Oak or nope?

Time for a regular check-in with what DOT Brew has been sending my way lately. As usual, it's a varied bunch: some going big on the barrels and blending; some not.

Barrel-aged beers at 3.8% ABV are rare, but trust the DOT/Teeling collaboration arrangement to come up with one. This is Hoppy-Go-Lucky, a light pale ale aged in the distillery's whiskey barrels. It's the bright gold of a glass of white wine and smells of freshly pressed white grape with some bonus pineapple. The low strength makes itself felt in the texture and flavour: thin and short-lived, respectively. I get a tang of grapefruit, turning bitterer, ending up as the sort of metallic aspirin effect I often find in non-alcoholic beers. That's not a good sign. On the one hand, it's good that it's not overwrought and that the barrel element is done subtly, but it's just weak tea, lacking character and, frankly, in need of a boost in booze and body. €5.50 was a lot for this small tin.

A milk stout follows; a strong one at 7.5% ABV and named Dark Stuff, which it is. It's quite light-bodied for all that it's strong and contains lactose, avoiding any accusation of cloying, but running the risk of wateriness at the same time. I let it warm up a bit before tackling it head-on. It rounds out a little, and the flavour becomes altogether more multidimensional. So what have we got? There's milk chocolate for sure, the lactose doing its job well, in a calm and understated manner. Next to it there's a bitter element, composed of roasted grain and a mild vegetal hop tang. Taking us out, there's a pink fruit and flowers effect, bringing raspberry and hibiscus. It's really nicely done: sweet, but not overblown; classic, but unusual. I took my time over the 440ml and enjoyed every minute of it.

DOT says the latest edition of Rum Red Dark (XVIII) is the "boldest" so far. It looks to be the strongest: 12% ABV up from the usual 8.6% or so. There was a squash to the can when I picked it out of the fridge, and sure enough the beer poured headless and flat. DOT's relationship with the Teeling peated single malt project is still going strong, and this has a powerful peaty aroma, along with a suggestion of toffee sweetness. To taste, it's full-on Scotch whisky to begin, softening quickly to caramel and fudge, but returning to TCP phenols in the finish. The flatness isn't a problem: this is full-bodied and feels more like a fortified wine than a beer; smooth and slick, with a sizeable quantity of boozy heat. As a smoked beer fan, I liked it, and I present that as both a recommendation and a warning, depending on your predilections. It's loud, brash, and utterly lacking in nuance, but it works, combining smooth and sweet red ale with a very specific whisky, and ramping up the volume to palate-pounding levels. This isn't an everyday beer, but I certainly have a place for it.

The Spin Off Series that DOT makes for Aldi has had four new additions this year, and I'm beginning with K.2, an IPA brewed with Norwegian yeast, presumably kveik. I think maybe it's time that Aldi customers learned what kveik is. We don't need to hide it from them any longer. It's a bright golden colour and plenty hazy. The aroma is gently juicy, suggesting high-end lemonade with a slightly sulphurous mineral bite. Though 5.2% ABV, it's light-bodied, so presumably finished on a very low gravity. That makes it pleasingly thirst-quenching, like lemon barley water. Don't expect too much other complexity, just a little ripe-fruit funk and a dry, soda water or soluble vitamin, minerality. An explosion of flavour it is not, but as a very decent hazy IPA to throw in the basket on your way through Aldi it's hard to criticise.

My jaded old palate still gets a bit of tingle when a beer label promises southern hemisphere hops. Nova IPA does, though doesn't tell us what they are. It's very slightly hazy and a rich shade of marmalade orange. The aroma is as zesty as the beer looks, more suggesting American hops than antipodean. On the flavour I didn't really get much of either: it's all quite muted, slightly orangey (Galaxy?) with a pinch of dry white wine (Nelson?), but that's your lot. OK, it's a low-cost can from Aldi, but it's also 5.8% ABV which should provide enough of a platform for some big hop fun. This is a very short celebration, though clean and inoffensive. Were it not so strong I'd be recommending it for the ice bucket at summer parties. While I enjoyed the broad sketch of the flavour profile, I would have liked it coloured in a bit more.

