Who asked for this?

They've gone all creative at Open Gate for the summer, Lord save us. Classic styles can wait; everything is getting an off kilter ingredient or two. But we shouldn't be too cynical before starting to drink them.

Exhibit A is Cola Radler. It looks like stout: a dark reddish brown with a fine white head. I suspect stout is the beer base and it tastes immediately roasty, plus I think I detect some Guinness tang in the aroma. Cola sits in the middle of the flavour, tasting a little concentrated, conjuring long-dormant sensory memories of the Soda Stream machine in my childhood kitchen. The cola syrup had a particular smell and taste which is echoed here. And that's it. As we saw on Friday, radler is supposed to be quenching and refreshing, and although this is only 3.5% ABV, the lack of citrus means it doesn't work. The cola is overly sticky and clashes unpleasantly with the stout's bitterness and roast. I noticed towards the end a nearby menu board saying that there is lime in the mix here, but there's not nearly enough. You may wince at the very notion of mixing Guinness and Coke, and I'm here to tell you, first hand, that that's an entirely appropriate reaction.

Open Gate becomes the third local brewery, after Rascals and Third Circle, to brew a beer called Dubliner Weisse. Theirs is with hibiscus, blood orange and pomegranate. It's a fun pink colour and 3.8% ABV. I was on the lookout for sourness first and was not very surprised to find it isn't really, hitting dry and crisp but not proceeding beyond that into tartness. The fruit mix is pleasant, though, suggesting cherry, pineapple, raspberry and apricot: all very bright and summery. A twang of yoghurt is the only nod to microflora complexity, but that's OK. It may not be even close to proper Berliner weisse, but this does what it's designed to do. Party on.

Yet another in the recent series of flavoured stouts follows that. With a Coconut Rum Stout it was always going to be tough not to mention Bounty bars, and I'm completely failing at that, because this very much tastes Bounteous: dark chocolate and gooey coconut paste. But wait, there's more. The official description doesn't mention real rum, only "rum spices", suggesting the involvement of Uncle Arthur's housemate, Captain Morgan. That's a big part of the aroma but mild in the flavour, adding hints of vanilla, cinnamon, walnut and smoke without interrupting the headline features. Most pleasingly, the beer is dry not sweet, with a proper bite of roast and a non-sticky texture, even at 5.6% ABV. Excellent work. Yes, it's pure gimmick, but designed and executed in an expert way, paying due care and attention to balance and complexity, while also doing the wacky novelty thing. I'm fully on board for that sort of brewing.

That set was followed swiftly by two further additions, still keeping things weird. I suspect that the Chilli-Mango DIPA didn't hit its intended gravity as it's only 6.9% ABV. It presents a foggy orange colour and smells properly pulpy and tropical, the 45kg of mango in the 10hL batch paying their way. That does mean there's something of a yoghurt kick about the flavour: not sour but creamy with a light layer of vanilla. There wasn't anything I would describe as hop character,  but perhaps drinkers of this type of heavy and hazy IPA don't care about the hops. It's not readily obvious that chilli is involved (three types): I didn't get any spice piquancy, which is unfortunate. Instead, I think all the pepper action is in the finish, where it's dry and a little plasticky, not contributing anything positive to the picture. Hey, Open Gate is a self-described experimental brewery, and this strikes me as a very experimental beer; one that doesn't quite do what it's supposed to. They've got the mango right; the other details need tweaking, however.

Next to it is Port Ellen Part II. I assume that Part I was the one released last summer under the name The 200, a collaboration with Diageo's distillery in the Islay town of the same name. My notes on that one said it was served too cold, hence letting this one sit for a bit. A freshly fried bacon aroma starts us off on the right foot, and the flavour continues in that vein, the sweet smoke suggesting Bamberg more than Islay to me. An enquiry about whether smoked malt was used, rather than simply depending on the whisky barrels, revealed that yes, it's peated malt, though the beer is possibly not barrel-aged. That scans. Though 7.1% ABV, it's not hot or spirit-laden. This sort of brightly smoky stout is right up my street: savoury as the day is long but still clean, drinkable and positively refreshing. I carry a torch for the one Messrs Maguire brewed, once, back in 2007, and this brought me right back there. Smokeheads assemble.

Just one (and a half) missteps with these, and it's not a surprise. Mostly, this is ideal fare for the al fresco drinking season, however short and sporadic it may prove to be this year.

