Cultivating enjoyment

I had enough fun with the beers from Croatia's Garden Brewery recently that I picked up cans of the other two beers of theirs currently in circulation in Dublin.

The first is a hazy IPA, and if I hadn't been specifically chasing the brewery's wares, I would have ignored this. Sure they all taste the same. The numbers on Oseka are boringly orthodox too: 6.2% ABV at 30 IBUs. It's brightly yellow, completely opaque and topped by plentiful, if loose, white foam. The hops are a solid combination of Citra, Simcoe and Galaxy, though they've introduced a random factor via experimental variety HBC 431. I have to wonder how that experiment is going, because it hasn't yet been given a name despite my having encountered it almost nine years ago, at a brewery which no longer exists. The beer smells sweet and creamy, with plentiful vanilla backed by a pithy tang of lemon peel and jaffa orange. It was a surprise, then, to find coconut as the loudest part of the flavour: big and bitter, concentrated to the point of tasting almost medicinal. That's fun, but doesn't last, and there's very little behind it. After the initial hit, we're heading straight for the finish line, where the vanilla puts in a token appearance before it all tails away to nothing. It's fine: a perfectly serviceable IPA in the New England style, and if you're one of the distressing number of beer drinkers who demand more of these, then this is a good one. I enjoyed it on that level but don't feel I learned much from the experience.

Plima is a double IPA, though low-balled for an American-style beer, at a mere 7.4% ABV. The can says it's juicy, so customers shouldn't be surprised to find it pours opaque, and it's a pale yellow shade with decent head retention for this sort of thing. The aroma is very sweet, passing vanilla and heading for condensed milk, with added pineapple concentrate. It gets even more tropical on tasting, stacking pineapple on pineapple, with creamy coconut for additional exotic sweetness. This gets balanced somewhat by an assertive citric pith, bitterer than is typical in haze, but very welcome nonetheless. The low(ish) alcohol helps it stay clean and cool. It doesn't really feel like a double IPA, but I don't mind. This is overall good fun, pulling some impressive moves with the hops and avoiding anything unpleasant or daft. Fair play.

I'm glad I went against my instincts to try these out. Garden hasn't always been my favourite brewery, and hazy IPA certainly hasn't been my favourite style. A bit of persistence has paid off for both of us, however.

Krieking at the edges

Co. Mayo's Belgian-style brewery, Mescan, has added a new fruit beer to the range. Kriek Silín is, I think, overstating the case with the K-word: I put aside any notions of this being a mixed-fermentation barrel-aged marvel before opening the bottle. Mescan tried its hand at lambic a few years ago and it didn't go well. This one is a straight wheat beer at 6% ABV, relying on the cherries for any sourness.

That they haven't skimped on the cherries is obvious from its appearance: a dark Ribena purple with a vibrantly-coloured electric-pink head. With that comes a heavily thick mouthfeel, making it feel almost syrupy, although it's not sweet. The cherry aspect of the flavour flashes only briefly at the beginning: that concentrated jammy quality, like in a Bakewell tart. When it fades, it leaves a more generalised fruit perfume taste, with notes of red apple, grape juice and a blackcurrant tartness. You can throw on a whiff of violet and lavender old-lady perfume as well.

While I'm happy it's no sugar bomb, I would have liked more of a cherry taste. The problem may well be that they've used real cherries, which don't taste as cherry as the proprietary syrup from a tub which less scrupulous breweries tend to use. It also has reminders of the flavour profile of oude kriek lambic, without any of the essential aspects: oak and Brettanomyces, basically. To me, that gives it an air of something unfinished, awaiting the truly fun parts of the production process.

Would I recommend drinking it? I'm not sure. Mescan does its best work when brewing authentically-Belgian tasting beer, and this isn't that. It is, however, a decently strong fruited wheat beer with good complexity and a flavour, if brief, of real cherries. I found it a little harsh and hollow, however, being neither a fully-involved masterpiece of complexity, nor a laugh-along candy frippery, but somewhere in between that's not quite as enjoyable as either. If all that sounds unhelpful, buy a bottle and make your own mind up.

