
Hagstravaganza 11, the seventh of its name, took place at The White Hag brewery recently. As usual, a team of guest brewers from Ireland, the UK and Europe brought a wide selection of beers for us to work through, 200ml at a time.
I was looking for a lager to start me off but they were in somewhat short supply, so went for a sour IPA instead, for that post-travel refreshment factor. This was
Sour Drop by Lambrate, seemingly a very typical example, being 4.5% ABV and a pale hazy yellow. The aroma is fairly standard too, showing the yoghurt-like tang of a kettle-soured beer. On tasting, however, its all about the hops, making excellent use of the plain base to showcase a firework display of zingy, zesty citrus flavour, with a punchy and invigorating bitterness. The finish is quick, but that only serves to help its thirst-quenching powers. I've been a fan of sour IPAs since my first encounter (hello Eight Degrees!), and while they're not always brilliant, this example was a reminder of why they're worthwhile, especially outdoors on a sunny afternoon.

The drops continued next, with Pressure Drop. Their
Pale Fire pale ale is one of those modern British classics, but also a beer I had never tried myself, a bit like Elusive's Oregon Trail, reviewed
last week. And a bit like that one, I wasn't a fan. It actually has the same savoury sesame or caraway kick which is one of the peculiarities of my palate when it comes to particular hops, although to a lesser extent here, thanks, I guess, to the beer being only 4.4% ABV. At first I found it dry and a little rough-tasting, followed by a growing pithy bitterness which I felt was a bit overdone in a session-strength ale. I don't doubt its boldness, or that it's exactly what the brewery and its customers want it to be. Too much of it was not to my taste, however. Could it be that the age of soft and fluffy pale ales has ruined my palate for big-boy bitterness?

The following beer proved immediately that this is not the case.
Drink While Laughing (great name!) is from White Hag itself, in collaboration with regular festival participant Green Cheek of California. It's another pale ale, and still modestly strong at 5.5% ABV. They say "West Coast" in the description and they really mean it. For one thing, it's a gorgeous clear gold colour, and attention has been paid to the malt side of the recipe, with a lovely big and chewy golden-syrup base. Not that it's sweet; the malt provides a platform for some wonderfully complex yet accessible hop character, starting on the classic grapefruit bite which, instead of building, gives way to a subsequent mandarin softness. This one-two citric hop effect continues all the way through, so while it's quite easy drinking, it still managed to hold my attention. Cans of this are currently in circulation, and I'm very much minded to become more familiar with it. I flag it thus for the attention of all the west-coast whiners out there.

That full-on hop experience necessitated something clean and fizzy to follow. Brewfist -- a blast from my beer-drinking past -- had a lager from their pilot scheme on the board:
Italian Pilsner 03. Now, maybe it's not my place to tell a seasoned Italian brewer what an "Italian pilsner" should be like, but this wasn't the beer I expected. Full marks for the visuals: a flawless golden body topped with a perfect fine shaving-foam mousse. The aroma is also that of a top-notch
Mitteleuropa pilsner, a pristine grassy note which, if it isn't from Saaz hops, is doing a convincing impression of them. And so it goes with the flavour: spinach and celery on a clean base, perhaps suggesting more German-style than Czech to me, and absolutely delicious, but shouldn't the Italian style have something a bit
extra going on with the hops? And shouldn't pilot releases be rather more experimental? I'm probably overthinking it. This is a pilsner from Italy, and an utterly superb one. Version 04
could up the hop quotient a little, but I wouldn't change the fundamentals.

I came back to Brewfist a little later on, when I noticed the strong beers were running out and I didn't want to miss theirs. That was
Vecchia Lodi, a 12% ABV barley wine. Style fidelity was in evidence here again, although it's not one of the hopped-up barley wines typified by Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot. Instead, it's sweet all the way through, from a syrupy treacle aroma to a cereal and cake flavour. A tang of grape and cork brings in the "wine" part of the spec, and is perhaps a result of this being a six-year-old vintage. While by no means spectacular, nor showing signs of much development after the extended ageing, it was simple and enjoyable fare; smooth and lacking any overweening alcohol heat or sharp hop edges.

A palate scrub was required again, so I followed this with
New Moon, a gose by Manchester's Balance. The brewery specialises in the wild and funky end of things, so it shouldn't be surprising that their gose is a straight-up one, lacking any novelty add-ons. It's 4% ABV, a mostly clear gold colour, and presents flavours of zest and brine, the sour culture doing the work that hops might normally perform, giving the beer acidity and bite. Classic gose is made with coriander as well, and if that's included here, it didn't really make itself known. Still, I had little to complain about as the sticky barley wine residue was washed from my gob.