A second tranche of Spin Offs in just the past week yielded Fruit Sour, a generic name for a beer with the unusual choice of white peach as the add-in. It's 4% ABV and a fruit-squash shade of opaque yellow-orange. It smells kinda spicy, with hints of pink peppercorn and matchheads. Could we actually in for a sour fruited sour beer? Not really. It almost gets there but the sour effect is stymied by an overall low level of flavour, rather than one which is too sweet. It's thin and quickly headless, oppressively fizzy with no more than a smear of sweet peach flesh and a tiny tinny tart tang. The promising spice from the aroma does reappear late on in the background, but I would need a lot more of it to consider the beer properly good. I can say I got my €2.50's worth in Aldi, but no more than that.

That arrived alongside US Wheat, another busily fizzy one. It doesn't get in the way so much here, as there's plenty of soft and pillowy malt to cushion its bite. The beer is brightly golden and only slightly hazed, with not great head retention, but better than the previous. There's a portent of dryness in the aroma, with elements of spun wheat and black tea, but a promise of fruit as well: soft cantaloupe and apricot. The hops are to the fore in the flavour, and deliciously so, leaning in to the sweetly smooth melon notes with only a token bitterness, similar to the profile of the mighty Little Fawn. I don't know if Mosaic was involved, but the profile is quite similar. The label does tell us that the hops came in CGX cryo-pellet form, and for once the minutiae of the processed hop market does interest me: this stuff is great, at least when used as DOT's contract brewer has here. Even though it's the stronger of the pair at 5.2% ABV, US Wheat is the one I'd like to have several of to hand on a sunny afternoon.

Time for some more stout, I think. The second-newest in the collaboration series with Redmonds off licence in Ranelagh is Marsala Imperial Stout, the second Redmonds joint to use ex-Marsala whiskey barrels. The aroma is very much whiskey -- hot and honeyish -- with just a slight hint of raisin to suggest the wine's involvement. The foretaste is quite sharp: this is no big chocolate or vanilla imperial stout but one where 10.5% ABV means it has been attenuated quite far down. The mouthfeel is light and maybe even a shade too thin. I get a little of the oak spice and sour cherry of Flanders red ale, which is enjoyable but not what I was expecting. A more typically stout-like roasted espresso bitterness arrives later, but doesn't hang around, and then the finish brings us back to the fruit, this time a long echo of macerated red grapes. It's an interesting, left-field, take on imperial stout, but properly enjoyable too. The Marsala-whiskey combination brings us places we otherwise wouldn't get to visit.  

The Redmonds partnership has also, more recently, yielded a bock. A barrel-aged bock. In fact, a Barrel Aged Brett Bock, the only one of its kind I've ever encountered. The base beer is a doppelbock, giving us 8% ABV and a dark chestnut colour, while the barrel is once again ex-Marsala. It smells sour and quite funky, with similar cherry aromas to, again, Flanders red. The texture is surprisingly light, a demonstration perhaps that neither lager yeast nor Brettanomyces leave much sugar in their hungry wake. There's a small remainder of the dark caramel flavour of doppelbock, but mostly the oak and Brett are in charge of the taste: lots of port-like wine notes, tangy oak sap, finishing on a strong farmyard funk. Although it's an unlikely combination, every element here plays its part. It's an audacious experiment, but one which paid off handsomely. And at €6 for a 375ml bottle, it's a steal.

A double IPA to end on: 3-Way Idaho [7], the second in a series of hop showcases which began with Simcoe last winter. That one was a failure of a New England-style IPA, and all the better for the resulting clarity and bitterness. They've fixed it for round two and I'm not happy. It's one of those hazy IPAs which shows off their regular problems. Not much aroma I can live with, but the grittiness; the earthy, chalky, savoury crunch from saturated haze particles is plain nasty. A harsh alcoholic burn comes with it, and even though it's 8% ABV, there's simply too much booze. It does have a good side -- I could still detect apricot, peach and lychee notes under all the unpleasantness, but they were too soft and subtle to stand up to it properly. Maybe the small draught measure didn't suit it, as it did mellow a little as it warmed. I certainly wasn't drinking it fast. I'm not sure I'd be willing to take a chance on a retry, though. Let's have another 3 Way instead.

Who knows what treasure we'll get next from the magical kingdom in the lock-up behind Dolphin's Barn Tesco. But there's a reasonable likelihood you'll find a review of it here.