Wild Westmeath

I wasn't counting heads, but the third iteration of the Mullingar Wild Beer Festival seemed a little more subdued, and I somehow doubt that the audience for wild fermented beers from Belgium, Britain and Ireland was being poached by Taylor Swift, who played Dublin the same evening. I don't know. I do hope that it was still worth the organiser's and brewers' time. It was certainly worth my time.

As always, the venue was down the back of Smiddy's Bar, where four Irish breweries had set up stalls, with a separate international selection of taps. I began with Brett & Forget, a Brettanomyces-fermented lager from Dublin's Third Barrel. The titular yeast, it turns out, is an unreliable carbonator, so this came out flat which, for a pale lager, is unfortunate. Still (ha!), there was a quite delicious flavour profile, accentuating the ripely tropical aspects of Brett: big on lychee and pear, with a dusting of coconut. It's hefty stuff, at 6% ABV, but very satisfying drinking. I will definitely be back to this once it's fizzed up, if given the chance.

Otterbank was launching a new core beer, a Bretted pale ale of 4.1% ABV called The Internationale. This is intended to be dry-hopped with rotating varieties, and the first is Kiwi hop Superdelic. It's a light touch on the hopping, and only a faint trace of lemon in the finish suggested it was there. The rest of the flavour is the other side of Brett; the musky, musty, foetid horse-blanket and mulch so familiar from Orval in particular. It's lightened by a sweet and heady floral perfume taste, all violet and honeysuckle. In short, it's far more complex than any core beer has a right to be. It may be low strength but I can't see it working as a session beer. It's one to take in slowly.

Last of the new Irish offerings was a sort-of grape ale from Land & Labour, though one with a near 50-50 ratio of wine and beer, which is unusual for all sorts of reasons. It's called Puro Salamino and the wine component was produced by the brewery from Lambrusco Salamino grapes. 8.5% ABV and dark maroon, it was being served on cask. I was quite taken aback by the flavour, a strongly savoury herbal character, tasting of oily rosemary in particular, though also dill and marjoram. A subtle lacing of cherry and raspberry were the only nods to north-Italian red wine that I found in it, and I can't say any of it tasted much like beer. While it's odd and unsettling, it's delicious too: the sort of thing I expect they served at the better kind of medieval banquet.

Land & Labour also had a canned imperial stout open for tasting. This was Torched, a 10% ABV job brewed by Catalan brewery Garage in collaboration with Land & Labour. It's intended to be a fully unadorned imperial stout, with no additives or ageing. And while I respect that, the result was rather harsh: very heavy, and with a concentrated roasted bitterness that came across ashen and acrid. Wax, tar and liquorice all feature in my notes, scribbling as I rushed to finish it off and find something lighter. Straight-up, old-school imperial stouts don't have to be outright evil. I'm a fan in general, but this one was too much.

Brussels microbrewery L'Ermitage had sent two beers along. I was dubious, and haven't really got along with this brewery's output, finding it on the rough and gritty side of IPA and saison. I hadn't had much of their beer in the wild and barrel-aged area, though, so was willing to extend them the benefit of the doubt.

First out was Cureghem Kriekland, and as the name implies, this is a cherry-flavoured beer. The recipe is quite straightforward: 75% young saison blended with 25% wild-fermented, packed with cherries and barrel aged. It's 6.5% ABV and deep purple in colour. I like the natural-tasting cherry notes but it's no candified fruit beer. There's a very serious earthy and funky side to it, with a slightly unpleasant plastic tang in the background. The fun and spritzy tartness of kriek lambic was never meant to be there, I'm sure, but I missed it all the same, as it has so many other features in common. This wasn't the beer to change my opinion of L'Ermitage.

And neither was their grape ale, Le Grand Œuvre. This is again a blend of straight and wild fermented beers, with the addition of Muscaris grapes before three months of barrel ageing. It's 7% ABV and a hazy gold colour, giving me an early warning sign with its vinegary aroma, sitting next to softer and sweeter honey. It's heavily sour on tasting: dry and astringent, with more of the artificial plastic twang I found in the other one. Some zesty lemon cleans things up in the finish, but overall it didn't really work for me, tasting too unsubtle and immature.

Some beer was left over from the 2023 event, so I got a belated chance to drink Little Earth Project's Echoes of Summer. This is a mixed fermentation red ale with redcurrants and four types of berry. A muddy brown colour in the glass, it has the red-wine-like aroma of Flanders red ale. Similarly, the taste has a cherry and strawberry base, plus some sweeter mellow raisin notes. While tart, it shows the maturity lacking in the L'Ermitage beers, though perhaps spending a year ageing in KeyKeg helped with that. There's lots of oak, but smooth and balanced. It may not be exactly a to-style Flanders red, but this has enough in common with the well-made ones to attract the same sort of appreciation from me.

