Ego Patricius

Time was, a new Irish beer review was a special effort I put in for St Patrick's Day. These days it's hard to keep up. So here's a round-up of my last few weeks of Irish beer exploring, for the day that's in it.

Meath newcomers Brú quietly released their first IPA last month, called Rí. Well, it seemed quiet to me: first I saw of it was when it became the début cask beer served from 57 The Headline's new beer engine. It's 5.5% ABV and, thanks to the chilly weather, arrived in my glass beautifully cool. All the right notes are there for a refreshing English-style pale ale: the juicy peach and mandarin without any of the harsher bitterness of the less-genteel IPA-brewing nations. But it's no lightweight, the alcohol content lending it a decent heft. Sip or slurp: your choice. I will say I don't think I got the best of it as the barrel was rushed from brewery to bar on the day so there was a bit of a yeasty, bready burr to it. I noticed the bottled version in the shops lately and would be hoping for a cleaner experience from that. If it can retain the hop complexity of the cask edition it will be a real treat.

Continuing the hop theme, Franciscan Well Double IPA was a nice surprise when it showed up on tap far from home in Against the Grain. It's a perfectly clear glassful, somewhere between dark orange and pale amber and smells worryingly of toffee more than hops. It's better on tasting, however: pithy, in an old world IPA sort of way. Do I detect the orangey overtones of Styrians, perhaps? Either way I get a distinct echo back to former Franciscan Well classic Alpha Dawg. The crystal malt sweetness becomes more apparent as it warms rounding it off rather nicely. Like Rí it's a well-mannered and approachable hop-forward beer.

The award for having fun with hops goes to Carlow Brewing and their new, ambitious, O'Hara's Amber Adventure, making its first appearance the week before last as part of a tap-takeover at Farrington's. The plan is a rolling programme of amber ales under the same name, representing a world tour of hop growing regions. We start the quest in New Zealand, the first iteration being a showcase for Pacific Gem and Motueka. An effort has been made at keeping things light and sessionable, so it's only 4.1% ABV and rather pale for the style. But it's far from insipid: the drinking experience is bookended by a big bitter hit at the start and a lingering acidity at the finish. The wonderful hop complexity forms the meat in this hop sandwich: all funky, weedy, resinous dank which is lightened, though not balanced, by mild candy caramel malt. As the colour previously suggested, the malt element is very much understated compared to other amber ales, and while it's good that the hops are pushed to the front, it does mean the end result is a little on the watery side. That said, no other Irish beer offers so much hoppy impact in such a sessionable package, and that makes it a very welcome addition.

Moving on from the hops... Wait, no, that's not how we roll in Ireland these days. Sticking with hops to the very last, a new seasonal from JW Sweetman: Intergalactic, a 6.8% ABV amber ale. My apologies for the utterly abysmal photo which makes it look like an opaque soupy mess, it's really quite see-through, though is a dark amber colour. One sniff delivers a blast of satsuma zest, in case it wasn't clear enough from the name that Aussie hop Galaxy is in the house. Tasting gives you a rapid flash of orange segment quickly followed by a sterner bitterness. There's a similar resinousness to that found in the house Pale Ale. The malt sits on the sidelines providing a modest amount of balance -- no toffee or caramel interfering here. Overall, an interesting side-step from the Pale Ale, but I was still glad to get back to a proper pint of the latter afterwards.

And never to be outdone when Irish micros are throwing hops around, Galway Bay Brewery have another one from their pilot series which has been around a while but I only just caught up with it last weekend. It's billed as a Cascadian Dark Ale, 6.8% ABV and served exclusively on cask. The aroma from the opaque dark brown beer is an innocent and inviting sherbet citrus smell, but its true colours are revealed on tasting as a much more harsh, rather waxy, bitterness. The dark malts play good cop to this, adding a cakey sweetness and a comforting creamy texture. Complex and thought-provoking: just what you want from a one-off small-batch brew.

So that's what's going on here. Meanwhile I'm off to Italy this morning, to spread the good news from Ireland to the Romans, like St Patrick in reverse.

What's in a name?

Festival season kicked off a couple of weeks ago with the first of 2013: the Franciscan Well's Cask and Winter Ale Festival in Cork. The emphasis was very much on the first part of the offer, with a little over 20 cask beers available in the covered beer garden, though not much that was particularly wintery.

Among the highlights was a return of Franciscan Well's wonderfully spicy Alpha Dawg IPA and a superb dry-hopped edition of Trouble Brewing's Ór golden ale. Just two on the list were completely new to me, and curiously enough they had something in common.