The blip

Three new beers from the generally reliable Our Brewery of Randalstown showed up locally recently. This producer has a pleasing tendency towards style variations, so I was a little disappointed to find that all three were pale ales. Still, at least they're different kinds of pale ale, and that's often the best we can hope for from beer these days.

The label of Next Time Around doesn't make it explicit that it's hazy, though the use of "juicy" and "soft" meant I wasn't surprised when it turned out to be. It's on the darker side of yellow, with plenty of head. I think "juicy" is overstating the case as it's sweet, but lacks any balancing refreshing acidity, tasting more of orange squash than proper juice. Its aroma is dry, with a poppyseed savoury crunch. Mosaic? No, this is done with Citra, Motueka and Rakau, and honestly I expected more from them. 5.3% is no compromised lightweight ABV, but this is dull and blunt, lacking colour and zing. A badly printed and incomprehensible date code means I can't tell if it's an issue of freshness, but I wouldn't be surprised. It's disappointing either way.

I followed that with The Nod. It's a collaboration with client brewer Tilt & Pour, in Australia's native beer style, the extra pale ale, and hopped with New Zealand varieties. I knew a vigorous pour would be necessary when I felt how squeezy the can was, and sure enough it's barely carbonated. Still, it manages to push out a gorgeous aroma, laden with fruit salad and tropical candy. The flavour is dialled back, however, with a harder bitterness in the ascendant, bringing notes of beeswax, zinc and aspirin. Though it smells like a cartoon, this is a beer of serious heft. The flatness makes it feel heavy for its 5.5% ABV, and I found myself having to chew through it, laboriously. If they'd got more of the hop fun from the aroma into the flavours, this would be a delight. As-is, it's missing the mark for me.

The final part of today's trilogy is Light Up Gold which the brewery describes as West Coast IPA, and backs that up with Citra, Simcoe and Chinook hops, as well as the beer's attractive rose-gold colour. At 6.3% ABV it's no lightweight local take either. There's not much aroma, and the flavour isn't a riot of grapefruit and pine, but it still works well, starting on a dry tannic note that helps hide the alcohol. There's a hint of crystal malt toffee and then it's over to the hops. They have a fun summer-fruit quality, tasting of strawberry and ripe red cherry, then a more serious resin and freshly-tanned leather. And while it's not heavy, there's enough substance to give it a long finish, continuing that fruity leathery fun for ages. This is classy stuff, taking a modest approach to the classic features which make west-coast IPAs so enjoyable.

All told, I don't think these represented the brewery's abilities well, and that's not just down to choice of styles and this drinker's preferences. Usually, Our Brewery's technicals are on point, and that under-carbonated one, in particular, was out of step. I'm fervently hoping that both that, and the tendency towards more pale ales than we need, are merely a blip.

Summer pubbin'

"Just stay out of Temple Bar" is my general advice to anyone coming to Dublin and looking for beer. Today's subjects were both found in pubs, and both of them technically in Temple Bar, although they're some distance from the Auld Dub/Oliver St John Gogarty/Quays/Temple Bar/Fitzsimons's central parade of shame.

I mean, The Porterhouse, Dublin's longest-surviving vendor of decent beer, is only a little bit west of Fitzsimons's on the same stretch, and it does get a generic crowd of uninterested tourists, but it also has a carefully chosen and ever-rotating beer menu. Lately, that has included the new range of tentative one-offs from Eight Degrees.

Last time it was Dolcita, an IPA, now it's a hoppy pilsner called Pacifika. It's got the pilsner look right, being clear golden with a well-formed and lasting lager head. The aroma is... lacking. No exotic gust of hop waft greeted mine hooter, I'm sorry to report. The flavour goes lager-first too, giving a grainy dry quality, all husky and slightly rustic. That's not unpleasant; this beer is clean to beat the band, but I signed up for hoppy. Where's my hoppy? One is left to wait, but it's there in the finish, with a quick and subtle burst of the tropical, fading to a fresh salad-leaf greenness and some slightly spicier forest resin. You have to look for it, though. I should probably be more appreciative that this pilsner is actually in the crisp and dry pilsner style, not simply a pale ale fermented cold. The Eight Degrees VLB training is on display here. But, since they made a hop the beer's actual name, I feel I should have got some more hop from it. Fans of proper pilsner are well served by this, but how many of us are there?