My last new tick before I went off in search of a beer to relax over (Wide Street's Saison de Pyrénées) was Thank You For The Day, a barrel-aged saison dry-hopped with Saaz, from Scatterlings, a side project of the brewer from Two Flints brewery in Windsor. The result is beautiful, with a fresh and light white wine aroma followed by a flavour which mixes juicy white grape with a pinch of citrus zest, sprinkled with coarsely ground black pepper. There's a lot of beautifully balanced complexity here, especially given the ABV is only 5.6%: a reminder that beers of this nature don't have to be >7% ABV to be worthwhile. Thank You, Mr Scatterling.

I said the festival felt smaller, but now it's written down, that's actually a decent afternoon's drinking. None of it was meant for quaffing, and I'm glad I didn't need to rush any of them. I'll have the same again please.

Good Spanish lager

The presence on the Irish beer market of A Coruña's Hijos de Rivera, via their partial stake in O'Hara's, yields the occasional interesting beer. I picked up two recently, in the 1906 series from the Spanish brewery, packaged in jolly, retro, 33cl bottles.

La Milnueve is described as a pale bock but is a cheery limpid amber colour in the glass. It definitely smells like lager, in a very German way, of crisp dry malt and lightly grass-laden hops. Although it's a bit of a whopper at 6.5% it tastes much lighter, being perfectly clean with lots of refreshing tea-like tannins and more of that fresh leafy herb thing. A certain caramel malt substance builds as it goes, but it never gets difficult, and I say that as someone who often doesn't get along with straight bock. Although I'd be reasonably sure it's a new addition to their range, it does taste classically old-fashioned: beer like it used to be, and still should be. 

The dark companion is called Black Coupage, though I don't think it's an actual coupage, just a black lager, claiming dunkel bock identity. It's a substantial 7.2% ABV but again it's sufficiently lager in nature to hide any less-than-clean attributes. Instead, you get aniseed, cola nut and burnt caramel, all fully in keeping with how the Germans do this sort of thing. The mouthfeel becomes more noticeable as it warms: a little treacly while still retaining the clean lager side. It's bob-on for a brewery trying to recreate the Munich thing, except for the 33cl rather than 50cl package.

Were I resident in this part of northern Spain I would be very glad of a brewery that has nailed German brewing styles quite as well as Rivera has here. As an outsider in both countries, however, I think I'd pick the Bavarian versions first. Regardless, these are a welcome addition to the current beer scene. Buy two of each if you want to go German.

Schar'd for life

I mentioned that when I visited Lambiek Fabriek on this year's Toer de Geuze, I took a bottle of theirs away with me. And here it is: Schar-Elle, their Schaarbeekse kriek. I've quite enjoyed these lambics made with heirloom Belgian cherries, and I hoped that the fruit would offset the fact that I tend to not really enjoy Lambiek Fabriek beers in general.

This is 6.2% ABV and a muddy maroon colour. On first tasting it's sharp and more than a little vinegary, which was disappointing but not completely surprising. Luckily, the cherries do a lot to save it. The rich super-cherryness of the Schaarbeekse isn't as sweetly prominent as in other breweries' examples, but it's there, and has a pleasant softening effect on the acidity. The warmer the beer gets, the more pronounced the cherries become, and other complexities emerge too: a funky blue-cheese effect and other tart fruit: blueberries and raspberries.

My preference is for something more matured: fuller-bodied and less sharp, but this is pretty good, and could even age to brilliance. It's a ray of sunshine in the otherwise quite dismal Lambiek Fabriek collection.

A whip round

Today I have a selection of beers from Whiplash. I've been making good use of their Dublin bar, Fidelity, which has made finding some of their more esoteric output easier to find than hunting in shops.

Allta Dark Sour is first, created as a house beer for Dublin restaurant Allta but available elsewhere too, like Fidelity where I found it. It's dark: at the brownish end of garnet; and it's properly sour: the classy balsamic vinegar tang of Flanders red ale. Any more? I thought I detected some sweet bourbon vanilla in the aroma but it turns out it's cognac barrel aged, so that's the oak component. I can't say it tasted like brandy, though. From the dark malt there's a little caramel and a crisp roasted edge, then we're back to the sourness and the typically Flemish cherry and raspberry tartness with sweeter date and tamarind. It's an odd choice for a restauranty foody beer, but maybe they're pitching it as an aperitif. Regardless, it's rather nice, especially when allowed warm up and round out.

Staying in Fidelity, a new lager called They Reminisce Over You, in the still-sort-of-fashionable "Italian" style. The board shys away from calling it a pilsner and I'm not sure why that is: it's properly crisp and even a little creamy in the central European way. The hop profile is not what it could be, however, and I didn't get a whole lot of that character. In both flavour and aroma there's a mild summer fruitiness, of honeydew melon and white grape, but almost imperceptible. For the most part this is dry: clear and clean but avoids feeling thin or overfizzed. On a sunny summer evening it worked well as a refresher: 4.5% ABV and served at 3°C, numbers fans. I could have let it warm up to see if more flavour emerged but I doubt that's the brewer's intention.

