Fruit and pudding

A flying visit to Dublin by Jay Brooks last month gave me an opportunity to catch up on the recent beers from Urban Brewing in the docklands. More of them than I expected, in fact, thanks to Jay generously sharing his flight of samples.

A grape ale caught my eye. That's a new one for the brewery, but possibly inevitable given their prodigious turnover. Oenobier is the name, 5.4% ABV and a pale copper colour, or possibly rosé, for the wine-inclined. The aroma is sweet and broadly fruity, a bit like Lucozade, suggesting syrup to come. Not in the mouthfeel, though: it's fizzy like a lager and the light texture doesn't reflect the sizeable strength. Grape flavour is hard come by, and I looked hard. It's really just a vague, artificial, syrupy fruitiness, bringing us back to Lucozade, though it's allegedly Muscat. It is at least dry and slightly crisp, perhaps suggesting Champagne if one had to pin a wine style to it. I deem it fine, but there's room for grapeing it up significantly if it's being re-brewed.

Kalamansi + Blood Orange IPA doesn't need much explanation, though it's the session variety, at just 4% ABV. It's pale gold with a slight haze, giving off a mild perfume aroma. This is another understated one, with a hint of orange, but no more. You wouldn't guess that two types of citrus fruit were involved, and I'm guessing it's real fruit rather than concentrated, and as such has all but fermented out, leaving only an echo. The finish is dry, and the overall effect underwhelming. My main beef is that they did opt to describe this as an IPA, and that means there should be more hops, by rights. Maybe they didn't want to drown out the barely-there fruit effect, but that's resulted in a beer which sounded more interesting than it turned out to be.

It's a Scotch ale next, though they've used the Americanised name of Wee Heavy for it. Built for winter at 8.8% ABV, it's nicely dense: heavy by name and nature. I expected toffee from that, but while it's sufficiently sweet, there's no stickiness or any high-gravity unpleasantness. Instead, a surprise seam of tannin runs through the middle, drying it out. That's the balance, and for complexity there's a lovely port-wine and cork character. It may be a little unorthodox, but it works incredibly well, adding an extra dimension to what tends to be quite a by-the-numbers beer style. Small-batch creativity has paid off here.

The creativity continues with the daddy of the set: Christmas Stout. I don't think they've ever done this before: a 10.3% ABV imperial stout, aged in bourbon barrels, "seasoned" with dark rum, and with sticky toffee pudding thrown in too, presumably just to annoy the purists, and raising more questions than it answers. The bourbon element is very obvious at the start, showing a tang of sourness and some fresh-oak vanilla. Later, there's a rich and warming caramel fudge flavour, which might be the novelty dessert, but it's well integrated here, suiting the big cake-like body perfectly. This is very nicely done, overall. They've resisted the route-one option of piling in cinnamon and clove, which nobody really likes, and made something properly celebratory instead.

On a Wednesday afternoon in Christmas party season in Dublin's corporate law and banking district, the place was eerily quiet. I hope Urban is doing enough business to keep the lights on and, especially, the brewery running.