Secrets and mysteries

Time for another peep into the Guinness brand home's experimental brewery, or at least it was last month. Here's what I found.

Open Gate has a remit to name its small batch beers after local places and history, but do they provide an explanation for these? Oh my, no. That would be helpful. Instead you get pale ales called things like "Threadcount", which might be a reference to the textile trade which shared the Dublin Liberties neighbourhood with brewing and distilling, but there's literally no way of finding out. This, on the left of the flight, is 4.9% ABV and rather murky; a slightly coppery red-gold colour. The aroma gives little away, and on tasting it proves quite thick and sweet, with unsubtle strawberry and raspberry tones. It is at least clean: Open Gate has form on making muddy-tasting pale ales, but this isn't one of them. It keeps things light and summery, with a long finish of sherbet and candied citrus peel. As long as you don't want any bitterness in your pale ale -- and it seems that most people these days don't -- it's an acceptable option.

In the paddle's middle is Sweetheart Sour, the Valentine's Day special, superannuated in the run-up to St Patrick's Day. It's a crystalline scarlet colour with a brush of pink foam. The aroma is an unremarkable cereal dryness, with no fruit and no sourness. A popping, punchy tartness is where the flavour starts, followed quickly by cherry and raspberry. If the intention was to recreate Love Heart sweets in beer form then they've done a superb job of it: artificial berry essence meeting alkaline effervescence. It's no high-brow wild-fermented sour beer, but equally not the sort of syrupy confection that too many brewers try to pass off as sour these days. There is zing and there is bite, and they're well done.

The last beer on the paddle is the one I came in for especially. I mentioned last year that Calvados ageing of beer is something I approve of and would like to see more of. So here's Open Gate with Calvados Champagne Ale, eliding two different drinks from northern France in a single beer. This is 8.3% ABV and a clear golden with no head. It tastes, in short, like Fino sherry: oxidation is a loud and brash main act here, giving me cork and grape skin, running right through from start to finish. It's light and breezy, not tasting or feeling the strength, but does get a little cloying and difficult when the novelty wears off. I liked it. Though it doesn't really have much Calvados about it -- maybe a little autumnal orchard funk if you look for it -- there is a certain Champagne crispness. But if they'd called it a sherry ale I would have completely understood it from the get-go. Fino fans assemble.

My finisher was an Open Gate Belgian Wit that was just coming to the end of its run. I only chanced a half, because a pint of wonky wit is not something I would relish being stuck with. This one isn't very cloudy and a dark-ish golden colour. The aroma is quite banana-ish, and it leans fully into that in the flavour, tasting much more like a weissbier than a wit. Like the sweeter sort of weiss, there's an element of caramel or toffee in with the banana, although it's not heavy or sticky, so at least has that in common with the Belgian style it's meant to be. I wasn't impressed, however. A half was the right decision.

So that's what was going down at Arthur's gaff in March. It must be nearly time to pop by again, although a bit more effort in keeping their online beer lists updated (ie, some effort; any effort) would be good.

What's going on?

Three beers from Galway Bay are the subject today, beginning with Figo, a pilsner which they've deemed to be in the Italian style. That means extra hoppiness, inasmuch as I understand the term. It's a beautifully clear gold pint, and modestly strong at 4.5% ABV. I was warned by my friendly server in The Black Sheep about the bitterness, and I braced myself, but while there's more hop character than in a mass-market pilsner, it's not excessive or gimmicky. Tasted blind, I would put this more in the north German genre than what tends to get badged as Italian, and I mean that as a compliment: it is not trying to steal the clothes of perfumey American pale ale. Instead it's crisp and grassy rather than fruity; the hops well balanced and entirely complementary to a soft and springy malt base. There wasn't much aroma at first -- that's pints for ya -- but when I was half way down and had a sufficient volume of vapour trapped in the glass I found a very pleasant mirror of the fresh and green herbal taste. This deserves to be served in something more goblet-like, though absolutely still by the pint. It's a class act, all told, and I'm pleased to report that Galway Bay Brewery looks to have started another year with high-quality output.

