Passing sweeps

Dropping into bars and offies on spec in search of beers new and interesting is a fairly regular part of my drinking life, particularly when left to my own devices.

One such wandering into the beer section of SuperValu recently turned up a bottle of Redemption IPA, the first of the style from the generally quite safe Kildare-based brewery Kelly's Mountain. The ABV is certainly safe, a very approachable 4.8%. It poured beautiful: the flawless clear gold of fine Czech lager with a pure white head whose loose bubbles showed that the carbonation was at just the low level I like. Sure enough there's a lively sparkle to it but no more fizz than it strictly needs. According to the label it's dry-hopped with Chinook and Admiral, promising "magnificent hop aromas balanced with a high bitterness" but it had already started to unravel even before I looked for the brewer's description. The aroma is all malt and sweet almost to the point of sickliness, a golden syrup note bringing thoughts of pilsner to mind again. But definitely no hops to speak of. And it's sweet again to taste: cloying brown sugar and a dirty great smear of diacetyl, though finishing quickly and leaving just a lightly acidic bitterness in the back of the palate. Doubtless the brewer had good intentions but something has let them down: the kit, the recipe, the method. It's not a bad beer; it will have fans, but it doesn't deliver on the promise of the label. Redemption is very much pending.

Work sent me on a rare foray into the south-eastern quarter of Dublin recently and I stuck my head into The Square Ball on the way home. Brewtonic's new porter was on: 13 Seconds, another one brewed at Rascal's to Rossa's recipe and commemorating a recent victory of Dublin's top kicky-punchy man Conor McGregor. It's 5% ABV and foamed a lot as it poured, staying fizzy as I drank my pint, though that didn't take long. The first impression on tasting is a slightly ashen roasted grain quality, followed quickly by a balancing velvety milk chocolate effect and seasoned with gunpowder spices of the sort I normally find adding complexity to dark beers on cask, so it was nice to find them in this cold fizzy keg. Last week's Alltech beer festival, of which more anon, provided the opportunity to try the cask version and it's as sumptuously smooth and creamy as I was expecting. But back to the keg, which finishes dry with a more serious metallic hop edge. It doesn't taste 5% and is very sessionable. I'd have happily stayed for another but there was another pub I wanted to drop by.

It was a specific beer that lured me to Alfie Byrne's, having already drawn a blank at its big baby sister The Gasworks. Kompass is described by Galway Bay Brewery as a "hopfendunkel" -- the first I've come across. It's 8.2% ABV and colourwise is, well, purple when put in front of a candle, the pub's main and rather inadequate source of light. I assume it's a dark red colour where it's bright enough to see. A haze was visible too, which is fair enough because the aroma leaves no doubt that we're in weizen territory: there's a massive hit of boozy bananas in the aroma, like Aventinus with the volume up. The texture is appropriately smooth and there's lots more luxury bananas and a darkly decadent rum baba flavour with lighter notes of vanilla ice cream. But then the special effects kick in: a sharply acidic, palate-scrubbing, green hop bitterness that's completely out of place. On each mouthful it's not noticeable at first but then jumps in, loudly and unbidden. The end result is a beer which tastes like an ill-advised blend of a weizenbock and a harsh IPA. I'd like to try this dunkel without so much hopfen, thank you.

That was only a couple of weeks ago but the Kompass sign was already coming down from the blackboard in The Beer Market when I called in last Thursday, to be replaced by yet another new Galway Bay beer: 303. There's lots to conjure with in the description: a "tart pale ale with Azacca hops", but it's really quite a simple affair. It's pitched at a sessionable strength and sessionable price: 3.5% ABV and €4.50 a pint respectively, presenting a murky orange but happily not yeast-bitten (a second pint, in Alfie's on Saturday, was perfectly clear). There's not much by way of aroma: a lightly sour acidity and no more than a suggestion of hops, but the hops are front and centre in the flavour. It tastes bright and fresh with a gorgeous rounded, juicy tangerine foretaste, then a slightly sharper pineapple note in behind, but tropical through and through. While a salty sour tang is certainly present, it's not a defining feature and serves only to aid drinkability. Those who are "into sours" probably won't find much to engage them here. On the downside I think I got a flash of stale oxidation on the very edge of the flavour and, unsurprisingly, the texture is rather watery which starts to get a bit irritating towards the end, but these are teeny tiny quibbles. 303 is a nice sidestep from both Heathen and Via Maris, and like both of them it's a beer I will happily drink, in quantity, until it runs out. I hope it lasts long enough for al fresco consumption.

