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.

My Fidelity

Fidelity 2019, the first of its name, took place in the Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin last month. It was the first of its kind in Ireland too: an all-inclusive beer festival, in the manner of Mikkeller Beer Celebration or Beavertown Extravaganza. Around three dozen breweries were represented -- a handful from Ireland and a broad international selection -- each pouring two beers per six-hour session. I figured the early one would be sufficient for my purposes. It'll take me two posts to get through everything I sampled.

I began with one from the organising brewer, Whiplash, in a suitable style: pilsner. Blue Ghosts was brewed by White Frontier in Switzerland and is 5.2% ABV. It's a perfect golden colour with a pleasingly soft texture. The flavour is big but not extreme: a red cabbage bittersweet effect, leaning towards that plasticky flavour I dislike in noble-hopped beers, but not hitting it full on, thankfully. It's not the best pils I've ever had, but it's well-made and classy. Going to central European to brew it was worthwhile.

Hops next. Lots of them. DEYA's Saturated in Citra writes a big cheque with that name. It's a pale and hazy double IPA of 8% ABV, with an almost pink tint to the orange colour. A lovely dankness in the aroma starts us off. The flavour is quite sweet to begin with, offering lemon chew sweets, made to make your mouth water. After this the bitter resins swing in, building quickly to become a burn by the finish. Each sip offers a full tour of the delicious aspects of the Citra hop, so it definitely delivers on the name. It's maybe a little hot to get a double thumbs-up from me, but it is very good: a raucous and rollicking hop party.

A few short minutes in, the first beer to generate a bit of buzz in my earshot was To Øl's collaboration with Whiplash, I Dare You, so I had that next. It's a smoked barley wine, or "rauchwine" as they've daftly decided to badge it: 11.3% ABV and a swampy looking red-brown. The aroma was beautiful: a super-clean Bamberg bacon effect, preparing me for something similar in the flavour. Alas it was not to be. The texture is the first thing to hit: a sticky, syrupy feel, which shouldn't be surprising given the specs. The treacle flavour is entirely in keeping with it being a barley wine but the smoke acridity hides any warming smoothness it might otherwise provide. I guess they're trying to yoke together the delicious savoury effect of a German smoked lager with the luxurious hug-in-a-glass of barley wine, but this attempt has missed the mark on that, I think. I'd be up for trying another go at it, however.

Retreat to the IPA, then, and a 6.4% ABV one called Pure Fog, from Burnt Mill brewery in Suffolk. More Citra here, plus Mosaic and Idaho-7. I suppose I should have guessed from the name it was going to be the New England sort, pouring a pale and opaque yellow colour and bringing creamy custard vanilla notes to the front of the flavour. Thankfully that's immediately offset by an intense citrus kick; the pithy buzz of grapefruit and satsuma, the bitterness giving way to delicious juice soon after. I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected to. It is, above all, a fun beer: bitter enough to deliver grown-up IPA flavours but with the cheeky youthful juiciness as well. It's hard not to like.

The poor sod that had to follow that was Collective Arts's Hazy State session IPA. It is possible to brew these at 4.4% ABV (as this is) and not have them turn out wan and watery, but Collective Arts haven't managed it here. The worst thing that happens when brewers try to do a New Englandy session IPA, or its close cousin, a table beer, is that they end up with a thin soup of sharp dregs and harsh hop bitterness, and that's pretty much what this is. There's maybe a hint of vanilla in there but not enough to soften the beer and make it palatable.

And that became two bad experiences in a row when I went to J. Wakefield next. The beer sounded properly interesting: a sour one made with dragonfruit and passionfruit, called DFPF. It looked amazing: a luminous maroon, topped with pink foam. It totally went to pieces on tasting, however. The sourness is too extreme: a harsh acid burn that only a masochist would enjoy. Beer pH isn't like IBUs or Scoville units: the human palate doesn't adjust to crave more intensity; overly sour beer, like overly salty food, is just ruined. The fruit is entirely absent too, and I'd say it takes a lot of interference to block loudmouthed ol' passionfruit. Instead there's a weird savoury red onion tang. Anyone looking for a colourfully flavoured Florida weisse was in for a disappointment here.

