Twelve degrees of differentiation

"Oak aged lager" is the strapline. Time was, a Czech brewery wouldn't have to specify what they aged their lagers in; sure didn't we all see Michael Jackson being chased around the Pilsner Urquell cellars by a giant oak barrel? Or did I dream that? Anyway, we live in a less enlightened age and it seem that Czech lager brewers no longer all do things the proper way. Zichovec does, apparently, and here's how that turned out.

Sinker Oak is 12° plato, or 5.1% ABV in Earth money, and looks much like an unfiltered pale Czech lager: brightly golden with a modicum of haze, but not full-on cloudy. The can was a little on the elderly side, six months past packaging and a week beyond the best before, so maybe it had settled more than the brewery intended. I can't say if it was meant to have much hop, or oak, aroma, but now it smells like a pretty standard pils, of crisp grain and a hint of damp grass. The basic, salt-of-the-earth lager is still there on tasting, but over it there's what I guess is the oak, and it's not an improvement. While it's not the sickly vanilla of an ill-chosen spirit barrel, it's a kind of dry and splintery imposition that does nothing to enhance the beer. There's a sappy stickiness: pine, but in the furniture-store varnished sense, rather than California forest floor. While it's not horrible, it does take away from what the beer could have been. I'm pinning the blame on the "craft beer" need to be different or some way innovative. Even the soulless multinational-owned Czech breweries make much better beer than this. Zichovec has tried to give us something a little different but frankly shouldn't have bothered.

I thought they would be much more in their wheelhouse with an American-style pale ale. Robin is also a twelve-degree-er but the can doesn't tell us which of those degenerate un-noble American hops have been employed, doubtless at arm's length. Under the flamboyant bouffant of foam it's a pin-bright pale golden colour, looking a bit like a light lager. Is this a Czech satire on mainstream American beer?

The aroma is invigoratingly zesty, like having a ripe lemon peeled directly under your nose. Its flavour builds on that sharpness, adding slightly oilier lime and bergamot features. As is normal when brewers from cool-fermenting countries take on warm-fermenting styles, there's a deliciously charming clean precision about the whole thing. Your citric hops are presented beautifully wrapped in a package with crisp corners and the bare essentials of added decoration. In fact, this is a better lager than the lager was: not an element is out of place. There's a decent body, showing it is genuinely warm-fermented, and there's even a soft mattress of malt smoothness supporting those hops. But the crispness, the cleanness, is joy that you mostly only get from central European brewers, and I suspect that they're not even trying.

I did not expect the pale ale from this Czech brewery to be so much better than the lager, but that's craft for you. Zichovec, like most of Ireland's breweries, seems to be trying to carve out a space separate from what the big guys are doing. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.