Ellen and Arthur

I hadn't planned on being back in Open Gate quite so soon, but the offer of a new imperial stout was enough to tempt me in. And I found out about it because they've finally got round to updating their online menu. Hooray and ker-ching!

It helped also that the beer is Islay-cask-aged, having been created to celebrate the, er, 201st anniversary of Diageo's distillery at Port Ellen. They've called it The 200, for the sake of neatness. It's a dense black colour with a fine crema on top. The aroma is light on peat but includes lots of toasty roast, suggesting a serious and grown-up taste to come.

So the rather sweet flavour was a surprise. I got an odd but fun mix of dark chocolate with summer fruit -- raspberry and cherry. There's kind of truffle or praline quality to it; hella classy. The smoke is there, but easy to miss if you aren't looking for it, manifesting as a kind of salty, iodine-laced seaside savouriness. That gives it even more the manner of something shiny and expensive from an especially creative high-end chocolatier.

At a mere 9% ABV and served ice cold, it misses the weighty and satisfying character of big imperial stout. It's pretty good as a lightweight, though. I'll take a gimmick-free imperial stout whenever it comes my way.

The Tallaght strategy

It's a miracle! Though perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a brewery called Priory, with a comprehensively Catholic theme running across its branding, should be the one that managed to pull a Lazarus act.

We last saw this microbrewery in the south Dublin suburb of Tallaght on these pages in June 2019. "An ambitious set of plans" is what I noted. I don't know how far advanced those got before Covid shut the whole thing down, and with the overall decline in Irish microbrewing, I wasn't expecting to see them back. The announcement in 2023 that the building which houses the brewery -- a café and a lot of empty space when I visited in 2019 -- would be transformed into an indoor food market didn't do much to change my mind. Dublin has serious form on failed indoor food market projects. If it can't be done in the city centre, what chance of doing it in Tallaght? And besides, craft beer is over, and it would be such a 2015 move to put a microbrewery in a food hall.

Nevertheless, the Priory Market project rolled on and, in late June 2025, it opened its doors to the hungry public, the offer including Priory Brewing reborn as a "tank bar" on the site. I went along on the first weekend, genuinely not expecting much. Usually, the brewery and the beer range is the last part of the project to get delivered, if it ever does. I was surprised by what I found.

The food hall was thronged, and all the stalls seemed to be doing brisk business, though without the excessive queues you get at events which don't have their catering logistics in order. Down the back, opposite two outlying food stalls, is the bar. I found perching space across from the window which looks into the production brewery.

Tank means tank, and there are four of them behind the bar, from which beer is poured directly. Original Sin, the flagship IPA, and Venial Sin, its session-strength sibling, have made a return and are two of them. I started with one of the new beers, Helles Fire. This is no still-fermenting murk: the bright tank has left it bright; a perfectly clear golden colour. It's a little light on its feet at 4.3% ABV though I appreciated the cold pour -- 3.3°C according to the readout on the vessel. So it was definitely thirst-quenching, and while it's fairly plain, there is enough of a gentle spongecake sweetness to pass. The finish is as clean as the beer looks, with nary a hint of the off flavours that can bedevil small-batch lagers, and a nicely crisp grain bite on the end. It may be unexciting, but it's very technically proficient. Time and money has been spent on getting it right, and I could taste that.

Also new from the tanks was Atonement, a pale ale. This is in the old American style, a deep amber colour and packed out with crystal malt, contrasting with sharp US hops. A fruit candy aroma leads to a toffee-first flavour, although it's light at 4.5% ABV, and not at all sticky. There's a tannic note as a reminder that English bitter is a close relation, and a touch of crisp roast to help dry it out. The hop tang is a little bit lemonade and a little bit aspirin; unsubtle and clashing with the malt side, I thought. The intention seems to be something like Sierra Nevada pale ale, but there's none of that one's perfumed subtlety. This time, the technical proficiency can't hide the issues with the underlying recipe.

