Hans up

It was exciting to see a beer from Hanscraft landing in Ireland. The client brewer left a lasting impression from my last visit to Germany in 2014, for his Backbone Splitter IPA in particular. This one is a collaboration, of course, with Stone's satellite brewery in Berlin.

Quince-Essential is the name, a New England IPA with added quince, and including the inevitable childish snub to the Reinheitsgebot in the label copy. It looks New Englandy, an opaque orange colour. The aroma is vaguely fruity with nothing specific jumping out. It's 6.3% ABV and there's a heat which comes with that. Behind this it's fruity, all orange and lime cordial. My experience of quince doesn't go beyond jelly with cheese, but I don't think I can taste any of it here.

This fits the bill of a thick and juicy NEIPA. It doesn't do anything very interesting within the style, however, and certainly doesn't justify the sizeable price tag. I can't really complain, however: this beer is fine. Hans does better, though.

International flavour

I was excited to find Hanscraft exhibiting at the Stockholm Beer & Whisky Festival in September. This German beer brand crossed my path in Bamberg a few years ago and I was very impressed with the Backbone Splitter IPA. I hadn't had the chance to try anything else of theirs since, but here they had their own bar and several beers pouring. In theory, anyway: I suspect that Hans was as excited as I was and spent his days going around the stalls instead of manning his own. Eventually the Festival stationed one of its staff members there to do the serving.

To begin, the Single Hop Kellerpils brewed with Hallertau Blanc. It's a clear golden colour and has a bold and interesting flavour of honeydew melon with white pepper. That would be superb if it were allowed to stay there, but there's a building floral character too, starting out on lavender and violet but growing as it goes until it becomes like sticking your head in a medicine cabinet. This is almost excellent but I think the dependence on one hop lets it down.

The other Hanscraft I tried was Black Nizza Motor Øl , a 9% ABV imperial stout. Huge liquorice in this one, then lots of rich and bitter dark chocolate. Maybe it's the Germanic thing but I was strongly reminded of Baltic porter by the way it goes about its business: there's a similar sort of rich fullness while also staying clean and sharp. It gets creamier as it warms though never becomes sweet or heavy. Classy stuff.

Just one Czech beer passed my way: HopBit 13 from Medvěd. It's broadly a pilsner, brewed with a selection of typically Germanic hops from New Zealand. Fresh ones too, judging by the smell of it. There's a very full-on noble hop bitterness with only a slight twang of the plastic off flavour I often get in beers like this. Fortunately, that's gone completely by the time the best feature, the aftertaste, arrives bringing lovely long grassy meadow vapours. The carbonation is pleasingly low as well, so an all round quality offering.

Belgium next, and Wadesda #7, a saison produced by Brasserie de la Senne but with added lambic supplied by Cantillon. This should be special, and it is too. The aroma offers up a luscious ripe stonefruit juiciness while the flavour genuinely mixes the best of saison and lambic: succulent Sauvignon Blanc grapes and spicy nitric gunpowder. If the other beers in this experimental series are as good, it would be well worth exploring.

Curiosity led me to order a Duvel Single Fermented from their distributor's bar. This is a draught variant of the classic golden ale, taken out of the maturation process early and kegged when it's just 6.8% ABV. I guess it's answering a market demand for beer that is actually lighter and doesn't merely taste it, like Duvel does. After my recent Chouffe Soleil experience in Brussels I wasn't expecting much here, other than a watered-down version of Duvel. But it's beautiful! The peach and pineapple fruit is somehow fresher and brighter; the bittering hops sharp and invigorating. There's a much lower ester factor than is found in normal Duvel, and perhaps that's the secret: the other flavours have more room to manoeuvre. This really does offer everything that's great about the taste of Duvel in a lighter and more approachable package.

To Denmark next and there were a few from Warpigs in Copenhagen on one of the big bars. I couldn't resist Bad Pun IPA. It's a pale yellow west-coast-style one, though only 6.1% ABV and a little watery as a result. There's a tropical thing going on at the centre of the flavour but it's rather muted, like it's just the pith and fibrous matter of the fruits, rather than the juicy flesh. I could see what it was trying to be but it needs a flavour boost all round.

I'm throwing the last beer in with the Danes even though it's brewed by Carlsberg's Swedish outpost. Eriksberg is a ubiquitous macrolager and came my way at dinner on the Saturday. BrewDog had arranged for a meal in the festival restaurant which, despite being surrounded by many of the world's best beers that weekend, had the worst drink selection in the neighbourhood. It's typical of the in-house catering at large event venues, I guess. So anyway: a half litre of Eriksberg with my reindeer carpaccio. It's an amber colour and smooth and sweet. And that's about all there is to say about it. It's OK; maybe a little syrupy, but bland and inoffensive.

And that brings us neatly, at long last, to the Swedish beers, starting tomorrow.

Craftwork

That was a lot of lager and weissbier last week, eh? What about this wave of foreign styles that's destroying traditional German brewing and replacing it with the same sort of beer you get everywhere else these days? I could have told you before I left the house that no such thing is actually happening, but that's not to say that there aren't plenty of German breweries offering something different. You just need to put a bit of work in to find it.

