Year-end pints

This month makes it ten years since Mark Dredge and Andy Mogg suggested categories that beer bloggers might like to use for an annual run-down of the best in beer. I've stuck with it steadfastly since, even if I do change my criteria for the winners each year, and sometimes during the process of writing that year's entry. It's not meant to be taken seriously or considered meaningful, is what I'm saying.

2019 has been a dramatic year in beer, in Ireland and abroad. To mull it all over I've chosen something with a bit of wintery heft: Abbaye de Vauclair Biere Ambrée, a large bottle I picked up for loose change in Lidl. They're not lying about the "ambrée", it's a very ambrée hombre indeed: a beautiful clear polished-copper colour with a generous head which expertly laces the glass. I wasn't prepared for how sweet it is; it is extremely sweet, suggesting treacle, muscovado sugar and similar cake-baking ingredients you're not meant to eat raw. I was a few sips in before I noticed the balancing factor: a dry and slightly bitter tannic twang, which I'm guessing has both a hop and malt component. It doesn't stop the sugary onslaught but it does make it manageable, rendering the beer drinkable as a result. The sum total is a beer that's quite light-bodied for 6.1% ABV and tastes like a cup of very sweet cold tea. I quite liked it, but it's not one you can rush, which suited my needs perfectly. And so...

The Golden Pint Awards 2019

Best Irish Cask Beer: Porterhouse Yippy IPA
The decision to replace heavy, resinous Hop Head with pale dry Yippy was not without controversy. For the record I still miss HH's clean punchiness. To begin with, I treated Yippy like a newborn younger sibling, resenting its usurpation. It was some months later that I first encountered it on cask at Porterhouse Temple Bar and finally got it. I suspect the brewery has sneaked a Yorkshire bitter onto the Irish market dressed as an American. On cask it has that same blend of honeyed pale malt and waxy hop bitterness. It's clean, elegant, moreish and generally a fiver a pint. 5% ABV is a bit too high for a proper guzzlable session beer (bring back TSB!) so you have to pace yourself, but the result is very rewarding.

Best Irish Keg Beer: Land & Labour Coolship (2018)
The sour and the funk may become a bit of a theme in this year's edition as some Irish brewers are getting extremely good at this sort of thing. This one, sampled at this year's Hagstravaganza, was damn near lambic-grade and a very clear indication that local brewers are approaching that standard. There was also a blueberry version showing just how easy it is to mess up something this delicate. Steer your Coolship straight and true, and everything will be OK.

Best Irish Bottled Beer: Wide Street Saison Sunday
It's their only bottle, but still the best beer they've released so far. I reviewed it here only a couple of weeks ago, but I hope I can avoid accusations of late-year bias by pointing out that I drank relatively few bottled Irish beers this year now that the can is king. I can see this category becoming the purvue of barrel aged beers. That said...

Best Irish Canned Beer: Wicklow Wolf Pointy Shoes
The canned Golden Pint has to go to a dark beer as we have had a slew of worthy examples from various local breweries in recent months. Larkin's Morrigan, White Hag Festa Nuda, Lineman's Astral Grains and Wicklow Wolf's own Apex and Locavore all deserve a share in this prize. But Pointy Shoes, brewed to mark Wicklow Wolf's fifth anniversary, and as the valedictory beer from the Bray premises, went beyond what any Irish stout barrel-ager has managed to create thus far.

Best Overseas Draught: Ca' del Brado Û baccabianca
Chasing the grape ales has become a travel pastime for me, one which doesn't always land great beer. I hit the jackpot in Billies in Antwerp, however, with this one from Emilia-Romagna. Ca' del Brado is a brewery now firmly on my drink-on-sight list.

Best Overseas Bottled Beer: 3 Fonteinen Cuvée Armand & Gaston 2018
Every year should involve ticking a few things off the list, and I was happy to realise an ambition I'd had since the 2017 Toer de Geuze to go to 3 Fonteinen's tap room on an ordinary day and drink some beer there. And I did, and it was this, and it was very impressive. How much of that was down to the occasion? Who cares.

Best Overseas Canned Beer: Crooked Stave Sour Rosé
I had to go all the way back to the start of the year to dig this one out. It's another super-complex mixed fermentation job, this time from the US. And it's permanently available in, among other places, the 4-for-€12 fridge at Stephen Street News. You're in a much better position to argue with me about this one than the previous two, but you have to buy it first.