Changing Times, despite its name, doesn’t strike me as much of a trend-chaser, but it has seemingly decided that the tiny wave of Irish ginger beers is worth surfing, and produced one of its own: Sinséar. I found it in the busily touristed surrounds of Darkey Kelly's, on Temple Bar's far western edge.

The visuals are as one would expect: a lightly hazed pale yellow, and likewise its ABV is the orthodox 4%. I turned down the option of lime, but was happy to be asked. They haven't skimped on the ginger. It's been a while since I've tasted the competition (Smithfield Zingibeer and Kinnegar Jackrabbit), but this one feels like it has more of a spice kick than I remember from them. That sparks on the tongue initially, spreading a tingle over the palate like a mouthful of pop rock candy. It's not built for complexity though does have a bonus hint of brown sugar or very light caramel. The thin fizzy texture is a bit of a downside but I'm sure that's intended: it's not meant to be assessed the way regular beers are. For summer refreshment, I could have seen myself drinking it again, maybe even with the discretionary lime, then I looked at the bill and found that this particular pint of light fizz cost €8.75. Yes, this is technically Temple Bar, and such things shouldn't surprise me, but that's ouchy nonetheless. I don't know if other pubs in the brewery's group sell it, but I hope they price it more reasonably if and when they do.

It's been hot in the city lately, so it's good that the pubs are looking after the punters' need for refreshment. That the pubs on the edge of Temple Bar still sell pints at single-digit prices should perhaps be a cause for celebration. It won't be like that much longer.

Value proposition

A completely random pick from the fridge at Craft Central landed me this can of triple IPA from Canadian brewer Nano Cino. It's called Innovation #6, it's 9.7% ABV and it cost more than €10. What does that get me?

The big floaty gobbets aren't an innovation: I've see those before. And it's quite an average shade of medium opaque orange, darker than the triple kind of IPA tends to be. The aroma has a lot of the caramel/crystal quality of the sort I associate with first-generation double IPAs, where the brewers seemed to care only about boosting the gravity without being too concerned where the hops fitted in. There's a spicy sort of citrus sideshow, but nothing especially bright or fresh.

Thankfully it doesn't taste of caramel, but the sweet orange jelly it runs with instead indicates that it's still a malt-first beer, which is a little disappointing. To the cordial or orangeade it adds a twist of black pepper for complexity and lots of chewy, boozy liqueur heat. You get a dash of vermouth or madeira in with your hops here, and I'm not convinced that that's a good thing. The sticky finish coats the palate with marmalade and triple sec: Paddington's breath on Saturday night.

I guess it passes muster as a triple IPA, but it tastes a little elderly and overwrought. Maybe as an end-of-the-night finishing beer, but even then I suspect it's better in smaller doses than this.

I don't make a habit of buying the double-digit-priced cans, and this is a prime example of why. It's just not worth the risk. Beer of better quality is available from breweries much closer to home at significantly more reasonable cost.

Where they do things differently

The Glider is a modern marvel. Belfast's metro-like bus-with-notions runs transversely across the city, from west to east, passing plenty of the city's beer destinations on the way. A new curiosity has arrived at the eastern G1 terminus in Dundonald. As has been reported far and wide, Lidl NI has chosen to open a fully-operational pub in the same building as their supermarket, to subvert local licensing restrictions. I went up to have a look.

Knowing, presumably, how much of a curiosity The Middle Ale would be, and the potential for positive publicity, the chain has gone to more effort than it strictly needed to. Although there's nothing distinctive about the exterior, the inside has been designed to a definite theme, based on the old-fashioned Irish pub-grocer, as befits a kind of modern day equivalent. The shelves are lined with decorative versions of Lidl food and homewares, not to advertise them seriously, but to fit the theme. With that goes shiplap-style painted-wood walls and ceiling, lighting in the style of early electrification, and even little vestigial drawers behind the counter, as though for storing loose produce. That it's all garishly coloured in the company's red, yellow and blue, rather than more realistic earthy ochre or olive green, takes away from the effect and reminds one that it's all a bit of set dressing. But it's fun, like drinking in the on-stage pub from a pantomime.