What Arthur did next

The Guinness glasnost initiative has gathered pace over the last year and a bit, from a handful of nosy parkers being shown round the pilot brewery last September to now: the opening of a dedicated bar for serving beers directly from that brewery. Under the new dispensation it's possible to taste Guinness beer which bypasses the multitude of impedances that have, for decades if not centuries, separated the brewers' handiwork from the drinkers' mouths. New hire Jason Carroll, having previously been getting creative at Franciscan Well, is now tasked with brewing fun and exciting, and possibly even unGuinnessy, things, ten hectolitres at a time, for serving at The Open Gate. As he tells it, he has a free hand, access to all the technology and raw materials that Diageo commands and, I think crucially, is brewing at sale strength rather than high gravity. It's an exciting vista and when they invited me to one of their launch evenings to have a look and a taste and a chat, I jumped at it.

The Open Gate has its own entrance from James's Street at the western end of the old Guinness site. The bar is a cordoned off section on a lower level of the building, looking through at fermentation vessels and pipework, though the brewhouse itself is a level up, out of sight to visitors. Decor is minimal: schoolhouse-style distressed wood-and-steel furniture and vintage brewery signage whose authenticity I don't doubt. In keeping with how normal corporate rules don't apply in this space, there's no individual branding on the eight keg fonts: mainstream Guinness and Smithwick's beers are served, but without their tacky illuminated badges: they take their place on the blackboard with the small-batch stuff.

Imperial Dunkel Weisse and Nitro IPA

One intriguing initiative of The Open Gate is to serve those beers that are brewed across the street on the big-boy kit for export but aren't marketed in Ireland. I'm sold on that idea alone. So, first off, I got to taste the much-maligned Guinness Nitro IPA, currently bringing the same bafflement and dismay to the American palate that we Irish drinkers have been experiencing with nitrokeg Guinness for years. First impression, unsurprisingly, is that it's bland and creamy, like every other smoothflow ale. There's an unpleasantly artificial perfume sharpness at the front and a bizarre dry catch in the finish, and then it's gone, leaving no aftertaste. Ordinarily, I'd be happy to leave it at that and move on, but it was free, so I asked for another, and this time took a bit more time over it. There is a proper hop character in this, buried way down and only present when it has warmed a bit. But it's not the bitterness you'd expect in an IPA brewed for Americans; it's the spicy biscuit-laden flavour you'll find in dodgy brown English bitter, though at 5.8% ABV this beer is almost double the strength of one of those. It might be interesting to try it served on cask: I think those hops would get more of an outing. But to be honest it's probably best to leave it aside and pretend it never happened, like so many other Guinness brand extensions.

There were three in-house beers on offer, and I may have detected a bit of new-brewer nerves in them as all were strong and dark. It's hard to go wrong with strong and dark, right? The weakest, at 6.4% ABV, was a Milk Stout, considerably overclocked for the style, I think. It wasn't served on nitro, but was very cold so tasted quite plain to begin with. My first impression was that it was spot-on for this generally pedestrian style, but it woke up later, revealing a sharp carbonic bite and a heavy roast that vied for supremacy with the sweet lactose tang. It's a tough sort of beer to impress with, but I guess there wasn't anything wrong with it per se.

Pictured to the left of the Nitro IPA above, there, is Open Gate Brewery's "Imperial Dunkel Weisse". So not a doppelbock or a weizenbock, then? No. They used Guinness ale yeast for this, so a fully Germanic name didn't seem appropriate. It's 8.4% ABV though doesn't taste it, with the sticky caramel foretaste balanced nicely by a properly bitter finish. It's not Aventinus but it's definitely swerving in that direction: less chewy and with more of a burnt complexity. As an experimental brewpub beer, from any brewpub, it would get a bemused thumbs up before we move on to something else.