Best Collaboration Brew: Jackie O's/Cycle Anything And Everything And Nothing At All
The runaway standout beer at the Fidelty beer festival during the summer. You think you've tasted everything that's possible to achieve with barrel-aged imperial stouts, and then along comes this. Fascinating and delicious in equal measure.

Best Overall Beer: Û baccabianca
I know. I'd love to have given this to something local, or to something readily available, but I look back on the finalists and think of my reaction to first tasting each of them, and this was the one that induced the cartoon-character-in-love effect. A-wooo-ga!

Best Branding: O Brother
The brewery's Off The Wall series of collaborations with graffiti artists began last year and has now clocked up two dozen beautifully designed cans.

Best Pump Clip: Five Lamps Tilted Drum
I liked the badge Five Lamps came up with for the Convention Centre's house beer, blending the building's distinctive shape with a beer keg.

Best Bottle/Can Label: YellowBelly Bushido
Well of course it was going to be a YellowBelly one. In picking a pastiche style for this black IPA, artist Paul really excelled himself. The beer was pretty damn good too.



Best Irish Brewery: Third Barrel
This was a tougher call than usual, with quite a few breweries doing amazing work. I'll save a special mention for Larkin's who've had some real stunners coming out especially in the latter half of 2019. But Third Barrel has really been putting the graft in. This year was the first time I found beers to impress me released under their Stone Barrel brand: Slammer and Awesome Sauce in particular. Third Circle's Needs More Cowbell and fruited Brett IPA were highlights, and then all the hyperactive hop activity under the Third Barrel label itself, as well as launching The Format, Pleasuredome and other client brewers. I'm exhausted just writing it down. I hope the pace is sustainable.

Best Overseas Brewery: Tilquin
Our dalliance was brief, but I had a lovely couple of sessions at the Tilquin blendery during this year's Toer de Geuze trying all their various experiments. They've never struck me as a particularly playful producer and perhaps it's the market that's pushing them into doing new things. Regardless, they're generally very good at it, that maple syrup lambic notwithstanding.

Best New Brewery Opening 2019: Wide Street
The promise of this all-wild-fermentation brewery in Co. Longford is enormous and the beers, in general, have been great so far.

Pub/Bar of the Year: La Venencia
Since I first visted this Madrid pub in 2009 it's been a firm favourite. I was actually apprehensive on going back last October, for fear it would disappoint. It didn't; it's still amazing. The best feature is that it doesn't serve beer, only sherry, so I get to put my notebook away.

Best New Pub/Bar Opening 2019: BrewDog Outpost Dublin
I've only been once and I haven't written about it yet, but I respect the sheer commitment of BrewDog in taking on 1,100 square metres of bar and restaurant space in the Dublin docklands and adding an in-house brewery to it. It's a big place and big things are expected.

Beer Festival of the Year: Fidelity
As usual I feared the worst: big queues and braying edgelords. But Ireland's first all-inclusive beer festival, organised by Whiplash and The Big Romance, was quite chilled in the end. There were lots of amazing beers and, if you didn't spend too long chatting, it was quite easy to get one's money's worth.

Supermarket of the Year: Fresh, Smithfield Square, Dublin 7
It's not what it used to be though I have found myself increasingly coming back to the beer section here, often finding things I couldn't source anywhere else. Supermarkets in general seem to have done away with continuously updated beer ranges -- it mustn't have been sustainable for anyone. Fresh is clinging on, though. Turnover isn't as rapid as you'd find in an independent, though I rarely leave empty-handed.

Independent Retailer of the Year: Redmond's of Ranelagh
I always have to make a special effort to go over, but it's always worth it. The exclusive beers created with DOT are what tipped it into the winners' enclosure for me this year. Shouts-out, of course, to my regular haunts DrinkStore and Stephen Street News.

Online Retailer of the Year: The White Hag
They sent me a free case to test their website, which was nice. It arrived very quickly after I ordered it, which was also nice. And the beer was good. Other than that, I had no cause to buy beer online this year, as usual.

Best Beer Book or Magazine: Pierre Van Klomp Says No: Life, Death and the Meaning of Beer
Another default award this, being the only beer book I read this year, and that was in ten minutes over breakfast on the morning it arrived. It's still a beautifully put together piece with evocative photos as well as earthy Belgian wisdom. Thanks to Pierre's literary agents Boak & Bailey for sending it to me.

