Monstrous beasts

I've built up something of a backlog of Wicklow Wolf beers over the last few months. That's partly down to the sort of beers they've been producing, going in for strong and dark in a big way. I love it, but finding an occasion to make time for that kind of thing is tricky. I got round to them eventually, however, and here's what I found.

A tiddler starts us off, namely Apex Nobó, yet another variation on their Apex oatmeal stout. This one has added cocoa and coconut and is the lightest of today's set at 5.5% ABV. Not that it looks weak: it pours densely and is topped by a head the colour of milky coffee. The coconut is apparent in the aroma where it sits next to the promise of a green vegetal hop bitterness. It seems this will be a beer of contrasts. Coconut dominates the flavour too, arriving in at the very front and spreading oleaginously across the palate from there. The stout character suffers under its ministrations. Yes it has the oatmeal creamy texture, but there's no roast, and I didn't get much chocolate either. The promised hop tang appears only briefly at the end. I've said before that none of these variants have improved on the original and this is no exception. If you live for coconut in stout this will provide full satisfaction; me, I was too bothered about the good flavours being smothered by the gimmick.

Guardian of the Galaxy black double IPA was one of the brewery's best offerings last year. Now we learn that, together with DOT, they aged a portion of it in rum barrels and stole a name from a different science fiction franchise to create Hitchhiker's Guide. This is badged as a "dark ale" rather than any sort of IPA, so I assume the hop side has taken a dive. It looks slightly paler too: a cola brown or red rather than black. The aroma is very spirituous, with a touch of the fusel effect I often detect in rum and rum-flavoured things. Although it's a whopping 11.6% ABV, the texture is surprisingly light and there's not much of a booze kick. In fact the flavour is quite muted in general. Yes it's rummy. I've come to regard rum as the raspberry of spirits: when added to beer it tends to dominate everything. Here's it's subtle and pleasant: bringing a dash of vanilla and molasses, but nothing severe. It sits on a gentle base of milk chocolate and runny caramel. My only issue is that something this strong and convoluted should be more complex. Time seems to have smoothed out the multifaceted character that made the original so excellent. You're left with something extremely elegant, but running the risk of seeming bland with it.

The pale one in the set is the deep ochre Locavore Autumn 2021. The Locavore project began as a single annual beer using the brewery's own hops. For this barley wine, not only are the hops their own but the barley is too and, amazingly, the whiskey barrels it was aged in were made from Wicklow-grown oak. Now that's commitment to the bit. The end result is a 13.5% ABV whopper, so viscous it pours like it's been nitrogenated, a surge of fine bubbles forming the thick head. It's smells a little sickly-sweet, ripe forest berries on sappy young wood. The mouthfeel is as thick and oily as expected, and this helps create a kind of coconut greasiness in the foretaste. Blackberry and strawberry follow, before it turns bitter in the finish -- an almost Saaz-like grassiness. The barrel's contribution is slight, adding nothing more than a spicy seasoning and letting the malt do the talking, which is as it should be. Honey and dessert wine are mentioned on the blurb and I fully concur with that. It's a sticky sipper but still a superb interpretation of barley wine in the style of the classic American versions. This is very impressive stuff, even regardless of the all-local conceit. I would love to see it added to the brewery's annual roster.

That brings us back to Apex. The Imperial Four Bean version reviewed in here last year has been given the bourbon barrel treatment to become Bourbon Barrel Aged Imperial Four Bean Apex. That boosts its ABV from 9.5% to 12.7%. There's still no mistaking the tonka, however, its cinnamonesque spicing in full control of the aroma. As with the original version there's not much else going on in the flavour: a hint of coffee, a dusting of chocolate powder and a small squirt of vanilla and that's your lot. It doesn't taste beefed up or boozed out by the bourbon. While the barrel ageing of the previous beer added a subtle complexity, here they may as well not have bothered. It's just too strongly flavoured to get the benefit. If it's to be brewed again the tonka needs to be dialled right back, or removed. Three beans is plenty. Don't get me wrong, this is still a lovely, soft and warming imperial stout with a comforting sweetness that's not overdone. 

All this, and new vintages of the Locavore winter stout and the iconic Pointy Shoes imperial stout too. I don't know if Wicklow Wolf exports much of its product but they make fantastic examples of what Irish microbrewers are doing. It deserves recognition.

What they do to stout

It's a golden age for drinkers who like their stout with a little something extra in it. Everyone seems to be at it, and none more so than Wicklow Wolf. Their enthusiasm has even leached across to other breweries, as we'll see with today's pair of review candidates. 

