The seven eleven

DOT Brew celebrated seven years in the brewing business in May with a tap takeover at Against the Grain. Seven beers were on offer, of course, of which five were new to me. Flights of four seemed to be the preferred dispense method, so that's how I started.

This is one of those brewers who makes beers, not styles, so exactly what the 3.2% ABV Plausible Session was meant to resemble I am not sure. My best guess is a table beer: the strength matches, as does the yellowy murk and dry, slightly gritty, character. That said, the hops do play a central role, making it quite lemony, with a creamy lemon curd foretaste and some bitterer hazy lemonade after. The name works: this is an unfussy and very drinkable beer, mostly clean flavoured and light without being thin.

Not long after the event, DOT had a very similarly-specc'd beer out in cans: Simple Session. This is also 3.2% ABV and yellowly murky. At least with a can label, I know that Hüll Melon, Idaho 7 and Centennial are the hops. It smells exotic and perfumey, of white peach and jasmine. That rounds out on tasting, giving the full grape effect I associate with Hüll Melon, and more than a hint of melon as well. That's pleasant as it goes, but the beer does suffer from the same interfering grittiness as the one above. Still, that's better than thinness or harshness: they've avoided that well.

Back to the flight and the next one needs a big asterisk on my review. I had already drank it when DOT's head honcho Shane stormed into the pub, declared it unfit for consumption and insisted on buying everyone who had tasted it a replacement drink (really!). For my part I thought it, Oak Pale, was OK. Yes, it looked green, sickly and murky, like a sample of sludge from the bottom of the tank (which, apparently, is pretty much what it was) but then lots of beers these days look like that, and some of them cost €8 a can. Anyway, it didn't taste like an oaked pale ale, but like a crisp and grassy pilsner. I was fine with that and moved on, but I will give this a proper review if I see it again.

The last time I was drinking draught DOT it was a verjus-infused sour beer, which came with a promise of a new and improved version on the way. And here it was: Verjus Take II, 4.6% ABV and a clear copper colour. I assume that raspberries were included again but this didn't taste at all of raspberry. Instead it's thick and sweet, tasting first of stewed apple and white grapes with a peach and lychee tang on the finish. It's subtle and not very sour but very tasty and definitely an improvement on the original.



I don't recall DOT having a sixth birthday, but the fourth and fifth came with a Barrel Aged Birthday Cake imperial chocolate milk stout. The gravity dropped a little between them and here plummets to just 9.6% ABV. The beer doesn't suffer from this, however, being extremely cake-like, with an almost crumbly, floury texture. It tastes somewhere in the midst of chocolate cake and coffee cake, full and creamy but not hot, and with a dash of honeyish Irish whiskey as a bonus. Stop the product development here: this one has been perfected.

With my flight landed, it was time for a proper glass of the final remaining beer, a cold IPA called Brrr... There still isn't much consensus about what this sub-style should actually be, but one thing I've noticed is that few of them are terribly exciting. Yes, the intense cleanness gives the hops plenty of elbow room, and here that's expressed as lemon and lime candy with a sharp edge of raw onion, but it's a bit one-dimensional with it. There's a reason modern IPA brewers have tended to give them quite beefy malt chassis, and this 5.6%-er would have benefited from one of those. Let's see how many more birthdays cold IPA is still around for.

I saved a few food miles with the next one. Having won the raffle on the night, I dropped around to the brewery a few days later to collect a t-shirt. Shane was kind enough to throw in a couple of beers, including House Helles, brewed for Sweeney's in Fairview, saving me the trouble of trekking across the city in search of it. It's a deep red-gold colour, very much on the dark side for Helles. There's a heavy grain crunch in the aroma, with a bite of pils-like cut grass. The flavour too is wholesome and chewy, blending golden syrup, oat cookies, rye bread and zinc. It's not quite the light thirst-quencher I was expecting, but I like the serious gravitas on display here instead.

In addition to the Farmhouse Ale produced for Aldi, there was another release in the Spin Off Series, a Cold IPA. This is a light 5.2% ABV and pale yellow with a faint haze. Served fridge-cold, the aroma manages to be both crisp and sweetly peachy, which is inviting. Crispness is absolutely the watchword on tasting, and the mouthfeel is superbly light and clean, just like a smooth and finely-honed lager. Onto this is grafted the fresh IPA hops, the peachy stonefruit landing first, then overtaken by a sharp citrus -- lime rind in particular -- and once again, like many cold IPAs I've encountered, there's a twang of raw white onion in the finish. That is at least brief; overall it's very tasty and offers great complexity and overall high quality for only €2.50 a can. And, like the Farmhouse Ale, it's an excellent to-style education piece for the mass market.

