one go so I thought it was going to be nitrogenated but it's not: no creamy white head here, instead a wholesome dark brown one. The aroma is bitter and tarry, suggesting this definitely isn't pitched at the mainstream stout drinker. It's fairly smooth and lightly sparkling, with lots of thick dark malt in the body. That contributes hugely to the treacley flavour, and the bitterness is back, tasting strongly herbal, like rosemary and grass clippings. It's certainly bold, though the big flavour tips a little into off-flavour with a touch of phenol on the end. Overall, it's pretty good, with the big hop character I always like to find in a stout. Though only 4.5% ABV it's no lightweight.

Neither is Screw Steamer, a California common from Lacada. I wasn't any sort of enthusiast for this style until its San Francisco flagship sank; now I see it as a rare heritage beer, deserving of recognition and preservation. It shows up infrequently in Ireland and I'm glad Lacada took a punt on it. The result is a deep copper shade with plenty of fizz. Dry crispness should be a hallmark, but this puts a rounded and quite sweet fruitiness at the centre, suggesting strawberry and red cherry to me. That's backed by quite a thick texture: not really something that could be mistaken for a lager. A more typical peppery spice flavour arrives late but doesn't hang around long, with the finish being estery; strawberry turning to banana and pear. In spite of the lack of crispness, I liked it. It's a sipper rather than a refresher but there's plenty of interesting things going on in it, and no technical flaws.

Another new brand for me, Hopsicle is a joint operation from Cork pubs The Bierhaus and Fionnbarra's, brewing in Dublin at Third Barrel, which is how their second beer, Is Citra Way To Amarillo, ended up in UnderDog just before Christmas. It's a pretty standard 5% ABV hazy pale ale, one with a particularly soft texture and lots of orange juice in the flavour. A balancing bitterness brings up the rear and ensures the sweet side stays under control. It may not be a very distinctive individual, but it's fine pub drinking, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Third Barrel themselves have something similar out under their own label: Eat. Sleep. Pale. Repeat., a 4.8% ABV double dry-hopped pale ale with Mosaic and Citra. This is another orangey-yellow job, and smells sweetly juicy, of jaffas and ice cream, with a minor herbal bite. The texture is light, coming across as a little thin, despite the best efforts of a haze-derived creaminess. There's very little assertive about the flavour: it's quite anodyne, bringing only light fruit flavours and a rough bitterness, all finishing quickly. The name is well chosen: this is a beer for drinking, not tasting. It's nicely refreshing, but don't expect depths of hazy complexity.

At Western Herd they've swapped their usual big bag of hops for a big bag of coffee, creating Beerista, described as a "coffee blonde pale ale". I've never seen the like. It is more or less blonde, with a polished-copper pink tint. The pour seemed a little flat, only reluctantly forming a head and offering no more than a gentle sparkle. There's an aroma of coffee of a certain kind; a cold pouch of ground beans, with nothing warm or inviting about it. In the flavour it's predominantly a pale ale: they didn't go too far away with those hops and there's quite an old-school American, or even English, tang of earthiness, which tastes like Cascade to me, even though there's Strata and Amarillo in here as well. I couldn't taste any of their fruitiness. The coffee is surprisingly complementary to this, again not heavy on the roast, or concentrated or oily; little more than a seasoning, in fact, adding a different sort of dryness to an already quite dry base beer. At only 5.1% ABV there's not a lot of complexity on offer, and while it's no revelatory taste experience, the experiment does work, giving you something interesting and worthwhile for your trouble.

Trouble Brewing itself, some months ago now, released a bitter of the extra special sort, brewed in collaboration with Italian brewery Railroad, and named Catenary. I doubt it would pass muster over in Britain as it arrived decidedly hazy, making the amber colour appear quite muddy. The aroma does say old-school Kentish bitter to me, smelling zesty and pithy like big jaffa oranges. The flavour continues in that direction, the mild citrus joined by a more metallic sort of bitterness. It's a convincing enough take that I found the cold and fizzy keg serve unsatisfactory: this does deserve to be on cask. 5.4% ABV but don't even think about drinking it in small measures: it's very much not that sort of beer.

WhiteField continues to be a pleasant surprise on the rare occasions I see its beer for sale. This time it was in the Mace on the South Circular Road and the beer is the 2023 edition of Harvest Ale. The description is intriguing: a blend of sour beer and weissbier with added Tipperary raspberries. Some of you may remember this recipe, or one very like it, as White Gypsy Première Framboise a few years ago. You also get a reminder that WhiteField runs the only cork-and-cage machine in the country. It's doing a fine job. The cork comes out with a pleasing pop and the beer behind it is crisply fizzy. It's a hazy orange colour, with a barely-there pinkish tint from the raspberries. There's an oaky spice to the aroma, reminding me of geuze, even though it's not barrel aged. The flavour is balanced, and integrates its component parts well. The dry sour side is at the centre, genuinely tasting like a decent Belgian oude geuze only slightly softer. The raspberries have a gentle sweetening effect, not the sort of pink foghorn you usually get from raspberry beers. I don't get where the weissbier fits into the blend, but I'm guessing it's helping take the edge off the sourness. It's very tasty and surprisingly refreshing for 5.8% ABV. I hope the experiment gets a third run out soon.

At the same strength is the new Cold IPA from Rascals, the last in their three-part Outbreak series. Cold IPAs taste like onion and this is no different, even though they've done it with all southern-hemisphere hops: Motueka, Galaxy and Pacific Sunrise. I would never have guessed. It's a clear sunset gold and a little spicy with a big side order of cooked vegetables. That resolves into predominantly white onion in the flavour, with only a faint lacing of lighter citrus. I know it's the whole point of the style, but the highly attenuated malt base makes this less enjoyable for me, taking away the platform which the hops need to work from. While it's not actively unpleasant, it does seem a bit washed out, lacking the hop heft I want from a 5.8% ABV IPA.

This year's winter seasonal from Hope is Seasonal Red Ale, a bit of a whopper at 7% ABV. It pours out thickly, forming a head slowly but expansively. It's quite dark, on the brown end of red, and with a brothy murk. It smells beery: a concentrated mix of sticky malt, old-world hop bitterness and fuggy booze vapours. The flavour really leans into those hops, bringing a tangy vegetal bitterness from the use of Challenger. That runs in parallel with a cake-like sweetness, suggesting cherry pies and marzipan. Strong and red doesn't usually float my boat, but I liked the heft of this one. Beer can bring wintery comfort without needing a double-digit ABV. 

This year Lineman has significantly slowed its output of new beers. Perhaps created before that strategic decision was made, Kismet is a dark strong ale, having had "extensive wood ageing". In what, we are not told. It finished up at 11.5% ABV, is a dark brown and cost €11.25 for a half litre bottle. The aroma is sweetly dessertish, conjuring tiramisu, affogato and chocolate torte. Chocolate dominates the flavour but has a slightly twangy oxidised sherry note in, suggesting things might not have gone exactly as planned. There's a vague spirit heat, but without knowing in advance I couldn't tell you which brown spirit previously inhabited the barrels. I tried hard to like it, and the formula is sound, but the vinegary poke to it means it fails to live up to its price tag.

Lots to take stock of there, and indeed over the past twelve months. Luckily, I know just the format in which to do that. Stand by.