But the tank bar has more than just tanks: there's a sizeable array of keg taps on the bar, all Priory-branded except for Whiplash's Slow Life, which seems to be covering them for a dark beer for now. My in-built cynicism couldn't help wondering if some or all of these were brewed elsewhere, but then why bother with the tanks if you're shipping beer in?

I had a half of Vice Beer, the 5% ABV weissbier. Here the brewery's tendency towards clarity is a little less appropriate, because there's none of the cloudiness that has been this style's hallmark since before anyone in New England thought to make an IPA. That seems to have added a sharpness to it, manifesting initially in the slightly hot butane aroma. And while there's banana in the flavour, it's greenly acidic, which isn't unpleasant, but is quite different from the soft and sweet effect one normally gets. The hops are more pronounced than usual, with a bite of celery and pak choi. It's a valid take on the style, reminding me of the crisper, pointier, sort of weizen from north German breweries, and Flensburger in particular. If that's your particular vice, jump in. I prefer the more cuddly Bavarian take, however.

And we finish on yet another central European style: pilsner. Impeccable was also on the keg lines and arrived slightly hazy. Freshness was very much in evidence here, the aroma giving faint but persistent cut grass, like the patio doors are open and the lawn outside has just been mown. Though only 4.7% ABV it has a satisfyingly chewy texture and that adds extra punch to the noble hops, flourishing outwards into a whole bouquet of garden herbs, with basil and rosemary the ones I noticed most. Despite the density, this is still an excellent warm-day refresher and mid-session palate scrubber, and again remarkably free of flaws for a newly-created brewpub lager. Since they can do pils well, nothing else should be a problem.

I didn't revisit their double IPA, and the red ale will have to wait to next time. On the menu but not yet pouring were a stout and a bock, and there was a tap badge for a sour ale which had also yet to materialise. The ambition is incredible for an Irish brewpub but they really do seem to have the ability to pull it off. I hope the momentum stays with them and that they get the kind of local support which seems to be keeping the Rascals taproom blazing. This taproom is a new and rare jewel in Dublin's beer scene and I dearly want to see it thrive.

Sweet sounds

Being at home on the June Bank Holiday Sunday meant being an involuntary audience member at the Forbidden Fruit music festival, taking place at The Royal Hospital Kilmainham but broadcast directly onto my patio some distance away. I got out some fruit of my own and made the best of it.

I began on Utenos Radler Raspberry, blended from half lager and half raspberry-flavoured syrup cocktail, finishing at 2% ABV. It's bright pink, thanks to the carrot named on the can as the source of its colour. I found it very thick and syrupy, and was hard pressed to find the beer element in it. The raspberry is sweet, not tart, and more closely resembles jelly or candy than actual berries. That hampers the all-important refreshment power; it's not difficult drinking by any means, but neither is it much cop at warm-day thirst quenching.

I felt a little oversugared after that, so was apprehensive about launching into another from the same range straight after, but soldiered on anyway. Utenos Radler Watermelon is the same strength and made the same way, just with a different syrup component. It works rather better than the raspberry one, and is less stickily sweet. The melon flavour is as much rind as flesh, adding a green, slightly vegetal tang, which helps balance the sugar. A slightly lighter body makes it more refreshing, and the addition of a couple of ice cubes really helped it along there. It still doesn't really count as a beer, but as a watermelon-flavoured low-alcohol drink, I quite enjoyed it.

Last up is one from fellow Lithuanian brewer Volfas Engelman: Radler Mojito Splash, a pale green number, with 2.5% ABV, resulting from a boost in the beer component, to 51%. It still doesn't resemble beer. We're back in the heavy, sugary territory, and that's the first noticeable thing about it, which isn't a good sign. The mint is laid on thickly, doing nothing to make the beer refreshing, only causing it to taste like toothpaste. The lime is very much lime candy, rather than proper citrus, and adds neither bitterness nor sourness to the picture. I can see how this might have worked in a thinner, zestier beer; what you get here is a bit of a sugary mess.

Radler is supposed to be consumable in volume, and refreshing. The above litre and a half was hard work to get through and even outdoors on a sunny summer's afternoon, they were filling and dense. I don't mind sweetness in drinks, but these were quite one-dimensional in how they presented it, the samey sugar both cloying and boring. I don't often review radlers on this blog. Here's why.