One such outlet is Café Abseits in Bamberg. I mentioned it last week as the main place to find beer from the Weyermann maltery's pilot brewery. There's an impressive menu of other speciality beers as well. I'd spotted Weithaler Hoptimum Pale Ale on the menu of Hütt'n in Nuremberg but it was out of stock then. Happily here it was in Bamberg and it's a cracker. There's a classic lagery golden syrup malt base balancing a serious teeth-squeaking, jaw-pinching bitterness. The aroma is all pithy spritzy jaffa and the flavour blends in herbs and sandalwood spices. At €3 for a 33cl bottle in the pub I could see this being a regular beer for me if I didn't live 1,000 miles away.

Hamberg's Kreativbrauerei, meanwhile, have a 7.5% ABV IPA, single hopped with new high-alpha German variety Polaris. The brewery claims SHIPA Polaris has mint or menthol aromas but I didn't get that, just lots of weedy dank and perhaps a light apricot fruitiness. It's dark, rich and sweet, reminding me of BrewDog's 5am Saint in particular, and it got to be tough drinking after the first few mouthfuls. Not a candidate for my go-to German ale, then.

From Berlin comes Schoppe Bräu XPA, another strong dark one, this time using all American hops. Even though it was a few days past date, the aroma was still excellent, all orange sherbet. It was somewhat  lacking in flavour, however, just a mild kind of jaffa cake orange and chocolate thing and hardly any bitterness.

Top pick at Café Abseits was Backbone Splitter by Bavarian rockstar brewer Hans Müller, released on his Hanscraft label and described as a "West Coast IPA". Bet you didn't know Bavaria even had a west coast. 6.6% ABV, 60 IBUs and utilising Simcoe, Amarillo, Centennial and Horizon -- all helpfully set out on the label. There's a stylistically spot-on aroma of grapefruit and sharper pine resin while the flavour is perfectly balanced between refreshing mandarin juice and a tougher, chewier oiliness, sprinkled generously with jasmine perfume. Beautifully put together, all-in-all.

The last leg of the journey brought us to Munich where, as well as a few old favourites, top of my hitlist was the new Camba Bavaria pub Tap House. In keeping with modern craft beer bar chic this place is kitted out in Nordic industrial style, all rough-hewn wood, riveted metal and concrete. A long bar with 40 numbered taps leads up a large bottle fridge at the top of the room. The draft selection was mostly German, with a few token Belgian and American offerings. And, of course, lots of beer from Camba Bavaria itself. To put even more distance between themselves and local custom, most beers arrive in either an American shaker pint or a teku-esque stemmed glass.

The only guest German beer I drank was Ratsherrn Pale Ale, a 5.6% ABV job with a vaguely weedy aroma and not much hop action in the flavour either: some orange barley candy fruit flavour but  it's otherwise dominated by sweet malt. Camba IPA is pictured next to it, a dark red-gold colour and smelling of sherbet and sweat. It's another malt-forward one, but this time the sweetness is better balanced by spicy resinous incense and candied citrus fruit. It's a little bit Christmassy, with touches of lemon drizzle cake, but good fun to drink.

I probably should have realised that Camba Amber Ale was going to be even sweeter. It even smells sticky and toffee dominates the flavour, with just a tiny bit of hop complexity, adding notes of red apple and strawberry for something closer to an Irish red than an amber ale.

Matters improved when I moved on to Camba Saison, all of 8% ABV but hiding that extremely well. It's a clear gold colour and has a lovely funky sour aroma. The flavour mixes wheaty grain and banana esters with a sour candy green-apple chew kind of oddness. Deliciously stimulating, if somewhat different to your typical saison.

Staying funky, Camba Nelson Weisse is a pale wheat beer that smells of grape must and has a beautiful rounded white wine flavour, with notes of cantaloupe, kiwi and flint. Traditional weissbier flavours are almost absent but I didn't really miss them, though the base beer provides a great full-bodied base for the hops. I'm glad they serve this by the half litre.

Two strong and dark ones to finish. Camba Imperial Stout is a huge 9.8% ABV with a very dry, burnt aroma plus traces of coffee. It tastes harshly phenolic in a marker pen sort of way with just a trace of dark chocolate. It's a beer that demands much of the drinker but has little to offer in return.

And then there was Camba Imperial Black IPA (aka Black Shark). It's the same inky black as the stout and 8.5% ABV. The aroma mixes thick molasses with piquant orange sherbet and the texture is every bit as heavy as the smell suggests. I was really not prepared for the taste: a palate-shaking blast of lavender, rosewater, tar and green cabbage, finishing with a waft of well-hopped booze up the back of the nose. It's an intense and very grown up beer: you'd need to like big bitterness without so much of the hoppy fruit. It turns out I do. Who knew?

Obviously the new wave of foreign-influenced German beers are a mixed bunch, as you would expect. But there's plenty of absolute gold in there. Long live diversity!