I needed redemption; something that would be reliably good. Hello Mikkeller! Is that a Spontan- I see? Spontanpentadruple Blueberry, it turned out, proving that there is literally no numerical limit to silly beer names. This is a frankly unnecessary 9.6% ABV and is the dark purple colour of beetroot juice. There's an unsubtle jammy aroma, and the flavour is mostly all jam too, with just a vaguely unpleasant acid burn behind. While not a bad beer, it's really not up to the normal classy standards of the Spontan series.

To continue the colour theme, a grape ale next. There were no Italian brewers present so Sweden's Beerbliotek had to fill in. I loved the name: Shirazzle Dazzle. The process is interesting too, starting with a very basic wort and minimal hopping, then adding grapes and letting the wild yeast on their skin take care of the fermentation. That led me to expect it to be sour, but it's not really. It is dry, with subtle tannins from the grapes and a crisp, savoury rye-bread character. More fruit flavour would have improved it, but I enjoyed how softly spoken it was, in a room full of loud music and louder beers. The method is promising, and with perhaps some judicious use of barrel ageing could create wonderful things.

Three fruit beers in a row meant it was time for another IPA, this one called Twin Glow, from Left Handed Giant. The aroma -- an unusual one, which I've written down as "coconut" but recall was more complex than that -- had me looking up which hops they've used. Turns out it's Amarillo and a new US variety, Sabro (formerly HBC 438) which has its origins in the wild Neomexicanus family. That coconut continues in the flavour, and I really wish I'd spent more time describing it properly. The beer has a pleasant soft texture and just a little bit of a booze burn, at 6.3% ABV. Balanced and very decent overall.

Stigbergets provided the next IPA, called Population III. This is one of those ones that looks like orange juice. It's 7% ABV but smells unreasonably hot, giving off diesel-like fumes. There's a heat on the palate too, followed by a flash of tasty and succulent stonefruit, before a harsh sting of yeast dregs covers that over. There's enough of a positive flavour for this to stay in my good books, just, but it's yet another one of those modern hazy IPAs that just isn't fully up to scratch. There's too much murk interfering with the hops here, and that's far from unusual.

The end of part one is approaching so let's fire the afterburners and try some more strong stuff. A double IPA next: Double Mosaic Daydream from New York's Other Half. This one is 8.5% ABV and a bright shade of orangey yellow. It wasn't an instant win: Mosaic's unfortunate caraway tendency is pronounced but not dominant, and that took some of the shine off for me. There's a bit of a diesel burn here too. But, in the plus column, there's a fresh zing of lime and indulgently juicy guava. Tropical fun brings with it tropical heat in this; a beer where one must concentrate on the good aspects and try to ignore the bad ones.

Finally for today, my standout beer of the festival: Anything & Everything & Nothing At All. Where to start? It's an imperial stout given 18 months of ageing in vessels described as "cinnamon vanilla whiskey barrels". Now, I don't know what "cinnamon vanilla whiskey" is. I don't know why you'd wreck a whiskey and then waste barrel space maturing it, but there you go. What I do know is that the barrels did a fantastic job on this beer. The cinnamon is present, but in a subtle, ghostly way: hovering in the background of the sweet coffee/chocolate stout, for both the aroma and taste. 16% ABV means it's plenty warming, but superbly mellow with that; just boozy enough. A burst of raisin-like ruby port or Málaga wine finishes it off. And all of these elements are beautifully integrated, flowing together and bouncing off each other in a whirling dance of flavours, yet not forced or busy or any way difficult. Were it not for the ABV and the two and a half hours still to go, I'd have had more of this.

What went on during those final 150 minutes will be in the next post, for as long as I can still read my writing.