A mountain to climb

Today's beers are from the unlikely brewery at the Caisleáin Óir Hotel in western Donegal: Errigal. While on-premises drinking is presumably the main goal, they also bottle and distribute as far as a few select off licences in Dublin. These came from Blackrock Cellar.

GRMA (Irish for "thx"), is a session, sorry, seisiún pale ale, and very seisiún indeed at only 3.5% ABV. It's pretty damn pale too, a wan straw shade with a dusting of unhelpful haze. It smells sweet, and a little syrupy, like a cheap strong lager. If they used any aroma hops, they didn't make it across to the east coast. It's as light as one would expect, and unmistakably watery. Plenty of fizz means it's cleansing and refreshing when cold. There is no hop flavour to speak of, leaving it with an air of pale mild or cream ale, styles I've never particularly cared for. That includes the same sickly syrup as found in the aroma, and a buttery slickness. This last element is why it wouldn't work as a session beer for me: there's an unpleasant smack of diacetyl with every sip, and there's only so much of that I'll tolerate. This needs more hops. GRMA ach ní-RMA.

I had hoped that a bit of hops in that would would help make the weissbier which was to follow more palatable. Oh well. With Bán you don't get a big fluffy weissbier head, making me suspect immediately that they've skimped on the all-important carbonation. It looks a bit sad in the glass, a dusty rusty gold with less haze than the preceding pale ale. There's a passable amount of banana in the aroma, bringing us back towards the style spec, likewise the 5.5% ABV, but that's as close as it gets. Flatness is the first thing that comes through on the first sip: not just flat for a weissbier, but barely carbonated at all. Then there's more of that butterscotch or toffee from the previous beer. Maybe it's meant to be a house quirk, but it tastes like bad beer to me. The yeast-derived banana makes a reappearance in the finish, adding little positive to the whole experience.

For beers in two quite different styles, from completely different brewing heritages, these tasted worryingly similar. I didn't have Errigal marked as one of those rural Irish breweries that turns out beer which is sub-homebrew grade, but I got that vibe here. Now maybe they're designed for a market with less sophisticated and whingey palates, and maybe the proprietor is perfectly happy with the product. But I can't help but opine that nobody's interest is served by beer as poorly put together as these ones.

Gill trip

Prolific Sligo brewery Lough Gill has three for us today. I tend to associate their output most with fruited sour beers and amped-up pastry stouts, but they're only reverting to type with one of today's selection.

The latest in this year's slew of Irish witbiers is Bán. The name gives it an Irish twist but otherwise it's straight-down-the-line Belgian-style, with wheat, orange peel and coriander. So it goes with the medium-orange hazy appearance, though the aroma lays on the herbs a little more thickly than most of these. Same for the flavour, unsurprisingly, but before you even get to the oily coriander there's the very dry wheat husk to contend with. Witbier shouldn't taste rough but this does. There's a strong bitterness from the hops and no balancing zest or sweetness from the orange. The finish is slightly funky, with a saline sweaty quality. Maybe Hoegaarden has infantilised my palate for witbier, but this is an acquired taste which I was not prepared to try and acquire.

The brewery turned five years old recently, marking the occasion with a re-imagining of one of its original recipes, Thieving Bastards. Five Candles is paler than the precursor, and clearly labelled as an Extra Special Bitter -- I marked TB down originally because I wasn't sure while drinking it what it was meant to be. I'd like to think there would be no mistaking this one: it's a rich amber colour and mixes weighty caramel malt with distinctively English hops which are a little floral and a lot tangy. A serious waxy bitterness in the finish gives it an assertive personality: this is no bland brown bitter. 5% ABV is modest and it tastes bigger, with bags of comforting warmth. It's a very well-made example of ESB and it's nice to see the style represented on the off licence shelves locally. A cask version, now...

That's it for the solid, reliable, 20th century styles. Obviously there has to be some contemporary nonsense, and in fairness Lough Gill does contemporary nonsense better than most. Loconut is an imperial stout of 10.5% ABV with coconut, blueberries and vanilla. Blueberries tend to disappear into the background of beers but they were immediately apparent from the aroma of this one as it poured. They're still there when sniffing the glass, and the coconut too: fresh and greasy, and surprisingly complementary. On tasting... omg blueberries. All the blueberries. Too much blueberries? Quite possibly. It's very jammy and extremely sweet with it. I found myself searching for the stout side of the equation, finding a little chocolate, a tiny pinch of roast, but all of it buried under the mashed blueberries. I was disappointed at first: it's hard drinking; unsubtle, too sweet, and not properly beerlike. The saving grace is the aftertaste: there's a lovely afterglow of fruit-infused milk chocolate that makes the initial difficulties worth suffering through. This isn't Lough Gill's best work in the silly stout genre, but my main takeaway is that proper blueberry stout is possible. I have hope for the future.

Taken together, they're a pleasingly diverse bunch. The colours alone bring us on a journey.