Breeding and breading

No, the dire wolf is not back from extinction. Being able to critically examine the claims in the publicity material from a biosciences company should be a basic life skill, here in this Black Mirror episode we've all somehow ended up living in. The coverage of one company's success in breeding a dog that mimics the dire wolf's appearance was breathless and widespread, so it wasn't terribly surprising to discover Wicklow Wolf had picked it up to brand one of their limited edition beers.

So here is Dire Wolf, a hazy double IPA which they've been touting around the international festival circuit this summer. The hops are all-Australian -- Galaxy, Enigma, and Eclipse -- giving it a gently tropical fruit salad aroma, with pineapple chunks and passionfruit most prominent. The haze isn't especially thick, and the beer is at at least somewhat see-through. You would definitely know it's a full 8% ABV, however, as it's dense and a little hot as well, warming one's innards from the first swallow. That makes the flavour more serious than the aroma was suggesting; the Hawaiian-shirt tropicals getting traded for the dredgings from a very ripe fruitbowl: squashy mandarins and bruised peaches, with a sharper citrus-rind tang. Still, it manages to steer away from any genuinely unpleasant flavours, lacking both grit and garlic. If Aussie hops are the key to that, then let's have more of them. This is an enjoyable sipper. It's not trying to pass itself off as juice for kiddies, being a very grown-up proposition, big hops meeting big alcohol. Like its namesake, approach with caution.

The next beer is another precision-engineered hybrid. Wicklow Wolf's first collaboration with Brennan's Bread didn't get many plaudits beyond my positive review, but that hasn't stopped them from doing another: Batch Brew. As before, the grist includes leftover bread, and the brewery will be planting a tree for every 12 cans sold. It's 4% ABV and hopped with Idaho 7, Hüll Melon, Talus and Chinook. Those are mostly quite modern varieties, but there's a real classic effect here, full of bright citrus pith, balanced nicely with softer tangerine juice. The Talus adds a dusting of coconut, but sweet mini oranges are almost the whole of it, squeaky-clean with not a hint of interference, despite the somewhat hazy appearance. You won't find any compromise from the waste-product ingredient. This is a very jolly affair, packed with hop character at a modest strength. There are real summer party vibes about it; a proper crowd pleaser. Buy loads and tell your guests about the trees.

Wicklow Wolf is a brewery of many talents. I wouldn't necessarily have placed them as top of the hops, having turned out a few too many harsh face-melters over the years, but these two are both excellent examples of the sheer fun which can be had when the hopping of a pale ale is bang on.

Avast selection

I'm not unfamiliar with Dutch beer and brewing, but had never heard of Rotterdam's Stadshaven Brouwerij, until I found six of its beers in the Mace off licence on Dublin's South Circular Road. They're in retro 33cl longnecks and keenly priced at €3 a pop. All aboard!

Sailors' Lager is first out. How do we know it's for sailors? There's lemon in it. There's a haze too, the pale amber body being lightly translucent. Zesty lemonade presents in the aroma, suggesting this is going to be a bit of a novelty beer. If only there'd been some clue on the label. It's quite heavy, though only 4.9% ABV: the spec suggests refreshment is the goal, but it's a bit of a chewer. The lemon element is sweet and almost sickly, finishing on an artificial and slightly plasticky twang. This has its charms, I guess, but it's neither subtle nor balanced. An industrial-grade pilsner has been given a squirt of fruit essence and we're supposed to be impressed. I wasn't feeling it.

Let's see if they do any better with witbier. The visuals of Great White weren't, er, great: a lager-clear pale yellow. The aroma has me back in Belgium, with a sizeable whack of unctuous melon and apricot, with overtones of pink peppercorn and clove. This is why we like Belgian-style beer. It's rather thin in the mouth, and the lack of haze leads to a lack of softness; there's none of the fluff that ought to be part of the witbier spec. The addition of grapefruit is what distinguishes this from your standard witbier but I couldn't detect where that went. The citrus side in general is sweet and syrupy, implying that any citrus that featured did so as a gloopy extract. We're a little too far away from the classic dry and spicy, yet soft, witbier specification for this to count as a good one. It's sticky, sharp and, above all, artificial and contrived. This is a long way from the vision of Pierre Celis, and for me, that's a problem.