My mantra of don't muck about with classic German styles has been observed with Don't Call Me Uncle, as straight a dunkel bock as you like. It's crystal clear and a gorgeous shade of cherrywood red. The aroma is a perfectly balanced mix of caramel malt and herbal noble hops, and there are no surprises from that in the flavour. It's 6.5% ABV and full bodied, which means the malt is foremost in the taste: bourbon biscuit, hard toffee and a little burnt breadcrust dryness. The hops take a back seat and, as someone who has occasional difficulties with pungent German hops, I'm glad of that. Here, they're limited to providing only a minor tang of acidity, preventing the sweet profile from getting cloying. It works, in that effortlessly refined German way, which I'm sure is not easy to do. Usually, bock fails to push my buttons but this example is spot on.

The brewery's can labels have become rather less engaging since they changed designer. The new one doesn't even have their name on it. Anyway, this is Desire Lines, a 6.8% ABV IPA, opaque as you like and hopped with Azacca, Galaxy and Motueka. There's a lovely fresh tropicality about the aroma with maybe just a hint of naughty dank in the background. The texture is nicely creamy, with low carbonation for enhanced suppability. I was a little let down by the flavour after that. There's rye in the grain bill, and the main thing I get from the flavour is a savoury, almost smoky, bitterness, which tastes very like rye to me. The fruit side of the hops, suggested by the aroma, doesn't really come through. It's certainly not juicy, though does have a stimulating hard bitterness in the finish. Ultimately I think it's a bit bland. With all the named varieties of ingredient I think I have a right to expect more complexity than was delivered.

Its ABV twin is Embracing Facts, another hazy IPA, this time with Hüll Melon and El Dorado. There's an annoyingly generous head and the standard Whiplash beaten-egg body. The aroma is sweet, fruity and crisp, like Skittles, and again we get that creamy meringue mouthfeel. But also again the flavour disappoints. Here it's standard haze problems: a rough and savoury grittiness, too much heat and a garlic or spring onion effect which drowns out the mix of grape melon and stonefruit which I can just about detect hovering in the background. The fun side of the off-flavours is a spicy nutmeg character, but I wanted fruit, dammit, and it didn't deliver. Whiplash used to be the one reliable brewery when it came to hazy IPA but they seem increasingly to be making ones that aren't to my taste. That's not on.

Let's regroup for a pale ale, one at 5% ABV called Slide. It's hazy, of course, and hopped using Strata and Galaxy. They give the aroma a pleasing mandarin juiciness, which is promising. There's a surprising amount of bitterness in the flavour; a hard resinous quality which isn't unpleasant but isn't what I was expecting either. The orangey fruit side sits behind this, though isn't strong enough to make the beer taste juicy or sweet. Once I had adjusted my expectations, I enjoyed it. They haven't skimped on the hops, and the bitterness builds, tasting almost like raw cones by the end. There's a very slight haze sharpness, but the hops prevent it from doing anything seriously problematic. It's not an easy drinker, but I like its sheer uncompromising wallop. Strap in.

At the same ABV but calling itself an IPA is Note To Self. It also says it's "West Coast" and it's the translucent gold of Sculpin and friends. I had been expecting grapefruit, though the aroma is sweet mandarin, which is lovely, but where's the bitterness? It's not really in the flavour either. There's a certain pithiness, but that's being charitable. Zest is as intense as things get, and there's certainly no resin, all of it finishing quickly with little to no aftertaste. We're in accessible-quencher territory here, rather than Whiplash hop fireworks. It's in a small can and sits comfortably beside the brewery's core offerings Rollover and Body Riddle -- built for the six-pack, or indeed pints at Fidelity. 

Finally, it looks like Chimes, the lovely lime-flavoured pale ale that Whiplash made for Dublin burger chain Bunsen, has been retired and replaced by the more plain-spoken Bunsen Pale Ale. This is 4.8% ABV and, as you might expect, fully hazy. There's a balance of sweet and bitterness, lemon juice meeting soft vanilla. I was served it very cold, in a chilled glass, and it's probably best consumed this way. There's a grittiness which begins to make its presence felt as the beer warms, accompanied by unwelcome oily garlic. But when cold it's clean and zesty, and does an excellent job of scrubbing burger grease off the palate. There's certainly no indication that they've skimped on hops, just because it's not pitched at hardened beer enthusiasts.

It seems Fidelity is definitely the place to go if you want Whiplash beer that isn't a hazy pale ale of some sort, although it does sell lots of them too.