Stout, porter and mild

Can you feel the evenings drawing in, and the lure of dark and wholesome beers? Today's three don't have anything much to connect them, other than arriving into my eyeline at around the same time last July.

Stout is represented by Nocturne, no not that one. The White Hag has chosen the name for its new coffee stout, even though it's in permanent use as Rye River's export stout. It had its Dublin launch on draught at Tapped on Nassau Street and I went along, where they were serving it carbonated. Now, you won't normally catch me calling for nitro, but coffee stout ought to be creamy, and this 4.5% ABV fizzy job didn't give me any of that. It didn't taste very strongly of coffee either, I thought, with the centre being a kind of nuttiness: crunchy hazelnut and a drier, harsher, peanut-shell rasp. Where the coffee does appear is in the finish, but it's not creamy and in no way rich, tasting to me like dreggy grounds: coffee on a technicality, but not an improvement to the beer. This was all-round disappointing and needs to be bigger, rounder and warmer to suit my tastes.

For porter, it's The Right Amount of Approachable, a collaboration brewed at Boundary with input from Kinnegar. We're still at 4.5% ABV, but here it's the hopping rather than the dark malt which is to the fore: a dank and spicy aroma, leading to a flavour of hay meadows and grapefruit zest. The label mentions that rye has been included in the grist, so maybe that's a factor in the spicy grassy effect; regardless, it's delicious. The actual dark malt side of the equation manifests as a gentle mocha roast sweetness, but the beer is light (or, less charitably, thin) so that element is relegated to the background. To me, this has a lot in common with Kinnegar's mighty black IPA Black Bucket, but it lacks the satisfying roundness which 6.5% ABV gives that one. It's still packed with flavour, and has a beautifully long aftertaste of ginger and chamomile, but seems a little hollow around the middle; an undesirable watery aspect that bothered me. It is, of course, perfectly possible to make impressively full-flavoured beer at session strength, but this felt like one designed as a punchy flavour bomb and not given the appropriate substance to carry it. Maybe the profile is just too close to Black Bucket for my palate to accept the slight variation. My perception is the one at fault, and not the beer. I would have liked more of a dark grain character from this, but what they've done instead with hops and rye is admirable. Don't expect ordinary porter, and certainly don't expect Black Bucket, and you will enjoy. Phew.

Lastly a mild. We do not get a lot of canned mild on the shelves of Dublin off licences. This one is from Abbeydale, and simply titled Dark Mild, from their Restoration Series of classic styles. At 4% ABV it's maybe a little strong, and is murky and brown in colour. The aroma is deliciously beery, mixing tangy and metallic English hops with chocolate cereal and treacle tart. I am instantly transported to the pub, and a good one at that. It's lightly textured, and extremely quaffable; I had to hold myself back from draining it until I had enough written. Drink it slowly and there's brown bread, caramel traybakes and chocolate milkshake. The roasted side is missing, likewise any bitterness or the dark berry tartness, all of which are my favourite features of mild. Regardless, this does the basics of mild very nicely, and is a tasty beer regardless of its assigned style. I'll take a 440ml can, but really it deserves to be pulled from a cask.

I'm a little surprised to find I preferred the straight-up interpretation of mild to the coffee'd stout and hoppy rye porter. I'm sure I'm not the first to point out that microbrewing tries too hard sometimes.