Back in 2018, before Wicklow Wolf became the beast it is today, they brewed a coffee porter for their local roastery Java Republic. It was a triumph, and I was pleased to see the band back together for the latest in the hacked Apex series. Apex Espresso is based on their excellent core-range extra stout, with 6.5% ABV. An oily roast aroma starts us off: concentrated and sweet, reminding me of beans burning on Sambuca. It's gentler to taste. The coffee is largely in the finish, oily again and creating a long and slick aftertaste. Up front it's mostly classic Apex, big on roast of the grain variety with a pronounced green vegetal hopping. There's a creamy lactic side as well. As usual I don't think the "enhancing" of Apex enhanced it particularly, but nor did it ruin it. This is another high-end collaboration between the brewer and the coffee merchant.

The collaboration continues at Lough Gill, this time with Wicklow Wolf as the guest. The result is an "imperial pastry stout" with salted caramel and Oreos called, with more of a straight face than it deserves, Ocean of Storms. It smells of all the pastry: jam donuts, custard tarts and, yes, gooey chocolate biscuits. The palate gets treated to an extreme sugar rush, largely chocolate, but with a mushed mass of other candy, perfume and syrup goings-on. This is the other extreme from Apex Espresso: overdone, overblown, and while not actively horrible, hard going for this drinker at least. You need to be in the mood for something very silly, and the branding is inappropriately serious. I'm sure there's an audience for this, and it's convincingly Omnipollish, but it tired me out before I was a quarter of the way through.

As a grumpy old geezer, I prefer my big stouts, by and large, without the add-ons. Ocean of Storms is a headline example of how it goes wrong. I don't mind the occasional bit of mucking about à la Apex Espresso, and I'll readily accept chilli as an alternative or additional addition. That's about the height of it, though. If you want my advice on how to jazz up your stout, try hops.

On the reintroduction of wolves

There were no half measures in the relaunch that Wicklow Wolf just undertook. It centred around the big and shiny new brewery in Newtownmountkennedy, but also included a brand refresh, a format switch from bottles to cans, and a raft of new beers. Sessioners Elevation and Eden survived the update, while Arcadia has been rejigged from warm-fermenting blonde to fully fledged lager. The IPA, porter and red, however, have been completely replaced, and in this post I'm looking at the new starting line-up, plus a few specials.

Wildfire is the brewery's new take on red ale, or possibly amber, given that it's officially "hoppy". It's quite a dark take, showing only faint red tints through the garnet. This is replacing their Sorachi Red and I get a definite bang of pithy coconut Sorachi Ace right in the middle of the flavour. Around it it's a bit thin, the texture watery and the flavour sharp. The malt side of the equation is understated: no toffee or caramel here; not much more substance than you'd find in a cup of strong tea. This feels tokenistic: we have to have a red; let's do Smithwicks with a more interesting hop. It'll float many a boat I'm sure, but not mine.

The centrepiece IPA is named after another extinct creature: Mammoth. Wicklow Wolf's distant roots are in Colorado, hence their launch with their original 6.3% ABV IPA. That's crazy strong for an Irish IPA so here they've brought it down to... 6.2%. It's not that different, really: a big hit of grapefruit and orange pith; a malt weight which exists solely to propel the hops. There's a slight metallic tang, but setting that aside it's very clean, delivering the hard 'n' hoppy flavours any '90s kid will lap up. With modern IPA splintering into a million variants, not all of them worth drinking, it's good that there's still a bitter hoppy core present and visible.

It doesn't really make sense to think of Apex as a replacement for Black Perle Porter, but it is the only black beer in the line-up. It's an oatmeal stout at a big 6.5% ABV and plays up to that from the moment the can opens. The pitch-black beer pours out thickly and slowly, forming lots of nicotine-coloured foam. It smells like a turf fire on a cold night: acrid yet somehow comforting, a mix of bitter herbs and burnt toast. The bitterness is intense from the first sip, giving it an almost grassy kick. When this fades there's strong coffee, a tang of tobacco and a light spritz of rosewater. These are all classic, stouty, stout flavours, not quite balanced but skewed towards a very grown-up bitterness. I really enjoyed the effect, and would quite happily have everything ramped up a level or two higher, but I know that wouldn't be to everyone's taste. Recently I wrote how much I enjoyed the straightforward stylings of Lineman's Astral Grains, well here's another very much in that vein.