It would have been good to end the post there and get it published some time in early June, but the cans kept coming. Next I have something called Sea Sour, a sour ale brewed with raspberries and sea buckthorn, given some ageing time in white wine barrels and finishing up at 4.6% ABV. It's a pale pink in the glass and smells juicy in a summer fruit salad sort of way, suggesting strawberries and grapes as much as raspberry. The texture is light and quenching with soft carbonation and aided by a mild tartness which ensures it's clean but doesn't go so far as to make it challenging. The fruit is still there, and the sour side tarts up the raspberries to taste more like cranberries. In the background I could just about detect traces of oak-laced white wine, something which doesn't dovetail with the rest of the picture but doesn't interfere either. For all that the recipe is complicated, and I don't doubt that every process and ingredient makes a contribution, this is a supremely easy-drinking summer refresher, to the point where I suggest serving it on the veranda in a big jug with ice and maybe a sprig of rosemary.

Two of DOT's regular Teeling collaborations to bring us out. The first is Gr8 Tasting Pale Ale, released recently to mark eight years of whiskey production at the Dublin distillery. It's a pale yellow job, hazy with a pile of fine white foam on top. The aroma is quite grainy, smelling wholesomely of unmalted barley and oats. The taste was plain at first but has a growing sweetness, the porridge becoming a cream-filled spongecake with pineapple icing. It's missing any real hop character, either as bitterness or "juice", and that's a little disappointing. Equally the whiskey barrel side is subtle to the point of invisible. Given what it is, and the name, I expected something more impressive. Yes it's only 4.3% ABV, but was also €5.50 for a small can. I felt a bit gypped.

For Christmas last year, the brewery released Teeling Festive, which I never got around to picking up. It looks like they overlooked a case or two as it was also available in the distillery giftshop when I went in for the above. This is a blend of an amber ale and a porter, utilising single malt barrels as well as ones previously used for Teeling's peaty Blackpitts. I expected that would have a big effect, and sure enough it smells strongly of disinfectant, with a sweet brown sugar backing. And it doesn't do anything more interesting than that on tasting. A smooth mouthfeel is the base for lots of chemical-laden peaty smoke plus sticky toffee and a faint coating of chocolate. It's shocking at first, but I was into it by the end. It would certainly have worked better in the depths of winter than the height of summer. One for serious smoke aficionados only, I think, or those interested in just how much impact a whiskey barrel can have on a beer.

Cheers to the DOT team, the AtG team, and all the usual camp followers for a fun evening out.

The sweet, the sour and the smoky

DOT has all the bases covered in today's selection, from light and breezy IPA to the densest, darkest, double-digit barrel-aged blend. I suppose we may begin at the beginning.

A micro IPA called Catches starts us off at 2.5% ABV. This is a clear gold and smells deliciously fruitsome with peach and apricot. Oats and wheat are there to offset any wateriness but don't quite cover the beer's nakedness as it's still rather skinny on the palate. Those juicy aromas fade to a pithy and metallic sort of bitterness on tasting: watery grapefruit juice and a little damp paper. Naturally it fades quickly and, pleasingly, the peaches come back in the finish, albeit briefly. This isn't a great example of the super-low-strength IPA, but it is at least easy-drinking and thirst-quenching. I guess it's my own fault for trying to analyse it too much.

DOT pays tribute to new wave bad boys The Stranglers with a peach-laden sour ale. No skimping on the fruit here: it's a dense breakfast juice orange and has a huge tinned-peach effect, in both the aroma and flavour. They've added a modicum of passionfruit as well, which contributes a tropicality that increases the impression of a blended breakfast juice concoction. For all the pulp that must be in there, it's quite light of body, though the ABV is a substantial 4.8%. That helps it be refreshing rather than sticky, as does a significant tartness which has an almost funky, smoky side. I'm guessing there's some serious mixed fermentation action going on under here. This is the very essence of summer. For maximum impact, wait for the very hottest of days before opening it.

There's even more of a fruit vibe to Sour Ballad: 15g of cherry per litre, boasts the can. The result is a deep dark blood red, pouring thick and flat. Ripe and squashed cherries are the aroma, unsurprisingly: real and tart rather than sweet and, er, cherry flavoured. There's a little bit of a sparkle on the tongue and the body is much lighter than it appears, especially given 6.4% ABV. It is extremely sour, but not in a harsh sour-beer way. It's the sourness of a black cherry, or a fistful of them: there's a certain juicy aspect as well, but no sugar. As with the aroma, there's no cherryish flavours, it's much too intense for that. Instead it's dry, tannic and even a little savoury or herbal. I quite enjoyed the punchy extremeness of it but couldn't shake the impression that this is merely the first stage of something else. I hope there's a quantity of it mellowing in barrels somewhere. Mellowing would do it good.

The first of today's barrel-aged pale ales is From the Vine, 6.2% ABV and aged in a Sauternes barrel. While it's another fruit-forward one, I'm not sure it got the full benefit of the wine, lacking the rounded lusciousness I associate with Sauternes and Sauternes-derived products. It's quite hot, with pear drops in the aroma and a slightly rough solvent character in the flavour. Thankfully this is offset by a clean acidic pinch which the label calls gooseberry with which I wouldn't disagree, and would add lemon zest and whitecurrant to the descriptors. The texture is very thick, which doesn't suit it, taking away any possibility of crispness and adding a woody muddyness. This is another where a little more time, in the tank or in the can, might be beneficial.

