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.