The sequence hits the crescendo with Pointy Shoes, a bourbon barrel imperial stout. I only just noticed that the branding is still the old one. Well, if you're going to go out, go out on 12.5% ABV. Despite the strength it's very easy going, light on the alcohol warmth and with elements of coffee, coconut, vanilla and churro sauce. With my imperial stout scorecard out I'd say it lacks bitterness, the sort found in Apex, but as a smoothed out barrel-aged take it's up there with the best.

Berliner weisse next, and I think Vice Vice Baby may be the first I tried from the new brewery, back in early October. It's strangely clear for the style: another pure gold glassful. It's not any way sour either. I get a dry wholegrain crispness but that's as close to the style as it comes. There's a briny, sweaty musk and a bizarre sugarpill sweetness. I imagine this is what you'd end up with if you forgot to add the souring culture to a straight-up Berliner weisse, though I'm sure that's not what happened. The end result is a clean and thin beer, screaming out for a tartness which it just hasn't been given.

I was privileged to have visited the Wicklow Wolf hop farm back in the summer. They've been turning out the Locavore series from there this last few years: an annual all-Irish beer (or two) in a spread of styles. Saisons, blondes and pale ales have all lent themselves to the muted tones of Irish-grown hops, but this year they've gone dark: Locavore 2019 is badged as a dry Irish stout. Well, it is and it isn't. For one thing the ABV is up at 5.5%. For another, the flavour is beautifully complex, bringing rosewater, cocoa, tar and pipe tobacco. It's a lot more complex than the norm. I find it hard to believe that the hop character here was grown in Leinster but it really forms a centrepiece to this. We're far from everyone else's idea of Irish stout: this is closer to the top end of London porter. Maybe it's time we reclaimed it.

Last of the string is Dawn of the Red, an imperial red ale aged in bourbon barrels. It comes out at 9.4% ABV and smelling all of that: big on the oak, coconut and red liquorice ropes. The texture is heavy and that's fully part of what it does; the oak vanillins spread quickly to the back of the mouth from the first sip onwards. Though the wood is sharp, verging on harsh, there's a smooth and balanced aspect, brought by the malt. A lot of work has gone in to making this beer taste like this. I like the end result: all the malt and all those bourbon barrels. If super-strong barrel aged red is your schtick, here's 440ml of it.

Do one thing and do it well is very much not the Wicklow Wolf motto, if these early offerings are anything to go by. In particular, the brewery seems to have found a new knack for stout. Long may that continue.

Capital scoops

If you can go the whole taxi ride from Ronald Reagan airport to downtown Washington DC without the theme from House of Cards playing in your head you have better self-control than me. The American capital was the third and final stop on my autumn tour of the USA, and it was much more about the museums and monuments than the beer. The sights are conveniently clustered along the National Mall making it very easy to hop from one to the next. The downside is that the planners haven't allowed for the normal functions of a city -- bars, restaurants and whatnot -- in between. So beering in DC tended to be a separate activity at the end of the day, rather than interspersed as I'd prefer.

Our accommodation for the couple of nights was placed in between the touristy and governmental bit in the south of the city and a good eating and drinking quarter further north. My top find was The Logan Tavern, the sort of good quality, good value neighbourhood restaurant that I'd hoped to find a lot of in America but turned out to be in short supply wherever I went. We ate here twice, affording the opportunity to get properly acquainted with its beer list.

The first beer I ordered wasn't a new tick: Northern Lights IPA by Virginia brewery Starr Hill had showed up at the 2010 Great British Beer Festival. It was much better on keg and closer to the source: still pretty full-on with the brassy bitterness but with an added peachy complexity that improves it massively.

DC Brau is a well-established local outfit, and the first of theirs I tasted was called Citizen, a 7% ABV Belgian-style pale ale. It's hazy orange and has a marmalade aroma, mixing bitter jaffa peel with old-world spices. There's a nicely smooth texture and it incorporates lots of very Belgian fruity esters, though does get a little overly sweet and boozy as it goes along. A smidge more balancing hops would be good, I reckon.

I thought I was in for another sticky orange experience with Duckpin Pale Ale. It certainly smelled heavy and cloying, despite being only 5.5% ABV. But the flavour and texture both proved to be a surprise: it's lightly effervescent with a solid hop bitterness behind the citrus high notes. A really well-executed pale ale that lets you think you're drinking something much stronger.

