Eternal return of the same

Today's beers were released late last year by Galway Bay Brewery but strictly speaking they're not new ones. They were brewed and sold as versions of The Eternalist sour ale, and bottled about three years ago. I only ever had the raspberry Eternalist, back in 2015, so both of them are still new to me.

The first they've called Ash, and it has added cherries in, as well as vanilla and tonka beans which aren't mentioned on the label. It's a deep purple colour with a firm pink head and smells strongly of the cherries: ripe and luscious and real. It's sour but not sharp; tangy more than tart, I'd say, and with a big and rounded body, reflecting the substantial 6.8% ABV. I can't say I was able to identify the tonka or vanilla, but there is a certain sweetness which can't be assigned to the cherries alone. It's entirely complementary with the sourness and quite different to the sugared-up effect of Belgian candy-kriek. Here, it's an added richness, of the sort you get from an amber-coloured malt. This does come at the expense of the wildness: I thought that a barrel-aged beer with wild yeast would be funkier but there's only a very faint trace of that here, right on the very end. On the other hand, I like cherry beer to actualy taste of cherries and this does so, quite beautifully. So while it's not as serious as many a cork-stoppered wild ale, it's very enjoyable in its own fun way.

The companion piece is called Oak, and this time the added ingredient is apricot. It's a plain golden colour, and the aroma shows little sign of the fruit, instead exhibiting a mineral spicing of the sort you often find from geuze: that brick-cellar nitre effect. It's even stronger than the last one, at 7% ABV, and again the mouthfeel is weighty, almost chewy. This offsets the sour punch, but here there isn't all the fruit to counterbalance the flavour, so it's plainer overall; or more subtle, depending on one's viewpoint. There is a certain tang from the apricot but it's far from central in the taste. For the most part, this presents like an unadorned lambic, albeit a strong and weighty one. There's a wax bitterness, the same mineral spice as I found in the aroma, and a lightly citric acidity which makes it refreshing and clean, despite the high strength. This is a classy character, wearing the added fruit and the barrel ageing lightly while exhibiting very proper wild beer characteristics.

I had skipped the two new versions of The Eternalist when they first came out, and that appears to have been a mistake. I'm very glad to have been able to catch up, even though I didn't know it's what these were when I bought them. Both belong in the canon of high-end wild Irish beer, and since there likely won't be any more, I recommend picking them up if you see them.