Best Beer Blog or Website: Food For Thought
You may have noticed the occasional snarky morning tweet from me about the drinks industry. And the occasional genuinely interesting industry news story. Many of these are fuelled by the daily email from FFT, so this is just by way of thanks to the team there for all the hard work they do collecting and presenting Ireland's hospitality news.

Simon Johnson Award For Best Beer Twitterer: @BeerFoodTravel
Liam has been a bit quiet on the long-form front recently, but his snippets of Irish brewing history throughout the year have been enlightening. He takes a good beer photo too.

Best Brewery Website/Social Media: Galway Bay Brewery
I don't think I've ever given the pub taplists on the Galway Bay website a nod, and they deserve one, even if they're not always up to date (has somebody lost the keys to the Against the Grain page?). The Black Sheep is generally spot on, I get a Twitter notification when something new is tapped, and I find that very useful.


And that's another year over. Thanks for reading, if indeed you still are.

How things change

Looking at the list of beers for this post, and at lots of beer lists in Belgium during my last visit, I was struck by the international dimension. It's not that long ago that the only beers I found in Belgium were from Belgium. That has changed not only in the generically international craft joints, but in some of the more traditional venues too.

Take De Ware Jacob and Oud Arsenaal, for instance: brown cafés in Antwerp, as traditional as you'll find. On my visits to both, I drank Dutch beer, albeit in a Belgian vernacular. Both were from the second Trappist brewery to open in the Netherlands, Zundert. Both are named for their ABV. Zundert 8 is a ruby red colour and surprisingly bitter for this sort of thing, leaning heavily on the liquorice. There's an unsubtle crunch of brown sugar next to this and the two sides aren't well integrated, fighting for the drinker's attention. It lacks the mellowness that the Belgian Trappists do best; maybe that will come with time.

Above the 8 there's Zundert 10. This had a lot of the same features, more of them even, but it worked altogether better. I'm still shocked by how dry and bitter it is, having almost as much in common with stout as quadrupel. There's enough quality dark fruit esters to get by: plum, fig and raisin balancing the liquorice, plus a velvety dash of high-cocoa chocolate. I still think the Belgians have the edge on it, but if you're picking a Zundert it's well worth upgrading.

If you want to hit the international stuff in a big way, Billie's Beer Kafeteria is a must. Despite the name it's definitely a pub, all varnished wood and bric-à-brac in the proper Low Countries style. My eye was immediately caught by a beer from one of my emerging favourite breweries, Ca' del Brado from Bologna. Û baccabianca is a grape ale and, unusually, a white one. It presents in the glass like a witbier: the hazy lemon yellow with a thick layer of foam. The peachy aroma is highly inviting while the flavour blends perfectly elements of juicy white grape, acidic sour spritz and mature barrel funk. Despite 7.9% ABV there's no heat here, just clean fruit matching spicy saltpetre. Exactly what a grape ale should be, and exactly my sort of thing in general.

An English double IPA to follow: Wake & Bake by Mondo in London, in collaboration with J. Wakefield of Miami. This delivers what so many of the style only promise: juice. A mandarin aroma leads on to mandarin and jaffa flavours; soft, not acidic and building to a long cordial finish. Here's another strong one (8% ABV) where the alcohol is completely hidden under the fruit flavours. While there's a tiny amount of yeasty grit and pithy bitterness present, they act more as balance than interference. This is a double IPA to restore one's faith in double IPA.

That evening finished up in Gollemke, an outpost of the Amsterdam bar chain. It's another bright and modern craft bar, though the selection is more traditional than most. I went mainstream on the first round: De Koninck's Triple d'Anvers, available all across Antwerp. Unsurprisingly, I guess, it's rather plain: clear gold with a honey sweetness up front, followed by wholesome oat cookie and golden syrup. There's no spices or heat, like all the fun has been filtered out of it. Tripel for people who don't like tripel, perhaps.

There was one beer on the menu I didn't recognise: Blinker, a saison by Siphon. They generally make good stuff so I took it for a spin. Halfway through it I noticed the bottle I got was a few months past date, but I still couldn't say whether that was the cause of this beer's problems. There was no fruit or spice in this; none of the things that make saison fun, and which aren't normally features that fade with age. Instead it was earthy, slightly funky, and with a harsh acidic burn. Though it's only 5.5% ABV I found it tough going and disappointing.