Continuing by ABV, the 5.5% IPA sits near the middle of the set, which is unusual. As is the use of tangerine and star anise in Moray IPA. It's a dense and murky carrot colour in the glass, with lots of foam and quite an artificial aroma, wearing the additives gaudily, and the spicy star anise in particular. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of sweetness here: the big crystal malt toffee of old-school American IPA plus a syrupy fruit element which suggests that no real tangerine has been near it. A tannic dryness that's almost equally as strong as the sugar pleasingly cuts off any potential sickliness before it starts. It's still a heavy beer, though: I got through it slowly and it was getting unpleasantly warm before I finished. Overall, I don't think it quite works. The novelty ingredients take away from its IPA qualities -- and it's certainly not "hoppy" as proclaimed on the label -- but they don't add anything positive. You could badge this as a dubbel and I doubt anyone would blink, which is a fatal flaw for any IPA.

With startling originality, the red ale is called Redhead. This time la fée purée has blessed us with lime and lychee. It looks well: a deep mahogany red and refreshingly clear. Bracing for calorific sugar vapours, I was happy to find that it doesn't actually smell of much: the caramel malt that it looks like, more of those assertive tannins, and a friendly wisp of metallic English hops. There's still no fruit gunk in the flavour. Tannins and toffee are nearly the whole of it, with a mildly drier roast crisping the edges. It's a pretty good take on red ale as it is practised in Ireland, albeit at a significantly higher strength at 5.8% ABV. Anyone looking for that bite of lime or sumptuous lychee squish will be disappointed, and they should buck up their ideas about beer, quite frankly. This is solid, unfussy, ungimmicky, and grown-up, even if its label isn't.

A blond ale, in the broadly Belgian category, comes next in sequence: Octopus. Again, they've decided it needs fruit extract, and again you can't taste it. Orange and kiwi are the wastes of everyone's time on this occasion. There's maybe a tiny kick of zest lurking in the background, but for the most part this is another simple, classically constructed, to-style job. There's an enjoyably gooey honey centre, infused with bubblegum and pear esters, and then balanced with a crisp cereal crunch around the edges. At 6% ABV and quite heavy-feeling, it's not a sessioner, but one 33cl serving felt just right. Other than four-packs of UK-brewed Leffe, we don't get much beer in this style in these parts, so this one is welcome, even if it's probably quite yawn-worthy in its homeland.

The final Dutchman in our flotilla is a tripel called Pirhana. Mango and kumquat. Let's not even bother. There's a worrying lack of head on this. Maybe it's my fault for putting it into a Westmalle glass, which that tripel always fills out nicely with a luxurious marshmallow of foam. The derisory skim of schuim here is downright ugly. No shade on the bright and clear golden body beneath, however. Though 8.5% ABV, it's a good deal thinner than the blonde ale which preceded it, and that's given it a flavour which is much less impactful, complex, and enjoyable. There's plenty of hot alcohol, but not much by way of fruit and spice. Only the dry tannic finish does what good tripel does; otherwise it's a poor show, doing the bare minimum to pass. If that's what €3 gets you in this space, then perhaps fair enough. On its merits, though, this is basic stuff: less a piranha and more of a damp squid.

My report card for Stadshaven says "must try harder". A sampler pack of fruit syrup does not make for a vibrant range of modern beers, for one thing. I sense an ability to do plain-spoken beers quite well, testified by the red and blonde in particular. Whether the decision not to steer that course is a creative one or a management one, I cannot say. The low price point is very much in these beers' favour, though I'm still not sure I got my money's worth from them.

Taken as red

Is it just me or are there a lot more colourful fruit beers around this season? We had one on Wednesday and today I have two more. This time the theme is red.