31 words are used in the description of Farmhouse Limoncello and three of them are "zingy", which sets expectations before the tab is pulled. We also learn that this is a pale ale, aged in white wine barrels before further ageing on "limoncello chestnut cubes", something neither I nor Google Image Search can picture. It's 7% ABV and a hazy ochre colour, smelling quite heavy and dense with oak and syrup. The wine is first into the foretaste, followed by a slick and oily coconut effect. The lemon is something of an afterthought, but it's present and I will even accord it a certain amount of zing. This isn't the spritzy refresher I was expecting, but a much heavier, more involved glassful. It's inarguably good though: the succulent white grape vibe mixed with vanilla oak is quite quite delicious. The name is gimmicky but the beer is not.

Rum Red Dark VII is the *counts on fingers* seventh outing for the iterative barrel-aged red ale, this one blending the previous three. Like VI, which I didn't get to try, this takes advantage of the Teeling Distillery's recent interest in peated single malt whiskey, and the spare barrels which result. It pours quite flat, and the aroma suffers as a result: not much going on here but a plain roasted malt vibe. The turf really leaps out on tasting however, bringing a lovely comforting phenolic warmth, buzzy and cosy, not harsh or antiseptic. It's flanked by gentler caramel and aniseed balls. The flatness doesn't bother me as the resulting smoothness suits it well. It's a beautiful and mellow mature sipper, perfectly suited as a sundowner on the unseasonably chilly evening I drank it. If that huvvy Scotch vibe is to your taste, don't miss this.

And once you're in a boggy hole, keep digging. Next is Stacked, a stout of 8.2% ABV making serious use of those peat barrels. I would be quite prepared to believe that they used peated malt directly in the grist, but apparently not. My reasoning is the big, almost fresh, phenolic twang at the front. And the middle. And the finish. Balancing the busy peat, to a certain extent, there's a chocolate and coffee richness, imparting a complementary sweet side. I tend to like some hop bitterness and dry roast in export-style stout, but I don't miss them here: there'd be too much danger of ashen acridity. You really do need to like your stouts peated to enjoy this as the barrels have added much more than a seasoning. It's almost, but not quite, one-dimensional, but I certainly liked the way it goes about its business, for one small can anyway.

DOT's advancing age -- five years now -- means its birthday cake is getting weaker. Barrel Aged Birthday Cake on its second outing is down to 10.5% ABV from 10.7%. The formula seems pretty much the same as last year -- an imperial milk stout aged in cognac, sherry and single malt barrels, with cocoa nibs and coffee -- but the result is quite different. Gone is the heat and acidity of the 2020 vintage and instead, as I'm sure was intended all along, it actually tastes like cake. There's a little bit of spirit, but it's entirely in keeping with those desserts that have a glug of brandy or whiskey in them; likewise the coffee is real and roasty, but is no more involved than what you'd find in a high-end coffee-flavoured sponge. It's creamily textured, filling and warming, yet clean and not cloying. I mentioned barrels-as-seasoning above and that's what you get here, adding a fun extra dimension to a tasty imperial stout without pushing it to any extremes.

Doubtless there will be eyes rolled at DOT's new found love of peaty barrels. Me, I'm excited to find out where it will take us next.

Take DOT and party

DOT marks four years of brewing and blending with a brace of barrelled specials. The first is the catchily-named A Bit of a Barrel Aged Birthday Blend. Well at least you know what you're getting, and why. It pulls together amber ale, red ale and stout and puts them through Irish and American whiskey barrels, with a spell in virgin oak too. The end result is 9.4% ABV and dark brown, shading to black. It smells a little like marker pens and a lot like bourbon. Full-bodied and smooth goes the mouthfeel, which shouldn't be surprising, while the flavour is remarkably well-integrated. There's a cola sweetness and a herbal vermouth seasoning; oaky vanilla and splashes of caramel and coffee, all of which sounds busy, but isn't really. It is thick, though, and can get a little cloying if you try to drink it too fast. I was glad I put it in a tumbler and took my time relaxing into it. This is definitely a beer to explore slowly, sip by sip.

That hors d'oeuvre is followed by, well, dessert, I guess: Barrel Aged Birthday Cake. It's just an imperial milk stout. Aged in rum, sherry and single malt whiskey casks. With added cocoa nibs and coffee. Simples. The roast is big in the aroma, and there's a distinct sourness too, which is a surprise for a purported "chocolate cake in a glass". Sure enough on tasting it's very thin for 10.7% ABV, with almost a vinegar tang: the balsamic quality of highly attenuated dark beers. The chocolate is there to an extent, and the coffee less so; the whole thing is quite spirituous and burny. Cake it is not. Stout it is barely. This doesn't taste very celebratory to me, and certainly not when compared to the previous. One for the hardcore barrel-fans only, perhaps.

Happy birthday DOT. Keep those busy yeasties under control, eh?