You can't be proper craft unless you're doing some barrel ageing, and The Open Gate has got hold of a Scottish whisky barrel from presumably somewhere else in the Diageo empire, though nobody seemed to know exactly which distillery it had come from. They've brewed a dark strong ale and it had been in the cask for about two weeks when we got to it, the ABV hitting 7.4% and rising -- a special arrangement had to be put in place with the resident Revenue official and the cask remained in bond with just the spigot poking cheekily through the wire into the bar. This Barrel Beer wafts vanilla in a big way from the aroma but tastes very harshly woody, yet oddly not of whisky. There's a chewy caramel centre but not nearly enough to balance it. This guy needs bunged up and left somewhere for at least six months to mellow, I reckon. It tastes very much like a first effort.

edited to add: I tasted this again three weeks later and it was much improved: far rounder and smoother than previously, though with a bit of an appley tang.

We were all sent home with a bottle of 6.4% ABV Strong Ale which I'm guessing (though am open to correction) is the base beer that went into the whisky cask (edit: confirmed, it is). It's dark red and smells strangely rubbery: an odd mix of forest fruits and tyre fire. It's rich and heavy; toffee and caramel at the front but immediately overtaken by an almost tart bitterness with a tang of metallic molasses. This is not a nice beer; it's a serious, grown-up and old fashioned one. But that just makes it a bit of a chore to drink. I can see why you'd want to smooth out the edges in a barrel, if that is indeed what they've done.

edited to add: the old-fashioned quality shouldn't be surprising as this is a tweaked version of the Smithwick's Barley Wine recipe, last brewed at the Macardle-Moore brewery before it was closed by Diageo in 2000. It's stronger than SBW's 5.5% ABV and uses Galaxy hops which of course would have been unheard of.

So, while I'm impressed at the concept, the set-up and the scenery at The Open Gate, I remain to be impressed by the beer. On the night, I reverted to Foreign Extra Stout fairly soonish: it was still the best beer present. I hope they don't lose track of the beer as the point of the exercise. I'm also a little dismayed at the access arrangements: they're limited to opening for five hours on just Thursday and Friday evenings, and as a result, you have to book. That's fine for beer tourists looking for an alternative to the showy soullessness of The Storehouse, but I can't see Dubliners making much use of it like that. I do hope a practical solution to allow for walk-ins can be found at some stage. A new beer is promised every fortnight and it would be nice if trying it didn't mean buying a €6 advance ticket for a flight that includes it.

That said, something pale and hoppy would be good next. Is there spare sack of Mosaic lying around?

Gebraut in Amerika

Blumenau -- pic from Wikimedia Commons

We had a visitor from Brazil at the monthly Beoir homebrewers' meeting in the Bull & Castle a couple of weeks ago (hi Tiago!). Though not a brewer himself, he brought us a few bottles of one of his favourites from back home: Eisenbahn Weizenbock. The brewery is based in Blumenau, a little piece of Germany in southern Brazil, and the output is appropriately Teutonic. The weizenbock certainly hits all the dark caramelised banana notes you'd expect from the style, though it lacks the spicy finesse found in top-drawer strong and dark wheat beers like Aventinus. One could get cross that it's another one of those by-the-book South American beers that shows little by way of creative brewing flair, but that would be churlish and ignores how tasty the contents of the glass actually are.

Meanwhile, on the Bull & Castle bar, a rotating tap had been given over to Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest. I had high hopes for this: a brewery as conscientious as Sierra Nevada wouldn't produce one of those awful sticky orange Oktoberfests that all the other American craft breweries do, would they? Sadly, they would: whatever demonic force compels them all to turn out these cloying horrors instead of something resembling clean German-style Oktoberfestbier was at work in the Chico brewhouse. Do people actually manage to get through this by the litre in the US? The thought is stomach-churning.

One nil to Brazil when the whistle went.

Wheat beat manifesto

It's wheat beers on The Session this month, a genre I find it hard to get excited about. Sure, I like the odd Schneider-Weisse or Aventinus, and I'm perfectly content holding a Hoegaarden, but generally speaking I don't go out of my way for wheat beer. It's more of a fallback thing.

In an effort to rekindle my interest, I decided to open something a bit special for this post: Hvedegoop, the "wheat wine" brewed as a collaboration between Three Floyds and Mikkeller. Something about the -goop suffix had me expecting dark beer, maybe along the lines of Haandbryggeriet's Dark Force wheat stout. Instead it's quite a pale cherrywood colour, with a short-lived skim of ivory foam on the surface.