I stuck with Balance for the next one, a dry-hopped saison called
Long Shadows. There was more than a hint of geuze about the aroma of this: an enticing spicy sharpness. The flavour was less impressive, but still good, with a lot more sourness than hops in evidence. The gunpowder spice of the aroma is reduced to a more saison-like white pepper, and there's a residual kick of vinegar, verging on the too-sour. I still enjoyed it, sourness and absent hops notwithstanding. There wasn't a lot of this kind of beer at the gig, so Balance's presence was very welcome. I should have tried their third one too.

At the opposite end of the sour spectrum, there's French brewery Nautile and their "lemon and almond pastry sour", called
Sneffels. I'm rarely without apprehension on approach to things like these, but I'd had strong recommendations during the day, and they proved accurate. Although this is 6% ABV and presumably brewed with lactose, it's no sticky mess, and isn't horribly sweet. It's not sour either, but does let the lemon do most of the talking, with a zesty aroma and a lemonade flavour, including a sprig of rosemary for a bonus oily herbal effect. I did not expect clean and refreshing from something of this description, but I welcome it.

Nautile also had a Flanders red on offer, a big one at 9% ABV, called
Katsberg. That heft didn't suit some of the drinkers who expressed a preference, but I thought it worked, and covered the style's requirements well. Yes, it's a bigger beer all round, with a denser body and more of a cherry and strawberry sweet side. The sharp and fizzy brisk sourness is not a feature, but I think the heftier spec works almost as well. There was certainly no shortage of complexity in the flavour, with lots of balsamic vinegar and dark chocolate in evidence. Flanders red, especially when produced by a brewery that doesn't specialise in it, can sometimes go too far with the acidity, and you get an unpleasant raw vinegar tang on the end. There's no danger of that in this big sour softie, however. It's unorthodox, but it's made me less of a purist about this style.

And we were spoiled for choice, since White Hag were launching a Flanders red of their own. The name,
Oud Foudre No. 1, implies that this isn't the last one of these they'll do. It's another fairly big one, at 6.6% ABV, and picks a different direction from the previous beer, and the style generally. Instead of going all-in for tartness, this is all about the funk, smelling almost like a ripe blue cheese. Not a beer for beginners, then. There's a sweet side represented by exotic dark fruit flavours -- tamarind and date -- plus a peppery spice, giving it a not unwelcome vibe of HP Sauce. It's still plenty sour too, which makes it a little curdling, but it's far too interesting for me to complain about such details. I could have spent the whole evening exploring its strange yet pleasant sensory features. Here's hoping this wasn't beginners' luck.

After all that microbial pyrotechnics, it was something of a comedown to drink a simpler fruited sour ale. Cloudwater's
Cherry Gentle Breeze is a mere 4.5% ABV and pink coloured. Although two types of cherry are used, it tasted more like raspberry or redcurrant to me, with that level of tartness, plus a sweeter ripe plum side. That problem tells us that the cherries were added as real fruit, rather than a substance designed to make beers taste like cherries. I approve. This is a simple and well-made affair: smooth and very sinkable, and streets ahead of all the garish syruped-up fruit beers pumped out by lesser breweries. I'm no Cloudwater fanboy, but this was excellent work.

That brings us to end-of-the-festival silliness territory. Before hitting the rails, I took Dave from Wide Street's recommendation of their own Cuvée Spontanée, a geuze clone that was promising on its début in Mullingar
last April but has now matured into Boon-like perfection. There was a snifter of barrel-aged Black Boar for the train, but my final tick was
Band of Brothers, a triple IPA by Dutch brewer Folkingbrew.
As per, this is custard-yellow and completely opaque, the ABV a full-throated 10%. There's an odd aroma of vanilla mixed with gunpowder, and the spice carries through to the flavour. There, the soft New England vanilla takes precedence, balanced by a slightly harsh and dreggy hop-leaf bitterness, and seasoned by a kind of garlic salt and chilli pepper spice. That doesn't sound especially pleasant, but it all hangs together harmoniously, without any disturbing alcohol heat. I never would have guessed the strength, and it didn't take me long to finish.
But finish I did. It was good to be back in Ballymote after missing last year, though I was reminded, as I always am at Hagstravaganza, that I've never been drinking in nearby Sligo town. That will be changing soon.
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