My nightcap was December Flower by White Pony of Padua, though presumably produced by their contractor in Belgium. This is a winter strong ale of 13% ABV, deep amber in colour; almost ruby. There's lots of heady sherry notes, like a super-strength lager, plus warming sugar and treacle. It's not subtle, or particularly complex, but it's clean, tasty and more-ish. Just what I needed at that stage in the evening.

One last beer in Antwerp, which came with a late-night burger in the Jack's fast food chain. It's called, imaginatively, Jack's, and is a bottle-conditioned pils. Hazy yellow and watery looking, it's very dry, tasting mostly of rice crackers. There's no substance, which is fatal for a food beer; no hop character and far too much fizz. Clean but boring, is my conclusion.

We departed Antwerp on Sunday morning, to grab a few finishers in Moeder Lambic in Brussels before the early evening flight home. It was here I discovered that Dieu du Ciel! has a range of variants on its excellent Péché Mortel coffee imperial stout. Pouring was Péché Morte Cerise and I went straight for that. The cherries don't really add much to the picture and the coffee remains dominant. There's maybe an extra Black Forest gateau note, but otherwise it's the same smooth beauty it always was. I like how this beer is becoming more readily available in Europe.

Over three years ago I visited En Stoemlings in their tiny premises near Brussels Chapelle station. They've moved since and the range has expanded beyond a single beer. This was my first time trying a new one: Tanteke, a saison. It's very unusual for the style, being sweet and creamy rather than dry and crisp. There are notes of lemon meringue and a floral perfume. I found it charming and very sinkable, dangerous given the substantial 6% ABV. That it has nothing in common with any other saison I've tasted matters little. I'll need to put more effort into finding more Stoemlings beer, if this is anything to go by.

Beside it is another coffee imperial stout: Whack!, by No Science, who share a building with Stoemlings. Though the texture is creamy, the flavour is quite a severe coffee-grounds bitterness with overtones of cooked green veg. I prefer this sort of thing to be rounded and less harsh. It's only 8% ABV so maybe it just needs a malt boost to smooth the edges off.

I'd not had a Kernel beer in ages so wasn't going to pass by the cask engine serving Imperial Brown Stout. Here we have a lot of the same things as in the previous beer -- big coffee, a vegetal or metallic tang -- but much better balanced and integrated. That it's 9.1% ABV perhaps adds credence to my theory that if you're going to make these, you have to make them big. The most surprising thing is that it smells and tastes more like coffee than the beer with coffee in.

The purple lad in the Cantillon glass is Mourvèdre/Carignan, a grape lambic from the Brussels brewery, utilising the two named varieties. It's come out well: 6.5% ABV with a pink peppercorn spice from the beginning. The fruit element is mild -- this is a classic geuze all the way down, with the bricky nitre and saltpetre I enjoy so much. I don't think it's been bottled so you'll have to seek it out on draught, and you should.

A final pair before we leave. I was intrigued by an offering from Austrian brewery Alefried, their Mikrozircus 12 Old Stock Ale, a 7.1%-er, fermented with Brettanomyces and aged in red wine barrels with cocoa nibs. There's an equally intriguing spicy-sour aroma while the flavour is a mix of lavender and cream sherry, finishing clean with a delicious sour flourish and a waft of leathery funk. There are elements of the geuze flavour profile in here, the waxy bitterness for one thing, and it's just as complex yet easy-drinking. Weird, but brilliant.

John went Brett too, picking Frappadingue Brett IPA by Brasserie des Garrigues in southern France. The non-Brett version of this double IPA is 9.1% ABV, and when the voracious yeast is let at it that climbs to 9.5%. It's a murky orange colour had has the orangey boiled-sweet aroma of many a Belgian IPA. It's thick and heavy but not hot or difficult to drink, just a bit on the sweet side. I didn't get any Brett character, nor much by way of hops, so it's less than the sum of its parts, perhaps, but an enjoyable warmer on a chilly spring afternoon.

That's a lot of beer and a lot of pubs covered this week. But Belgium: I'm ready to do it all again this weekend. Let's go!