The drinks offer... well, they've made a bit of an effort. For the most part, the draught options are what you might expect to find in a mainstream Norn Irish pub with a tie to C&C: Tennent's, Heverlee, Bulmer's, Bud Light, Guinness and the one surprise, Estrella Damm. When I lived in the province, such a basic array would absolutely have included C&C-brewed keg Bass as well, and it was a little jarring to see it's not part of what's plainly an out-of-the-box factory-settings beer line-up. I bet the marketing wunderkind who came up with "The Middle Ale" didn't think to ask if the pub would sell any ale. It doesn't.

While you can buy Lidl-brand wine and spirits behind the bar, the logistics of doing the same for draught beer would have been impractical. This is where the effort shows, though: an additional beer tap is badged as the own-brand Crafty Brewing Lager, and while I strongly suspect it's hooked up to a keg of Rye River's Bidin' Time, I also have my suspicions about whether or not those are two different beers in any meaningful way.

None of this was getting me any new ticks, however. I had to turn to the bottle options for that. Now, you know I love a bit of knock-off branding from the German discounters. I had never taken a punt on either of the main rivals' Corona clones, because they're only in six-packs and that's too much commitment to a beer that's likely undrinkable. At The Middle Ale, however, they'll do you a single of Camaro, and even shove a wedge of lime in it.

I understand that the lightstrike-proof hop substitute that big-brand clear-glass lagers are made from is quite expensive. That it's not in use here is painfully obvious, even sniffing through the tiny aperture of a longneck. The pub hasn't been open long but this was still skunked from its time in the glass-fronted fridge. That's present in the flavour too, but is far from the worst thing about it. There's a horrific cooked-sweetcorn savoury quality, turning to popcorn husk in the finish. The little jet of real lime from the wedge does genuinely help by masking some of the awfulness, but it's a bad time from start to finish. The mainstream versions of this type of beer are mostly very bland and treated a little unfairly in the discourse; the Lidl one, however, tastes as bad as all the jokes about them say they do.

A better drinks offer might have had me spending a little more time there, soaking in the Disney-does-country-grocer ambiance, but nothing took my fancy. Back on the Glider, then.

I didn't have any to-do list beyond that, although I'd never had a pint in the downstairs bar of The Ulster Sports Club, so decided to fix that next. It was quiet and cool in there, and downstairs was the only option as the Out of Office brewery taproom on the upper floor hadn't opened yet. I had a pint of their session IPA: Pencil Pusher.

This is a modest 4% ABV and pale yellow with a light but definite haze. The flavour is crisp at first: plain and a little grainy, before the hops kick in, bringing a fresh and pithy citric bitterness. It took a moment for anything else to appear, beyond the initial grapefruit, and that's a sweeter and slightly sticky stewed peach effect. It remains zippy and refreshing, however, and well-chosen as a regular on the more mainstream downstairs bar. There's little to dislike about it.

All roads lead to The Sunflower, and it was busy in the sunny beer garden, though a little quieter indoors, before the Friday after-work crowd fully descended. Galway Bay makes the house beer here: Sunny Lager. It's pretty unchallenging fare, though well made. It's a crystal-clear golden colour, looking like lager perfection, and is softly textured, the body full for something only 4.3% ABV and likely brewed to a price point. Where I cynically expected it to be bland, the flavour has a colourful floral quality, tasting of summer meadows and tasteful bouquets. Maybe the appropriate weather we had enhanced my impression of it, and it wouldn't be as engaging on a dismal grey afternoon. Quality is quality, however, and I would come back to this.

On the guest cask was El Dorado, a pale ale from Manchester brewery ShinDigger. They had it served nicely cold, which was appreciated. This is another pale and clear one, and has much in common with the lager, being plain and decent, with a subtle hop flavour. Here, that's a light zing of orange and grapefruit, though without any proper bitter kick. It's hard to dislike, but I had turned to the cask in search of complexity, and attracted by the name of the beer being the name of a hop. There's an element of false pretences about it: it's far from the hop showcase one might think it would be.