One was White Gypsy's Amber, a 5% ABV pale ale which I'd narrowly missed at the big festival in Dublin last September. It's a pale amber shade and quite sweet: packed with all manner of fruit flavours. The tasting committee around the table picked out peach, lychee, banana and vanilla. I got more than a hint of chewy Refresher sweets too. Not suitable for hopheads but I really enjoyed it. It's not the first beer from White Gypsy to be called Amber: a couple of years ago Amber was an excellent Munich-style lager. Hopefully nobody was expecting the lager when they ordered this, and hopefully also we'll see the old award-winning Amber back at some point, under the same badge or another.

The second new one was Chameleon Bräu, a "lager-style" blonde by Metalman. It's quite a simple beer but does what it does exceedingly well, blending dry grain notes with clean lemon zest. There's perhaps a hint of diacetyl butterscotch on the finish, but nowhere near enough to spoil it. So I was perfectly happy about the taste, but the name makes me grumpy.

Originally, Chameleon was a single beer which was altered in various ways before serving, so there was a chilli version and a variety of dry-hopped editions: a neat idea and fun to explore. But then late last year there came Chamelon Garnet: a completely new beer with a recipe unrelated to the earlier Chameleons. Now Chameleon Bräu is something different again. The official line from the brewery is that the Chameleon range is a series of small batches and experiments, just like the first ones were. That's fair enough, but surely the customer should be allowed to expect that a beer with the same name has something in common with previous ones. I could understand "Bräu: part of the Chameleon series", but "Chameleon Bräu" raises a customer expectation that isn't met. In this customer, at least. Galway Bay Brewery used to practise this unfriendly naming method with their Strange Brew series, but thankfully that has been knocked on the head now: every beer gets an individual name and this makes them much easier to talk about.

Still, it's nice to be whinging about beer nomenclature rather than beer quality. No complaints about the latter at this festival.

While in Cork I also took the opportunity to call in at the new branch of the Porterhouse in the Mardyke Centre, not far from Franciscan Well. They've done a lovely job here, creating a comfortable spacious pub with an atmospheric vaulted ceiling, the usual great range of Porterhouse beers and best of all, a full-length shuffleboard table:

Every pub should have one.

Drink all the beer; write all the beer

Would I have been surprised to learn, on Day 1, that my new blog will see through seven whole years? Probably not, to be honest. I reckon I'd be very surprised at what I'm writing, and hopefully impressed. This blog has seen me through a considerable education in things beery. Around 2008 I even stopped sniggering at "bottom fermentation".

This month's Session is hosted by Brewpublic and the topic is "What Drives Beer Bloggers?" I'll take a punt on the top answer being "beer". It certainly is for me as this blog fulfils a very simple primary purpose: to record for future reference what I think of every beer that comes my way. It does make it very easy to write. If I'm looking for inspiration all I have to do is open the fridge.

I don't do industry news or commentary, I don't do pub reviews, I don't do home brewing, brewery visits nor a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the-bar anecdotes, except when these are in some tangential way related to the beer in front of me. Not that there's anything wrong with such topics, but plenty of other beer blogs do them and if I have an opinion on the issues you'll find it in their comment sections. Which leads on to the secondary purpose of this blog: to give me the guiltless freedom to comment at length on everyone else's without looking too much like a hurler on the ditch.

And that's about as much introspection as I can handle. Blogging about blogging is a pet hate of mine and I'm only making an exception this once, because the nice people of Brewpublic asked me to. Now for beer.

With the Franciscan Well Easter beer festival kicking off tomorrow afternoon, I have a bottle of their new IPA Alpha Dawg. As with their two previous bottled offerings it arrives in a massive, hand-numbered, 1-litre swingtop. 5.9% ABV and hopped with Admiral and Cascade says the label. Inside it's quite a pale shade of orange, fogged slightly with what I hope is hop haze. The aroma is quite bitter, not the zesty high notes one might expect from the Cascade. And this carries through to the taste as well: it's a kind of sharp resinous bitterness, the sort that gets harsh if it's too pronounced but here is merely assertive. Some more subtle fruit tones are lurking quietly behind it but they don't get much of a say. The punchy bitter tang lasts long after the beer is swallowed.

While I think this would have benefited from more, later, hops, they've made a pretty decent fist of an IPA.

Stay tuned for more writing about beer and absolutely nothing else.