Initially, I had no idea what "Globe Salute" meant or why Rye River decided to call their cherry-flavoured sour beer that. I thought maybe it was a variety of cherry, but it turns out it's a firework, the one also known as a cherry bomb -- one of those occasional Americanisms for which we must forgive this brewery. The beer is 4.5% ABV and a bright pink colour. That makes it look like a simplistic novelty job, but looks can be deceptive: manys a well-made and deeply complex wild beer is luminous pink. This isn't one of those. Basic is the game here: syrupy fake-fruit flavour and a tang which definitely isn't properly sour. It's unimpressive, and for over a fiver a can in off licences, offers poor value for money. I try not to be a snob about such things, and I am aware that not everything like this has to be Brett-laced and oak-aged, but this manages to be overly sweet and rather boring. No salute from me, I'm afraid. Drop and give me twenty.

At around the same time, Hope had similar ideas and released one called Limited Edition 36: Raspberry and Lime Sour, which is rather less intriguing. This one is 4.8% ABV and, although the can claims it's red, it's more the orange pink shade of highly polished copper. It is almost unheard of for something like this to put the sourness ahead of the fruit purée, but here we are. The first sip is a puckering, mouthwatering jolt of candyshop sourness, all sherbet, sour jellies and red liquorice. Engaging my grown-up palate for a moment, I found the lime's bite to be central to proceedings, accompanied by several other sorts of sharpness, including green apple skin and a dry cereal twang. This is a very rare example of raspberry in a beer being subtle and providing background harmonies rather than the loudest vocal track. I approve. Its main contribution is a pink sugary smack on the finish. Cheeky! All told, it's a well-put-together beer, and delivers proper sour complexity where the norm (see above) is to simply pile in the syrup. And if you're not into picking the profile apart forensically, I can also tell you it's a beaut as a post-chore refresher on a sunny patio.

I doubt our nation's brewers are done feeding us fruit beers for the year yet. At least it's not endless samey takes on hazy IPA.

Fruiting the breeze

"Coconut Breeze" is an ominous name for a beer, sounding like a euphemism dreamt up by the marketing department of a chemical company for their latest additive or scent. Lough Gill is inviting us to don our Hawaiian shirts, cast our cares aside and join them in summer time. This is, in their words, a "coconut and pineapple fruited pastry sour". Let's unpack that, shall we?

The brewery has extensive form with this sort of thing, and is better at it than most. They've tended to have a light touch on the lactose, and enough sourness to actually qualify as sour. And so it goes here. It's a translucent yellow, like freshly-crushed pineapple juice, and has the unmistakably sweet-yet-vegetal aroma of real pineapple: the husk and stalk as much as the flesh. A significant acidic tartness singes the nostrils, even at this early stage. In the flavour it's the coconut that hits first, and lasts all the way to the finish. It seems to be buoyed up on the lactose, which gives it a mouth-coating creamy quality. And yet, it's not gloopy or cloying; the sourness is there to spritz away the residual sugar so it never becomes a problem. That means it's not one of the smoothie-like fruit "sours" that are par for the course, and that's the Lough Gill advantage. Pineapple's role in the flavour is very much secondary, and perhaps that's for the best, as a third sort of sweetness might not have been welcome.

6.8% is a sizeable ABV for a summer party beer, better suited to something more serious, and serious this is not. There's a considerable heat to contend with, and combined with the sourness, that gets a bit curdling and difficult before the end. I strongly recommend starting into this one when it's properly cold. It might even be refreshing that way. 

Above all, this is a strange beer, and I found myself teetering between liking it and not liking it, all the way down. I think you need to have a significant tolerance for weirdness in beers to enjoy it, and fortunately I do. Should you need a second and more forthright opinion, my house fruit flies adored it. Summer vibes all round.

