Rad bod

Today, you join me not-live on the patio, on the first properly warm day of the year. Our topic is radler (shandy the German way) and the conditions are excellent for some side-by-side evaluation.

We start traditionally, with a thick-walled half-litre bottle of Hofbräuhaus Traunstein Radler, from Bavaria. It's 50% "bier" (lager, presumably), and the other half cloudy lemonade, coming out at 2.4% ABV. With these, I think the choice of lemonade is crucial, and they've picked a good one. It has quite a natural flavour of real lemons, pulped and sweetened, and that's in spite of an ingredients list that shows it's anything but natural, including both lemon extract and citrus-hop-extract as well. The result is big bodied and satisfying; verging on sticky but still perfectly thirst-quenching. And while the lemonade is far and away the main character, there's a slight hint of biscuit lager malt and salad-leaf noble hops, hovering in the background. The contents of my glass did not last long, and I reckon I could have followed it with another straight away. I'd say the sweet side would have caught up with me before I finished that, however. This is no watery lemon fizz bomb, but a radler of substance. I enjoyed its bigness.

Staying German but switching fruit, next is König Pilsener Radler Grapefruit, brewed by Bitburger and packaged in half-litre cans. The ABV drops to 1.9% as a result of it being only 40% beer, so I'm expecting this to be another brief affair. The archetypal grapefruit radler is that made by Stiegl, so this has some work to do to impress. It's a hazy carrot-orange colour, with lots of foam on pouring but none by the time I came to take a drink. It's certainly lighter and less sweet than the previous one, which also means it has less flavour in general. I had hoped for a bit of grapefruit's sharp piquancy, as in the Stiegl one, but it doesn't have that, instead staying simplistic and sugary, the sweetness kept in check by the thin body and overactive carbonation. It's drinkable and refreshing for sure, and meets the basic requirements of the genre, but no more than basic. This is low-effort radler; lacking beer character and may as well be a soft drink: unfortunate, but not unusual for the style. 

We turn to the craft beer segment for the final one, and pretty much double the price paid. To Øl Lemon Radler is 2.5% ABV but doesn't tell us anything about how it's constituted. It's certainly less sugary than the previous two, tasting more like a lemon-flavoured beer than a mix of beer and fizzy pop. It's still no masterpiece of complexity, however. The lemon is nicely tangy with a proper bitter edge, and it lasts a long time, finishing on an almost metallic mineral rasp. While not overly sweet, it's not very fizzy either, and that reduces the refreshment factor somewhat. While I may feel like I'm drinking a real beer, more than with the others, it's less impressive as a sunny-day throw-it-down-cold job. I'd be less inclined to drink another, even if it hadn't cost me the guts of €4 for the experience. The Germans' cheap and simple approach works better in general, I reckon. 

I'm not really a fan of radler. I probably should have mentioned that at the outset. For the day that's in it, I would really have preferred a few properly cold proper beers than these citrus mixes. There's no harm in doing the occasional experiment, however, on the rare occasions when the weather is up to it.

If the Chouffe hits

Obviously I don't do "guilty pleasure" beers, but I do have a fondness for Cherry Chouffe while also recognising it's no great feat of Belgian brewing artistry. So I was perhaps inappropriately delighted to find the fruited gnome series has a second addition: Chouffe Framboise. Raspberry, like cherry, is an established and acceptable Belgian beer fruit. When we start getting Chouffe Mango and Chouffe Banana, I'll worry that they've gone full Floris.

This can't be exactly the same beer as Cherry Chouffe with only a different syrup, because it's 7% ABV rather than 8. Maybe that just means they've added more gunk. Anyone who sees the word "Framboise" and thinks immediately of acid tartness, may look elsewhere. This is heavy and dense, a clear claret-red colour in the glass, and is extremely sweet. For those who consider a cone of soft-serve ice cream incomplete without a streak of tachycardia-inducing pink sauce: this is your beer.

I am, generally speaking, tolerant of fruity sweet flavours in Belgian beer, and this stops just short of being horrible. It is not a beer to convince anyone that flavoured syrup in beer is quite good actually. Do not expect subtlety. I assume the heavily buried base beer is the standard La Chouffe blond ale, because there is a trace of it in the background of the taste: dry grain husk and Belgian yeast spicing. But it is not a beer which gives that up readily, preferring instead to shout loudly about raspberry jam over the top of everything else.

Any excuse, but I decided to drink it back to back with Cherry Chouffe, and found that to be far and away its superior. That's likely simply because I prefer artificially cherry-flavoured things to artificially raspberry-flavoured ones. There's a more grown-up boozy phenol thing going on in the cherry one that I think has more to do with the chemical properties of cherries than it does with the beer simply being stronger. Anyway, I might recommend Chouffe Framboise to drinkers who want nothing more than a strong and sweet fruit-based drink, but if that's you, you're much better served outside of the beer sphere these days.

Shady happenings

It was a mix of sunshine and showers on the mid-May weekend in Kilkenny, so it's just as well the motorised awnings over the beer garden of Sullivan's Taproom were in good working order. The annual beer festival brought a selection of breweries from around Ireland. I was last here two years ago, and since then a new brewery has sprung up next to the drinking space, though I suspect this is more an expansion of the pilot kit, rather than a full production site for contract-brewed flagships like Maltings red and Black Marble stout -- both fine beers, of course.

