Variety isn't everything

Today it's one of my occasional check-ins with Co. Antrim brewery Lacada, beginning with Shallows, a 4.5% ABV sour ale with cherry and raspberry. No surprise from the pinkness, nor from the minimal amount of sourness on display. That's no more than a grainy cereal husk dryness, overlaid with heavily seeded raspberry jam. Nothing about it says cherry, though it's far from unusual for raspberry in a fruit beer to drown out everything else. I mean, it's a tough set of specs to do something impressive with. There are enough high-strength lactose milkshake wannabes and mixed-fermentation sippers on the market these days to make a standard kettled soured ale look lacklustre and, frankly, a bit pointless. I didn't feel I got much for my fiver from this one. 

For the next two I have Simon to thank for providing tasters. The Sugarloaf is a Helles lager at a somewhat slight 4.5% ABV. They claim a level of authenticity here, using Hallertau and Perle hops, but I think they've either used too much of them or left the gravity too low. It doesn't have the rounded spongecake richness of good Helles and is instead quite dry and grassy in the aroma and a little vegetal and bitter to taste: not bad, but more like a pilsner. The crisp biscuit base is part of that, and the rising volume of celery and green cabbage leaf continues it. I got a twang of brown sugar sweetness in the finish, but it didn't add anything terribly positive. Lager isn't really a Lacada speciality, and this has the feel of one brewed to meet a market demand without any real enthusiasm, a bit like the pink lad above. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but I'm sure there are better examples of Helles from Germany available wherever it's sold.

A stout to finish, the faith-and-begorrah stylings of Shamrock Pinnacle, named for a submarine geological feature off the Antrim coast. It's a stout, of course, broadly in the sessionable Irish style though given a little extra welly with 4.8% ABV. That provides an excellent framework for boosting the stout flavour characteristics, and there's lots of warming roasted richness and punchy cabbage bittering. More subtle elements arrive once the initial hits calm down, and I got brightly floral rosewater and a spiced cola complexity. There seems to be quite a fashion at the moment for Irish and Irish-style stouts, coming from all sorts of breweries here and in the UK. This is definitely one of the better takes, hanging on to the pintable fundamentals but adding some quite marvellous bells and whistles to that. Excellent work.

I could be glib and say that this demonstrates how making good dark beer is so much easier than lager or sour, but I think there's a genuine talent at Lacada for stout: Shamrock Pinnacle isn't their first to impress me mightily. It's a shame that, by every brewer's account, it's such a tough sell. I'd love to see more.