Crow flight

In the interests of balance for what follows, I did buy one IPA from the range of Dois Corvos beers which arrived in Dublin from Lisbon recently. There were numerous options but I picked Funchal Drift, the New England-style one made with Citra and Motueka. That sounded interesting, though the unappetising pale yellowish green emulsion it poured as, less so. A worrying kick of vanilla and plasterboard manifests in the aroma, alongside an assertive lime bitterness. Hello Citra. From the foretaste I got an initial waft of that chalky mineral effect I smelt, followed by hot yeasty dregs and vegetal leaf bitterness. At least a part of this is down to the Motueka, adding a eucalyptus medicinal effect which dovetails neatly with the grit and the murk, but not in a good way. The Citra fails to come to the rescue; where there might be a zesty citric finish, it's only smoke and burnt plastic. Any dessertish custard softness has been thoroughly drowned out. I took a gamble and I lost. This beer presents a catalogue of reasons for calling the whole haze phase to a halt sooner rather than later.

Ugh. With that out of my system it was time to move on to the stuff which attracted me more. I began on Café Racer, which is as good a name for a coffee stout as any. Funny, it doesn't smell of coffee. It smells, and bear with me, of the things that coffee smells of. Toast, hazelnuts, tar and tobacco. I didn't say good coffee. It is intriguing though. The body is surprisingly light and fizzy, and the flavour primarily dry. 5.4% ABV means it shouldn't necessarily be a big and creamy fellow, but I was still surprised by how gassy the whole thing is. Nuts are at the centre of the flavour, with a bit of the aroma's hazelnut and even more dry peanut shell. A certain amount of dark chocolate surrounds that, though oddly no coffee. A tang of burnt salt is all the finish offers. I really wanted to like this, but it's all harsh and pointy; neither refreshing nor comforting. It doesn't smell like good coffee and it doesn't taste like good coffee stout. Maybe I should have expected that. 

Our last last best hope is Magnetic Poles, a Baltic porter with tonka beans. Normally I'm very much not in favour of microbreweries adding their own kooky twist on classic European lager styles, but I was so desperate for something good at this stage that I was determined to give it a fair shake. It's 8% ABV and densely dark brown with a tobacco-stain head. The aroma is oddly sour, of old sherry and cherry liqueur. It doesn't say it's barrel aged but I might believe it is. The cherry note continues in the flavour, even sharper, and joined by an oily tobacco leaf effect, classy dark chocolate, rosewater and Christmas cookies. It's the first beer that almost manages to put tonka in its place, turning it into a surface-level seasoning instead of the beer's whole deal, though the dusting of cinnamon is a dead giveaway of what's going on. It works beautifully, however. Strong tonka-laden stouts tend to be stickily sweet, but by adding the lager dimension this one retains a level of crispness which makes it far more drinkable than one might expect given the strength and other specs, which is of course the Baltic porter way and why we love the style. Never before have I encountered a beer that managed to put manners on tonka's busy confectionary, but if one style was going to do it, it would be this one. Baltic porter purists need not apply, but I found it a perfect melding of old fashioned meticulous decency and frivolous craft creativity. Fight me.

I've had a few Dois Corvos beers over the years, and their hit rate is generally better than what we have here. While I may have chosen poorly, I am not rushing back to try more of their hazy IPAs.

Sugar rush

What was I thinking? Was I thinking? Look, they were in my eyeline, in the supermarket, labelled as BEER despite all other appearances. So that I could stop wondering whether they should be included on the blog or not, I bought them both, God forgive me, and here they are.

You will find a review of classic Desperados here, written in 2009. These are extensions of a brand that probably didn't need any. Both are at the same strength as that: 5.9% ABV.

Desperados is (loosely) tequila flavoured, but for Desperados Tropical Daquiri they've taken pains to point out that rum is the spirit invoked. It looks like a standard lager: a clear deep golden. It doesn't smell like a beer at all, however, with sickly sweet syrup of the generically tropical variety, done with passionfruit. To taste, it's not as sickly as I was expecting, something it has in common with the original. There's a clean base that has been syruped up but not completely destroyed. Where the beer side contributes most is the finish, cleaning up the worst of the sugary excesses so that they don't dwell on the palate. The promoted rum character does not materialise at all, which suits me as a disliker of rum-flavoured things that aren't actually rum. I mean, it's not good beer, but it could be much worse. There are "proper" artisanal breweries passing off products as fruited sours that are more sticky and unpleasant than this. Though as a fan of both beer and daquiris, this doesn't really give me any sense of either.