More Sullivan's small-batch beer is to be welcomed, and the indoor bar had three of them. California Common is one of those styles which made it from a million homebrew kits to a thousand microbreweries as the brewers went professional in the '00s, but which hasn't had much of a permanent impact on the beer scene. It's always nice to see one in the wild, even if they're rarely spectacular. This one certainly wasn't, but gets the job done. It's 4.5% ABV and an attractive rose-gold colour with a crisp, biscuit-like aroma. That's what the flavour opens with, followed by a brief green and leafy bite of old-world hops. It's refreshing, and almost clean, with only a slightly inappropriate warm-fermentation banana note towards the finish. The slightly rough-and-rustic character is part of its charm, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's deliberate.

You'll need to do your own historical research on the next one. Sullivan's claims that Viess is an old German style, ancestor of both Kölsch and Weissbier. News to me, and Ron's got nothing on it. I can tell you that Home Rule, as they've called it, is a clear golden beer of 4.7% ABV, though tastes light for that. The flavour doesn't resemble either of those top-fermenting styles, being brightly fruity, with pear and lychee notes to the fore. It's a wheat beer, but has a clean lager crispness, and is very refreshing and sinkable, while also showing an interesting complexity. So while I don't know what it is, I really enjoyed it, and that's enough.

Last of the house beers is East Coast IPA. I do know what this is meant to be, and it's not one. The problem isn't even the tiddling 4.9% ABV: perfectly decent New England-style IPA is possible at this strength. For one thing -- and despite my backlit photo of it -- it's a worrying deep orange colour, suggesting inappropriate caramelised malt, or worse: oxidation. It's also mostly clear, and the lack of fuzz also gives it an unpleasant thinness. Moving on to attack the flavour, it has a dull sweetness, like orange jellies, and then a plasticky twang on the finish. There is none of the full-on hop freshness which is the whole purpose of hazy IPA, so it's more like the early examples, where it seemed brewers were following the instructions without ever having experienced what the end result is supposed to be. Quality-wise, this was a marked contrast to the other two, and I hope it's not indicative of what the new Sullivan's kit is providing to the good people of Kilkenny.

Moving out to the guest bars, there were two new ones for me from Bullhouse of Belfast. Keep Rolling is described as a hoppy lager and is 4.8% ABV. It looks rather wan and sickly, a hazed up pale yellow. I was expecting it to feel watery so was very pleasantly surprised by its soft and creamy texture. No crispness, but I didn't miss it. It is fizzy, however, and that pushes out a classically American citrus aroma. So it goes with the flavour too, the lemon and grapefruit notes complicated by a touch of Kellerbier's husky grain. To me, it tasted like a hybrid of well-made American-style pale ale and an unfiltered German lager. That's a nice space to be in.

The rolling continues with the more informally-named Easy Rollin'. This is the actual pale ale in the series; 4.2% ABV and as light as one might expect from that. It's still fully hazed, however, and has a solid measure of vanilla sweetness in with its zesty lemon. That gives it a sort of spongecake flavour, although a background buzz of garlic detracts from that. I guess it does what it's supposed to: channelling the haze characteristics in a modest and easy-going package. Whoever brewed the East Coast for Sullivan's could learn a few things from it, and I hope they tasted it on the day.

Joining the California Common in beer-styles-we-don't-see-much-of was Vore, a Vienna lager from Galway Bay Brewery. After the murk this was a treat to look at: a crystal clear shade of garnet. It was heavier than expected at 5.2% ABV, managing to have a dense and filling texture but without the rich biscuity malt that should come with it. Instead it's dry, with a simplistic grassy bitterness from some perfunctory hopping -- the brewery's claim that it's dry hopped could not be tasted, at least by me. I wanted to like it but it just didn't deliver what I needed. Too heavy to be a thirst-quencher, but too dull to be worth sipping slowly, puts it in an unfortunate spot. Thoughts of settling into a few pints of it once I'd tried all the new beers were regretfully put aside.

The end was indeed in sight, with Peninsula, a new double IPA from Whiplash, in collaboration with Breton brewery Sparkle. More haze is it? If we must. This is a pretty good example, and something of a return to form for Whiplash after a few recent disappointing efforts. This one mixes smooth and sweet vanilla with spiky, spicy (presumably) New Zealand hops. Soft apricot meets tart gooseberry on a bed of rocket, seasoned with peppercorns. What more could you want from this sort of beer? Though all of 8.4% ABV, it's smooth and cool, with no dreggy off flavours. This is a much-needed reminder that it is possible to make delicious hazy double IPA. I wish more brewers would learn that.

My favourite beer of the day was actually the one I started on: The People's Elder, a sour ale from Brehon Brewhouse, made with elderberry. It's very pale, and light-bodied for 5.2% ABV, but it's no slouch in the flavour department. It zings with a refreshing tartness, at once both spicy and crisp, with grapefruit zest overtones. The elder doesn't contribute much that I could identify, but I was happy not to have it interfering with the sunny spritz effect. I would happily have had another straight after and would love to see this beer out and about more.

That was all the new beer I had to try. I was back at Brehon for my finisher: their excellent bourbon-barrel barley wine Red Right Hand, which is a treat in any weather. Cheers to Sullivan's for running a festival which is enjoyably casual, well-stocked and, crucially, waterproof.