The brewers' renowned love of C-hops is immediately apparent from the aroma on pouring: sticky nectarine fruitiness made extra potent by sweet caramel-candy notes from the malt backbone. That this is a strong sipper (10.4% ABV) is never in doubt.

One expects a certain soft mouthfeel from wheat beers but there's none of that here. Instead the gentle fizz and powerful-yet-subtle booze heat gives it a definite wine vibe, much more like an American barley wine. And that continues into the taste: big big hops, but balanced by lots of sticky malt -- I really can't find anything to indicate we're dealing with wheat malt here rather than plain old barley, and I doubt that any of the yeast strains most commonly used for wheat beers have been employed.

More than anything, it reminds me a lot of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, which brings me on to Mrs Beer Nut's observation. She liked it a lot, but reckons it needs another year or two of maturation to mellow and soften, just like Bigfoot does. Me, I liked the in-your-face double IPA kick and didn't find it remotely harsh or difficult, however I can't help but agree it would be really interesting to find out what happens to it after a couple of years.

As a strong-and-hoppy late-night sipper-to-share I rate Hvedegoop very highly. Whether there was any point in making it with wheat rather than all barley, however, I really couldn't say. But if anyone's using this Session to argue that wheat beers are intrinsically dull or samey, here's the killer argument against.

Manifestoval

It's beer festivals for The Session this month, and I'm pretty much regurgitating points from a discussion I had a while ago on maeib's blog. He was wondering about the minimum number of beers an event needed to be selling to qualify as a beer festival. I brought up my observation regarding Oktoberfest in Munich: it's not really a beer festival; it's a festival of being drunk. Stonch wasn't having any of this, but I stand by my taxonomy (I'm a librarian -- it's what we do). Oktoberfest is a festival, for sure, in a big big way. But they could be serving vodka or cava in those tents, instead of six specific and unchanging beers, and the whole thing wouldn't be much different. Though there might be more women.

Conversely, when a pub buys in a large variety of beers, it will often put up posters claiming this is a "festival", even though it's business as usual as far as the atmosphere is concerned. I've a few examples of this on here, like the Porterhouse's Belgian "festival" last summer. Beer yes. Festival no.

So, to have a real beer festival you must have both the emphasis on the beer and a proper festive feel to it. In my opinion, the latter cannot be achieved unless the event is held somewhere people can't normally drink. If you're going to have it in a pub you must at least adapt or expand the premises in some way, as the Franciscan Well do when their Easterfest tent (right) goes up in the yard. But the most festive festivals are the ones held somewhere else entirely, since nothing kills off atmosphere faster than one of the locals grumbling at the bar about blow-ins. CAMRA, at least in east London and Belfast, seem to favour dull exhibition space. The lack of music at Pig's Ear almost has me questioning its festiveness, but it still managed to feel properly festivalish. At least the lonely grumblers there had made an effort to leave their usual boozers.

If I had to pick a favourite out of the half dozen or so festival and festival-like events I've been at in the last twelve months, the prize goes to Hilden. It didn't have the beer selection of CAMRA NI's gig, nor the wonderful local emphasis of the Franciscan Well, but it had damn good beer, and most importantly it had a brewery yard full of people -- families, mostly -- just having a fun day out. With top-notch beer. And even if not every grown-up was drinking the good stuff, this infectious enjoyment is what really makes a beer festival so much better than than, say, simply going to a pub with a great range of beers.

That said, family fun is all well and good, but at the same time there was no way I was going to miss The Big One: September's 2000-beer, three-day tickfest in Copenhagen. Anyone else out there going?

Warning: Tenuous theme linkage ahead

Of course, my drinking life is one big beer festival -- an endless amble along the global bar, perusing the pumpclips and labels, picking up samples here and there, and doing my damnedest to make the best use of the time and capacity I have available.

Capacity is a big practical issue where festivals are concerned. I drew a discreet veil over just how ratted I was when I rolled out of the King's Hall last November after inadvertantly completing the strong beer set. So just two strong beers this session.