The spirit moves once more, and the next one is Desperados Red Caipirinha, claiming to be flavoured with cachaça, though I'm not expecting to find much of that. It's a dark rosé shade in the glass and, bizarrely, actually smells like beer. The listed additives are cachaça, which isn't a strong flavour by itself, and elderberry juice, which I'm guessing is mostly for the colour. That leaves the grain of the lager base as the main character in the aroma. It does taste syrupy: sweet and generically fruity, more raspberry and cherry than anything fancier. There's absolutely no sign of the spirit and it really doesn't resemble a cocktail of any kind. This is an alcopop in all things but smell. The previous one, and standard Desperados, do at least add interesting things to the syrup; this doesn't. Its USP is that it's pink. I'm not impressed.

In for a penny, in for a pounding. The same supermarket also sells Kopparberg's Orange Ginger Beer, and what with ginger beer having a bit of a moment in these parts lately, I thought I ought to give it a whirl. 4% ABV seems to be standard for this sort of thing, likewise the pale Golden-Delicious yellow colour. To taste, it's sweet, which is hardly surprising given Kopparberg's form with cider-adjacent products. You don't get much ginger, just a tiny pinch of spice; a spritz of heat in the back of the throat. In front of that is masses of sugar, which is mostly cleanly syrupy but includes a fun element of boozy orange, like a cheeky dash of triple sec. Half a litre of this was hard work. While it's light on alcohol, there's so much sugar here that I found it difficult, and I'm pretty tolerant of sweetness in beers. The orange gives it something of an interesting twist, but ginger beer fans would be much better off sticking to the examples from Smithfield Brewing and Kinnegar. Add your own orange to taste.

Well, I'm glad that's over. If you've ever hovered at the colourful, ultra-sweet, not-quite-beer section of the supermarket, consider this your cue to walk on.

Red, white and new

The randomness is part of what I enjoy about the churn of British cask beer at The Silver Penny, the Wetherspoon on Dublin's Abbey Street and current unlikely champion of decent ale. On a recent visit, however, there was a pattern: two new ticks, both with a colour in the name.

Oakham's presence in the regular roster of breweries is a blessing, and I hadn't seen White Dwarf before. It's a golden ale of 4.3% ABV, made mostly with English hops, plus some bonus American Cascade. Beer quality is rarely an issue at the 'Penny but this one was served uncharacteristically warm on the sunny June afternoon. Perhaps the cellar cooler has gone the way of the wifi and the gents' hand drier. It's a pale gold and perfectly clear, giving off a gentle aroma of pear and apple. The pear ester is more pronounced on tasting, allied with some sweet banana: ripe fruit, or even artificial candy. The finish is clean, though there's no real malt character, whereas a little biscuit or cracker would have improved it. As well as the slightly high temperature, it was on the flat side too, which was another factor in preventing this from being everything it could be. This beer should really be crisp. Warm and flabby isn't going to suit any beer, but I think this one suffers especially. Oh well.

The other was Red Kite from Vale Brewery: a bitter at the same strength. "Chestnut" says the badge, and indeed it is: a lovely clear auburn with a cream-coloured head. The aroma presents that most unhelpful of descriptors: "beery", like a carpeted pub just after the doors have opened for the day. It's heavy, almost chewy, and here the warmth is really helping it out, lending what may normally be a so-so brown bitter the character of a wholesome porter. There's milk chocolate, dark toast, a coating of caramel and a slightly fruity finish, giving raisins and red apples. A tannic dryness prevents any of this making the overall effect busy or difficult. Well-made brown bitter is a rarity and, for me, Harvey's Sussex Best is unassailable. This different take, leaning into the roast and residual sugar, impressed me too, however.

That's your lot. Nothing amazing here, but at the same time, both beers were exotic and noteworthy pints for Dublin. If there was anything like this available from local breweries in locally-owned pubs, I'd be all over it, though would probably have the place to myself. Until then, rack 'em up, JD.