Up comers

Today's post is mostly about beers from southern Europe which featured at this year's Borefts Beer Festival, but I neglected to mention Poland in my northern round-up on Monday. So we'll start there.

I was a little surprised to find Pinta at the festival. They make good beer, but seem a bit mainstream for Borefts. I picked the weirdest thing they had: After Hours, described simply as a "wild ale". This is the Citrus version, brewed with lime and two kinds of orange. It's a pale hazy yellow and 6% ABV. Though very light bodied, it seems to have been given a thorough dose of Brettanomyces, bringing a degree of blue cheese funk, but also a gooey pineapple and peach flavour, which makes the beer seem richer and fuller than maybe it is. The zesty citrus remains intact, and there's the perfect level of palate-cleansing sourness. I wanted weird, and I got it in the best possible way. This one is endlessly entertaining, with something new in every mouthful. Several other versions exist and I would love to catch up with them.

Wrocław's Stu Mostów was also on hand. Cherry Me is an imperial stout with cherries. This is something an Irish brewery tried recently with disappointing results. Stu Mostów got it just right, however. The secret is to start with a really good stout; here that's 11.2% ABV and already a dessert in its own right, with heaps of chocolate cake laced with thick sweet coffee. The cherry merely tops this off, adding a fruit complexity that is obvious and real-tasting, but doesn't interfere with the fundamentals. The beer is lightly textured without being at all thin, and balanced in such a way as to be dangerously easy to drink. This was one of many beers I could have spent a lot more time with.

My last one from them, and indeed of the whole festival was one described as a "Philly Crumble Gose" and I have no idea what that means. The beer is called Peach on the Beach and is 6% ABV, an opaque soupy yellow colour and thick like a smoothie. I don't know how much further you can get from the proper spec of gose, but we're definitely not in Leipzig with this one. The flavour is very dessertish, although without much fruit. Instead, vanilla and white chocolate are what it's about: intensely sweet and quite un-beery. I did quite enjoy the ice cream effect once I'd got used to it, but it's very much a beer to grind the gears of any traditionalist.

OK, to southern Europe then. One of the headline attractions was the appearance of Menno Olivier, the man who founded and shaped De Molen before selling it to an industrial brewing concern and emigrating to Catalonia to start over. Menno Olivier Brewing is the brewery name; I guess without a windmill this time he was short of inspiration. He had created a Back & Future beer in keeping with this year's festival theme: a mixed fermentation job, hazy orange and 6.5% ABV. It's one of those beers where Brettanomyces pulls its party trick of making the beer taste intensely of ripe tropical fruit, without any actual fruit having been near it. This is an almost sickly sweet mush of pineapple and coconut. That sits next to a contrasting sourness which helps balance it, a little. What's missing is the wild spicing. I had to check if it was barrel aged, and it is, but there's no oak character or other signs of maturity. It's fine, even interesting, but unexciting.

Some time later I tackled Dota, a barrel aged imperial stout, something much more in Menno's wheelhouse. The barrel is from Kilchoman, on Islay, and so there's lots of delicious smoke in this one. The peaty phenols mix with dark chocolate in a way that probably shouldn't work, but I know from experience with De Molen that it definitely does. It's as rich and warm as you would like an 11.3% ABV stout to be, but the smoke dries it out nicely, and the texture is surprisingly light and accessible. Overall, it's very well balanced for an extreme beer with crazy flavours. Top work, and very much the sort of thing that has sustained my interest in De Molen over the years.

The other Catalan brewery was Poch's, who have been to Borefts before. The most obvious redundancy in a beer name was their Tonka Attack: there's no such thing as subtle tonka bean. This is a 10.2% ABV imperial stout, and in fairness to the beans, the aroma is quite subdued, though its delicate cinnamon spicing leaves no doubt what's going on. The beer is thick and sumptuous, tasting first of hot chocolate, then a more herbal cola effect, and then a massive hit of tonka cinnamon flavour. It may be an attack, but it's not one-dimensional, tasting balanced, well-rounded and refined. There are lots of tonka-infused imperial stouts like it, but that's no criticism. I can see why people enjoy what it brings.