And with that it was back home to Dublin. I didn't get any proper exploring of Belfast done but felt I did the city's beer scene a little bit of justice. Whether it's worth gliding out to Dundonald to see how Lidl does a pub isn't for me to say. Don't go for the beer offer is all I have to add to the conversation.

A two, three, four

In the discourse around beer, one often sees it noted that the simplistic veneration of ever-bigger numbers, common a decade and more ago, has subsided. The IBU race is over, and conscientious beer drinkers, some of them even in the US, have come to recognise that stronger beer is not automatically better than weaker beer. However, I think there are still vestiges of The Old Ways to be found, including the exponential growth of IPA subgeneres: double was followed by triple for no rational reason, and brewery science (or, more likely, brewery marketing) has continued the stylistic inflation. Today we follow the pattern via one brewery: SOMA Beer of Girona in Catalonia.   

Representing double IPA is Lag, at 8% ABV. It's fully hazed up and especially pale, which I'm taking as a good sign: no nasty oxidation here. And indeed it smells very fresh, having been about a month in the can. Ripe mango and mandarin segments form the aroma, as well as a generous dollop of vanilla custard. That had me worrying it might taste sickly, but the flavour is clean. The custard sits at its centre but is prevented from turning cloying by a citric bite, adding oily lime zest and a squeeze of tart lemon juice. But there's something else. Yes, I know it's a full-strength double IPA, but it's also the first and weakest of a set of three, so I wasn't prepared for how hot it is. The texture is dense, almost chewy, and there's a burn to the flavour -- not unpleasant, though definitely surprising. That descends to become a wholesome glow in one's belly. This is a tasty and well-made beer -- hazy DIPA as the Lord intended -- but I was somewhat on edge at the thought of scaling up.

The burn warning continues with Ripple, a 10% ABV triple IPA with an all-Kiwi hop combination of Nectaron, Waimea and Motueka. A blast of heat is fair game for the style, though, and like the best examples, this one burns cleanly, with no unpleasant solvent notes. There's nuance too: a concentrated tropical fruit cordial lands in at the middle, and there's a more involved herbal and medicinal bitterness when it finishes. Despite all that, it rounds out in tidy fashion, with no significant aftertaste. On a warm evening, I took my time sipping through it and enjoyed it a lot. Prepare for a big beer with a big flavour, because it makes no apologies for being one of those, but equally it has been put together with skill and makes good use of big hops and big gravity to deliver a tremendously fun experience. Bring on the big lad!

Despite the glaring obviousness of the concept, quadruple IPAs are fairly thin on the ground. I've only previously had a couple. Today's set is completed by Midnight Club, SOMA's quadeepa. The ABV tops out at 12%. It looks pretty similar to the others: an opaque emulsion, but pale yellow, and therefore free of any oxidation that might make the promised big hopping suboptimal. The aroma is a fairly standard mix of tropical and stonefruit, and if anything it smells less hot than the triple IPA. The texture is where the difference lies. This is milkshake-thick; a beer which requires muscle to pull it out of the glass and down the throat. Hoppy custard. There's a bit of a burn, but not as much I thought there would be, and more of that hard herbal bitter side, turning almost waxy. The bitterness is what makes it different to your standard strong murk. There's no room for fruity niceties here: the hops are aggressive, as is the mouthfeel. I get a sense of a beer that wants to be taken seriously but is just camply silly instead. While it isn't unpleasant, going quadruple is no kind of upgrade on double or triple.

All told, these three aren't really different styles of beer. Strong and hoppy haze is what it is, and there are no significant variations between 8% and 12% ABV that justify according them separate styles. I will, however, say that SOMA is very good at doing it. I'm painfully aware of how many different things they could have got wrong here, throwing their beers out of whack, but it's expert poise and subtlety all the way through. You're on a crazy ride through Silly Town, but the driver has total control over the vehicle at all times and you will arrive safely, if perhaps a little dizzy.