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.

Sour season

It seems like only last week I was looking at Ireland's winter beers, but apparently the planet has done that tilting thing again, the weather has turned warmer, and the brewers have had to react appropriately. Refreshing and fruit-laden seems to be how they're achieving it. It's only early summer, though, so just two examples today.

Brewers At Play 50: Gose with Lemon Zest, Pink Peppercorns & Thyme is the latest in Kinnegar's limited edition series. The name steals my thunder as regards telling you what it is. I'll add that it's 3.7% ABV and a pale, Golden-Delicious, yellow. The lemon zest hits hard in the aroma, enhanced by a fun mineral tartness. That leaves the flavour for the pepper and herb but I couldn't really taste them. Up front it's lemon again, though less zesty, with a touch of sticky cordial about it. It is at least balanced by a sherbet effervesence, and a degree of salinity, both of which ensure it stays refreshing: arguably the most important aspect. That it's not watery at the low strength is a further point in its favour. So, while the convoluted name suggests a very involved complexity, it's actually a lovely warm-weather quaffer. I approve. 

We get a bit of wordplay from Wicklow Wolf's one, Póg, referencing both the Irish word for kiss and the Hawaiian bottle-top game, named for passionfruit, orange and grapefruit. It's a large fellow for the spec, at 5.2% ABV, and very much thicker than the other one; almost creamy, in fact. That smoothie impression doesn't sit well with the citric tang of the flavour, creating a sort of orange-juice-meets-toothpaste effect. Then at the end there's a weird kind of chemical, chlorine, thing, which presumably is what happens when you design a recipe around conceptual punning rather than whether the ingredients will work well together. It's not particularly sour, so while it's not one of those gooey fake-sour fruit beers, it has no properly sharp edges, which is disappointing. This isn't a refreshing beer-garden beer; it's chewy, reflecting the strength, and almost jammy in how the fruit manifests. I can give props to its bright tropicality, but not to its sourness, drinkability or refreshment power. On balance, I wasn't a fan.

One beer was what I wanted; the other not so much. So it goes. Doubtless we'll have more like this before it's time to hunker down for the darker days again.

Red letter day

When I was an undergraduate, my university offered the option to sit second year exams in March, a term early. A decent grade came with an exemption from the summer exams, and so it was that my housemate Tim and I spent a lot of April and May 1997 in The Porterhouse, drinking their Red ale. I have a very particular memory of the beer, which was smooth and fruity; predominantly sweet, but not excessively so; balanced, and modestly strong, so well suited for an afternoon's drinking before a long evening of Mario Kart duels. In the early 2000s, I got out of the habit of drinking in The Porterhouse, and when I came back a decade later, the Red seemed to me to have changed, with a harsher bitterness and a more stark caramel sweet side. No harm: there were always plenty of enjoyable alternatives. But my experience with the Red of old came back to me recently when I called in to try the beer they've released to mark 30 years of the beer brand and its Temple Bar headquarters*.

In a marked contrast to previous birthdays when there's been a new stout, this time they've launched Celebration Amber Ale, commissioned from regular supplier Hopkins & Hopkins. It was available on cask and keg. I went cask, with a shot of keg on the side, for science.

It's a dark copper colour and smells, as good Irish red ale does, of ripe summer fruit, and strawberries in particular. The flavour brings the opposite side of that rare but happy equation: a dry bite of tannins. That gives it the refreshment factor of its near-relation English bitter. Some hop character might have been nice, and I thought the American nomenclature of "amber ale" perhaps signified that, but it's never been a Porterhouse strong point. I don't know if Peter Moseley, head brewer for all the years that The Porterhouse was a brewery, was involved in the recipe design, but if not, Hopkins & Hopkins has done a great job of channelling his kind of beer, which is fitting for the occasion.

The keg version's extra fizz is a boon, reducing the fruit sweetness further, to make it drier and even more refreshing, but I preferred the cask one, which is rounder, softer and altogether more cuddly. It's nice to have the opportunity for a a side-by-side draught format comparison.

Maybe it was simply the surroundings, largely unchanged for the last 30 years, but I got quite the Proustian rush from drinking this. It's a very decent beer in its own right, if the low-hopped red/amber genre works for you. New examples of it are quite thin on the ground. Maybe I still would have preferred another birthday stout, or even the return of lost Porterhouse classics like TSB and Wrasslers. But nostalgia is not The Porterhouse's business. Here's to the next 30 years and beyond.