It looks like there's a story to be told about Whiskey & Coffee, the stout they launched, quietly, in March. The badge implies that it's one in a series called "Modern Classics" and that it's a "celebration stout". Celebrating what, and how do the whiskey and coffee enter the picture? Not in the flavour, anyway. This tastes very plain indeed, and though it's not powerhouse-strength, 5.5% ABV is plenty to give a stout character. Here, the extent of the coffee is no more than you'd find in any typical dry stout. There's nothing resembling whiskey at all, so I doubt it's barrel-aged. Whisky-soaked oak chips, maybe? Sorry, there are more questions than answers with this one. I was a bit bored by it, not to mention confused.

Our finisher is a barrel-aged imperial stout -- haven't had one of those in a while -- called No Quarter. No skimping on the ABV here: it's 11.8% and pours a flawless obsidian with a slow-forming dark brown head. In the manner of Galway Bay, they've added tonka beans, maple syrup and vanilla, and of course the former is fully present in the aroma, showing tonka's signature candied cinnamon. That's heavily present in the flavour too, but superficially so, and it's easily ignored. The other two add-ins don't really make their presence felt, and I'm not surprised to find they blend in with the barrel's effects. That is subtle, though, with no spirituous heat or obvious sappy oak. Instead, it's smooth and creamy milk chocolate at the centre, giving a Snowball dusting of flaky coconut and dessertish coffee cake. A wisp of burnt-caramel smoke adds a modicum of dryness to the finish. The barrels don't really feature, and I had to check the label to find out what they were: bourbon, apparently. I complain about how honkingly unsubtle that can be in other stouts so I can't really complain about it being unobtrusive here. Points for complaint are few with this one: with the velvety smoothness, it's charming and classy, even if it does taste a bit like the bakery on cinnamon swirls day. The price, though, is not easy-going, and I think €13.50 for the half litre is excessive. If that sort of thing isn't a niggle for you, dig in.

Galway Bay's previous whiskey-barrelled stouts tended not to be such shrinking violets: they know how to deliver the spirit and the warm. So I don't know what's happened to either of these stouts. Maybe some longer maturation would be in order. There's nothing wrong with the pils, though: that can be left alone.

Ketchup, catsup...

The Jesuitical analysis of comparable beer styles never ceases to amuse and bemuse me, bless all the dear pedants who take such things seriously. Before us today is the question of how a "dry-hopped lager" differs from a "West Coast pilsner", because I'm sure these aren't terms that breweries simply assign arbitrarily.

For the former, we have Airbell by Lough Gill. This was a terribly handsome fellow once poured into a glass: a deep and serious golden colour, crystal clear, topped with a generous pillow of pure white foam. There's not a Bavarian alive who wouldn't be charmed by that. It all turns very un-continental afterwards, however, starting with the freshly zesty aroma making it very clear there is citrus to come. The flavour follows right through on that promise, delivering an intense hit of freshly-squeezed lemon juice. It runs the risk of tasting a bit like washing-up liquid but avoids it thanks to a generous malt base, providing the pancake for the hops' Jif. Throughout, it's as squeaky clean as I'd want a lager to be, and the pinch of grapefruit bitterness on the end adds to its significant ability to quench and refresh. There's a lot going on in this for a mere 4.5% ABV, and if you didn't know Lough Gill, you might be surprised that something so accomplished could come from a small brewery in north-west Ireland.

Also in that general neck of the Atlantic coast is Kinnegar, who have reached Brewers At Play 44 in their limited edition series. This is another pretty one, and I'm not sure I can recall when I last had two purely clear Irish beers on the trot. The aroma wasn't as in-my-face as the previous, only a wisp of sherbet or lemonade. The hops really don't manifest in the flavour, or at least not in The American Way. Instead, here's a very Germanic crispness; achingly dry in the Nordsee manner, with a rasp in the back of the throat, mixing celery and spinach with a harder plaster dust and burnt rubber acridity. I'm surprised to read on the can that it's done with American hops, because it really doesn't show much of their attributes, merely a light spritz of grapefruit zest at the end of something that's pilsner first and West Coast a distant second. It's not at all a bad beer -- I'm fond of a traditionally-formulated pils -- but it's not what I was expecting, and is very very different from the beer which preceded it.

You demand conclusions. It's probably something about how the myriad decisions required when formulating any beer recipe have more of an effect on the finished product than any pre-determined notion of style. Or, pay more attention to what brewers brew than to what they write on their cans.