First up is Vitus, the weizenbock from Weihenstephaner. The only other weizenbock I know is the mighty Aventinus, one of my all-time favourites. I was expecting something along the same lines so was shocked by the bright yellow beer that poured forth. I should really have known that Aventinus is no more typical of the weizenbock style than Schneider is of weissbier. I braced myself for the onslaught of cloying sugariness that so often arrives with strong and pale beers. But no, I got something else instead. The 7.7% alcohol adds a warmth to the flavour, quite reminiscent of the Scheider-Brooklyner Hopfen Weisse I had back in April. A gentle layer of weissbier clove notes adds to the warmth even further, and the result is a beer you could easily curl up with. I'm enjoying it with some strong cheddar which cuts through the spice beautifully. It has been observed that beer festivals and cheese festivals belong together. Vitus and vintage cheddar would make a great headlining act.

And speaking of vintage... The second offering in my home festival of strong beers comes from down under: Cooper's Vintage Ale. I'm not sure what the label, depicting a man being savaged in the face by a badger, says about the product. It could be some kind of health warning about the beer's tendency to attract badgers. Seems unlikely, but I'm going inside the house anyway, just in case.

It pours a red amber which, frankly, looks a bit watery to me, despite the vast amount of dense sediment in there. The head doesn't hang around long, but there's a fairly strong malty aroma which is carried through into the flavour. It's quite barleywine-ish, with rich and smoky flavours as well as a touch of toffee and maybe even damsons as well. I can't help but be distracted by the thinness, though, which is worsened by an inappropriately heavy fizz. It could well be that the beer's still a bit green, being a mere 2006 vintage -- the only beer I've ever seen with a "best after" date stamped on it.

Alan reviewed it recently, but I think he might be better left alone today. He'd enjoy Hilden, I'd say. Bring the wains.

Last beer blues

Oktoberfest in the Bull & Castle wrapped up last night. I enjoyed a variety of different beers during the evening and was planning on finishing with something dark and malty -- Aventinus or Kwak were particularly in mind. However, at the last minute, and possessed by a sudden need for novelty, I ended up opting for a Samuel Adams Octoberfest. I was sadly disappointed. This rather thick, flat beer pours a shocking reddish colour. It's certainly sweet, but not at all in the way a märzen should be. Instead, it has the corny-syrupy cloying sweetness of a high-alcohol tramps' brew.

I really wish I'd had that Aventinus now...

Sedimental journey

I hadn't intended for my weekend's drinking to have a theme, it just turned out that way.

On the roster were three beers I'd been meaning to try for ages but hadn't got round to, and all with their gritty little secrets.

First up was Hen's Tooth. I'm a big fan of Old Speckled Hen, so I thought it only just to give the reserve beer a go. I wasn't disappointed: it's incredibly smooth and delicately flavoured, very similar to the best pints of draught cask ale I've had in Britain. And it has a hefty 6.5% strength, so much more satisfying than the 3-4.5% that ales tend to hover around. And surprisingly, the sediment didn't get in the way. I did my best to keep it out of the glass, but some of it ended up suspended in my pint. Didn't affect the flavour though, or at least not unpleasantly.

Continuing on the enhanced editions theme, I tried a bottle of Aventinus Eisbock. Schneider Weisse is my favourite German beer, and their Aventinus is great too, so I figured the concentrated Aventinus was definitely worth a go, despite the €5.50 price tag. No strength on the label was the first black mark. I read, however, that it's around 12%. This is the same as Bush, Belgium's strongest beer, and the taste was similar too: ultra-heavy and very cloying. After a few sips I managed to get into it, but it's hard, chewy work. A 330ml bottle and a considerable quantity of sediment meant that at least the experience was curtailed slightly. This stuff is an acquired taste for sure, and given the price I'm not sure it's wholly worth the effort.

Last up was a beer I've seen many times but hadn't considered buying because it looks so unassuming: Cooper's Sparkling Ale. Australian beer for me is limited to Toohey's Extra Dry and Carlton Cold, and even then only when I'm actually in Australia and have limited choice (though I do recall a great Carlton Cold drinks promtion in an Irish bar in Hong Kong some years back). Recently while trawling the Internet for beer suggestions I happened across a review of Cooper's Sparkling that made enormous claims for it -- a true connoisseur's beer, a proper ale from a country where beer terminology is badly abused. However, while it does stand above its compatriots, this stuff just can't cut it in a European context. The taste just isn't bold enough, leaving it watery and having an annoying fine sediment. I can completely understand why one would turn to this if VB or Toohey's New was your only other option, but otherwise I don't get it. One for the ex-pats only, methinks.