*The Porterhouse brand in general pre-dates the brewery, having been applied originally to the founders' Bray pub (since sold and now trading as The Palm) in 1989. The first Porterhouse brewery was located at the pub in Temple Bar between 1996 and 2000, and although the company still owns a production facility in Dublin, it's leased out and hasn't produced Porterhouse beer since 2023.

Kildare's wins

It's a busy brewing county, Kildare. I guess it benefits from being in the Dublin hinterland but without the constraints of Dublin commercial rents. Today I'm looking at four recent beers from four different Kildare breweries.

I'll begin with a lager from Farringtons, though not in the brewery's usual livery. Hells Yeah is a collaboration with Martin's Off Licence and is branded for the shop, having been created for their Advent box last winter. It's a hefty fellow at 5.4% ABV, and the brewer's German vocabulary may need a refresh as it's not very hell at all: a medium-amber colour. It follows that the aroma is more like that of a bock, mixing rich golden syrup malt with a strongly vegetal hop seasoning. The body is unsurprisingly full, and there's a lack of carbonation, detracting from its abilities as a thirst-quencher, which is what I wanted it for. The flavour is full too, however, and enjoyably deep and rounded. There's gooey treacle tart and a surprising blackberry-jam fruity side, all hitting up against the green bite of spinach, asparagus and nettles. I detected a tiny bleachy twang on the end, but couldn't say if that's a minor brewing flaw, or just what happens when weighty pale malt meets noble hops in quantity. On paper I shouldn't have liked this, but while it wasn't what I signed on for, I appreciated its boldness and cuddly demeanour. Some regular-lager drinkers may have got a surprise when it came out of the box back in December.

Until a few weeks ago, when our Great Uncle Diageo started getting the red and yellow stuff (black is pending) running out of the new plant at Littleconnell, Kildare's biggest brewery was Rye River. Their summer special is a sour ale with raspberry and pineapple called Flamingo Acid Test: an elaborate name with a simple ABV of just 4%. It is at least pink, rendered pale by a significant degree of murk. "Centrifuged" says the boilerplate text on the can. Must have been just a quick spin. The haze makes it look like one of those milkshaky pseudo-sour beers, but it isn't. That said, it's still not very sour. The pineapple in particular adds a strong sweetness that the raspberries' tartness fails to balance and which steamrolls equally over the effect of the three-acid blend with which they've kettle-soured it. Don't expect complexity, then, but otherwise it's fine: a bit of simple summer fun. Basic, but nowhere near as basic as your Aperol-drinking friends. 

Kildare's oldest brewery is Trouble, best known around Dublin for its Ambush pale ale, but producing the occasional other beer too. Fresh Start pale ale is a rare new addition to their line-up, and I don't know if the name is meant to signify something. The online commentariat have noted that, although it first appeared on shelves in late April, it bears a canning date in January. Still, I don't think the Citra and Amarillo hops have been harmed unduly by that: it still smells bright and zesty, and the flavour blends Amarillo's fruit candy with a sharper bite of Citra pith. All that is as you'd expect, really. Although... it feels very light and is an exceptionally pale yellow colour, neither of which tallies with its full 5% ABV. There's not much malt flavour, and while the hops are definitely present, the flavour is a little understated. It's a grand sunny pinter, but the strength seems somewhat excessive for what you get.

Not far from Trouble is the Dewdrop Brewhouse at the Dewdrop pub in Kill. Morning Dew is badged as a limited edition can and is a saison, with a beefy 6.2% ABV. It looks the part, all pale and hazy, with plenty of foam on top. "Fruity Dry Peppery" are the three descriptors the brewery has stuck on the label, and the aroma is all about the first of those: big banana and pear, which isn't how I like my saison, by and large. Pepper (white) does follow in the flavour, and the body is pleasingly light and crisp; saisons of this strength can turn out unpleasantly flabby, but this one keeps things taut. The fruit is still there, however: the pear in particular, but that's simply a different kind of crispness. And it finishes dry to complete the set. Overall, this is pretty much on the money, and especially impressive as the work of a country brewpub. I know that saison is a hard sell in the craft beer space generally, but wouldn't it be nice to have a local one in regular production? This would be a good candidate.

There's nothing especially noteworthy in this lot, though also no stunt recipes or similar show-off silliness. Steady and stolid is the Kildare way.