Over to Italy next, beginning with Ca' Del Brado. This is one of my all-time favourite breweries and, looking back, I think I made a mistake by not drinking more of their beer while it was there. The one I had was called Zena, described as a wild gose. Yet more playing fast and loose with that word? This one is at least pale yellow and clear, although quite strong at 6.4% ABV. There's maybe a faint trace of gose saltiness in the flavour, but I doubt I would have been able to identify it unprompted. Instead, it's a classic CDB barrel job: opening on a clean and sparkly Prosecco-like grape effect and following it with some mildly funky wild fermentation notes. It's zesty, sunny, upbeat and delicious; complex yet quaffable. I really should have gone back for more of the similar.

But the siren song of unfamiliar Italian breweries proved impossible to resist. One was the oddly-named Granda brewery, from Piedmont. They had a black IPA. Hurrah! Regeneration is a big one at 7% ABV, and delivers all the fundamentals of coffee roast meeting spiced red cabbage with a liquorice bitterness behind, all set on a smooth body. While flavourful, it's also subtle and balanced, finishing cleanly and tasting lighter than its strength. I don't mind when these lean into the bitterness a bit more, but I also appreciated how finely honed this one was.

Tell me more, Granda! They also brought a smoked lager, called simply Rauch, making it very clear what sort of smoked lager it's meant to be. These, I would say, are quite tricky to get right. Too much smoke and they end up tasting like kippers. Here they've been careful to keep the smoke low, and indeed we don't get close to kippers, but neither does it have the lovely savoury meat effect that the best examples do. When making a lager clean, it's important not to make it boring, and they've narrowly avoided that error with this. It has quick-fire sparks of burnt crispy bits to hold the drinker's attention, and it's just enough to make the beer worthwhile. Maybe I needed a larger measure to get a better handle on this. It is only 5.2% ABV and handling a pint would present little difficulty.

Brasseria Della Fonte was another returning brewery, and from them I had Good Morning Madamoiselle, a coffee maple stout at 8.4% ABV. I got a lot of head from the pour of this, and a huge amount of the maple syrup, making it taste quite smoky, and not in a good way. The coffee side is less obvious, showing only as a smear of oily roasted beans. While it's heavy and unsubtle, the flavours disappear surprisingly quickly, suggesting to me that the base beer isn't up to scratch. This is all gimmick, trying to cram the eye-catching added ingredients into a stout that can't really handle them. The result tastes quite amateurish. Plenty of other breweries at the festival were doing this kind of thing much better, and almost all of them were making their stouts stronger, which I'm sure helps.

A hop over the Adriatic brings us to Croatia, and the ubiquitous Zagreb brewery The Garden. Honestly, I wasn't inspired by anything they were pouring, so just to get them a mention I tried the Florida Weisse Watermelon, suspecting that I can probably buy it in Dublin. With the watermelon they've added lime and mint, and the aroma is particularly minty, with a pleasing mineral sourness alongside. It's light bodied despite a substantial 6.2% ABV, and the flavour is extremely minty, with any watermelon, lime, or indeed sourness, just about clinging on to make themselves felt in the background. "One-dimensional" pretty much covers it, but if you like mint in your beer, The Garden has the perfect Florida weisse for you. Enjoy.

Finally, from green flavour to actual fully-green beer. This is Little Green Man, by Pulfer, also from Zagreb. "Heavily fruited sour" is all the description says. Poured from the can, it looks like vegetable soup or a healthy smoothie: a dull, opaque green, all thick and gloopy. The fruit bill consists of passionfruit, mango, papaya and coconut, and while I couldn't pick those out individually, it definitely tastes tropical. It's as thickly textured as it looks and has a fun fruit salad character at its centre, allied with a cheesecake creaminess. A slight citric bite on the end provides something resembling balance. But this beer isn't about balance, it's about being ridiculous for its own sake, and I rather enjoyed the clown act. It helped that I wasn't expected to drink the whole can. While only 5% ABV, this is one to take in small measures.

Next, we'll look at the beers which travelled furthest to get to Bodegraven.