As usual, the breweries of Ireland collectively slowed the pace of new release beers for the month of January. Luckily, beer squirrel that I am, I had built up a collection of Whiplash's late-2025 offerings to tide me over until the kettles were fired up once more.A number of local breweries have taken turns in making a Christmas special for the Molloy's off licence chain, and it was Whiplash's go last year. As usual, it's a simple and accessible pale ale, this one 5.2% ABV and given the grand title Winter Hymnal. In defiance of fashion, it's very pale and very clear, with a classic aroma of gently lemony American hops. The gravity is high enough to give it a decent malt substance and quite a sweet character. The hops manifest as lemon curd or candy, soft rather than sharp, despite the "west coast" claim on the label. Don't expect much else: this is an uncomplicated beer, to say the least. It's far from bland, however, and beautifully clean. As usual with these Molloy's beers, they're sort of thing you can lay in for a party and keep all the beer drinkers happy. Or most of them, at least.
Belgian pale ale isn't a style we see much of from local breweries, but Lace Ritual is one such: a collaboration with Belgian-themed Atlanta brewery Bold Monk. It poured clearer than I would have expected for both the style and the producer, turning out a happy sunset gold with plenty of fine white foam on top. The ripe, almost foetid, fruit of the aroma tells us we're in Belgian territory from the get-go. The low carbonation level was the next surprise: the gas must have all gone into the head. That does lower the Belgian quotient a little. The flavour is bitter at first, a pithy bite striking early. This softens after a moment, adding sweet orange segments and a floral complexity, like jasmine and/or honeysuckle (it's been a while since I had a good sniff of a flower garden). The bitter side returns in the end: a little herbal and a little minerally. A nicely full body helps carry all this, though more active condition would have helped too. I've complained recently about Whiplash beers lacking boldness of flavour, and while this could be accused of that, I think the subtlety is in its favour, and it's far from bland. Refreshingly different and very decent, is my assessment. Thanks, presumably, are due to the collaborating partner for taking this out-of-the-ordinary approach to pale ale.
The inevitable hazy IPA in the set is Dream State, a collaboration with English brewery Floc. It's the beige sort of hazy, with a handsome head of loose bubbles on top. Tropical juice features in the aroma, a sweet mix of mango, passionfruit and pineapple derived from Galaxy, Citra, Motueka and Nelson Sauvin. The flavour is clean, but a little plain. I get coconut rather than tropical fruit as its centrepiece, which is dessert of a different sort. Apricot and red apple sits behind this, and little of Nelson's flinty spice. Although it's heavy, and shows all of its 6.5% ABV, it's clean with it, and quite easy to drink. As usual for recent hazy Whiplash efforts, I would have liked bigger and louder regarding the hops, and there's nothing very special here: nothing distinctive or justifying the presence of the visiting brewers. Not all beers of this sort are bang average -- some are actively terrible, others sublime -- but this one is the epitome of fine. I'm of the opinion that there are so many hazy IPAs knocking around that they really need to do something distinctively excellent to be worthwhile. This one doesn't, alas. 
Yet another hazy double IPA follows. Down to the Well is the typical Whiplash 8.2% ABV, though not the typical Whiplash colour, being a dun shade of beige, rather than luminous yellow. The aroma is spiky and bitter, suggesting hop dregs or even raw cones. Azacca and Amarillo have been used, and I thought they would have given it a sweetly fruitsome flavour. Instead, it's bitterness first, thanks presumably to the third hop, Chinook. That's coupled with a heavy texture and lots of heat, two more things that are out of character for the brewery. More subtle mango and cantaloupe arrives late in proceedings, but has to share space with a waxen bite and a teeth-squeaking pithiness. The whole is a bit too hot and soupy for my liking. Drink it cold to make it manageable.
I wasn't sorry to be leaving the hoppy section behind. Whiplash isn't playing a good haze game these days. We move on to the much more enjoyable genre of stout. Shepherd's Warning is an oatmeal and coffee job, with regular coffee-dealing collaborator, 3FE. The roast is off the charts in the aroma, beyond coffee and into full-on carvery: beefy, with deliciously charred edge pieces. The flavour is still centred on coffee, but lighter and more, well, coffee-like. Coupled with a creamy texture, the main taste is that of coffee cake icing, or a coffee-cream filled chocolate: much more sweet and oily than dry and roasty. There's little room left for the beer in that, but I don't mind. Roast is roast, and too many coffee stouts allow the beans to fade into the stout background. That very much doesn't happen here, and it runs a contrary risk of being too coffeeish instead. I liked that about it. It's bold, unapologetic, and makes superb use of both the added ingredient and its blousey 7.5% ABV. One could level a fair accusation that it's nothing but a novelty beer, but few coffee novelties are this colourful, or enjoyable. The coffee isn't a seasoning here, it demands your full attention, and deserves to be given it.
The strength goes up to 8% ABV for Dying Again, though it's in the somewhat plainer style of export stout. It looks great, though: pouring thickly with a very dark tan-coloured head. The aroma is coffee, but much less pronounced than in the previous one, obviously. There's a little buttery toffee too, suggesting it's going to be sweet. But while it is dense with unfermented malt sugars, they've given it a serious dose of hops -- old world, I assume -- for that wonderful balancing kick of vegetal bitterness. I always think of beers like this as a window into stout before the big multinationals eroded it into the anodyne, mass-market beverage it became in the 20th century. This is stout from when it was, well, stout. Atin' and drinkin' in it, to redeploy the horribly over-used Irish beer cliché. After the initial rush of molasses and zinc, there's a gentler summer fruit and meadow flower perfume. It doesn't need complexity, but they've given it some anyway. All told, it's a damn solid, straight up and down, thoroughly proper export stout. Why isn't this the fashion, instead of hazy IPA?I eagerly await the 2026 releases from Whiplash, especially if there are more big stouts.