And a weissbier to finish: Feed the Monkey from Jailbreak Brewing, in Maryland. This presents like a witbier, being a hazy pale yellow, and tastes like one too: a sharp squirt of lemon zest that's very out of keeping for a German-style hefeweizen. The other bit of complexity is a waft of diesel which suggests to me beer that's still a bit green. The lack of weissbier smoothness and roundness is probably the biggest let down, especially since it should be plenty strong enough at 5.6% ABV. As a beer it's just about OK but it's strange for a style spec as straightforward as this to be completely missed by the brewer in charge.

Just around the corner from The Logan is Washington's most famous craft beer bar: Church Key. This is a roomy first-floor attic above the Birch & Barley restaurant, owned by the same people and with which it shares its very substantial beer menu.

L: Grapefruit Sculpin; R: Bell's Brett

Trusty old Bell's of Kalamzaoo was the first brewery on the menu to catch my eye and I ordered their Brett Berliner Weisse. It's an ugly beast, arriving murky, headless and flat. The farmyard funk is right up front and sets the tone for the rest of the beer; an acidic tartness reduced to just a quick flash across the palate before it all tails off into watery silence. I've no problem with interesting flavour additions to Berliner weisse but this one just wasn't interesting enough; and may even have been a waste of a decent base beer. Bring back the fruit syrup.

Herself picked Ballast Point's iconic Grapefruit Sculpin. I wasn't a big fan of the original and this isn't much of an improvement. The real grapefruit bitterness does help offset the massive toffee rather better but everything that's wrong with Sculpin is still wrong with this: too sticky, too harsh, too difficult to drink.

DC Brau's On The Wings Of Armageddon, conversely, does hot 'n' hoppy rather better. This double IPA is 9.2% ABV but despite the monstrous name and monstrous strength has a subtle flowery aroma while the flavour offers a big but gentle lemon zest quality, suggesting the use of Sorachi Ace hops. It's properly heavy and sippable, like a double IPA should be, but like the best ones it's not hot or cloying. Others may find it a bit of a lightweight but it sat perfectly with me.

All these beers at Church Key were really just filling in the time it took me to leaf through the cinderblock of a bottle list. I eventually settled on Stillwater's Cellar Door, a saison with added sage. It's a big 6.6% ABV and a hazy yellow colour. At the core it's a light and breezy lemon-and-straw farmhouse beer with just a mild oily lacing of sage. It offers a pleasant mix of sweet and savoury: on the one hand easy drinking but I couldn't help feeling that each part could do with being turned up a little. Nevertheless it's perfectly enjoyable and neither overly saisonish nor in any way gimmicky.

Also nearby there was a branch of the Whole Foods supermarket chain which became a handy source of supplies for the apartment, including beer. First to pique my interest from the large selection here was Oak-Aged Noble Rot from Dogfish Head: I do like a bit of botrytis now and then. The base beer is a saison though it's a stonking 9% ABV, and I got the dry saison straw in the aroma, alongside the sweet white grapes. The flavours line-up in this fashion too, starting dry and grainy, then with a Shloer-like grape sweetness. Which is fine until the oak kicks in, big and nasty, turning the whole thing into a 1980s Chardonnay experience. As it warms, the alcohol becomes more pronounced and by the end I was tasting Calvados and lamp oil. This beer needs some dialling back: the concept is sound, but there's so much concept going on it interferes with the quality.

I bought a six-pack of Escape to Colorado, an IPA by Epic brewing of Colorado, formerly of Utah, and not to be confused with the New Zealand operation of the same cliché name. It's 6.2% ABV, pale yellow and absolutely roaring with Mosaic. You know when you peel an onion and under the brown papery skin there's a layer of thick leathery green skin? It tastes exactly like that, with maybe a touch of dry and crispy fried onion as well. This is an extremely one-dimensional beer and it's not a good dimension. Bad Mosaic! Naughty Mosaic!

And a Californian to finish: Bear Republic's Apex double IPA. 8.25% ABV and a dense dark orange colour with lots of sediment left behind in the bomber bottle. From the first sip I was wondering how long this had been sitting refrigerated on a shelf in Whole Foods. I felt entitled to at least some hop character but this is all hot toffee and caramel with just a sharp bitter tang on the finish. There's no charm or balance to it, which does not strike me as the usual way things are done at Bear Republic. Them's the $8 breaks, I guess.

That's some good scooping value we got out of two pubs and a supermarket. It's kinda nice not to be doing long pub crawls every evening for a change. On Wednesday I'll take a look at a couple of DC brewpubs.