The London invasion

I've long since lost track of what's happening on London's beer scene. It was so much easier in 2007. The occasional headline occurrence passes my way in the general discourse, but I know that there's plenty chugging away in the background that I'm not aware of. And nor should I be, really: I live far away from London. In recent weeks, two unfamiliar London brewers have come to me, via new export arrangements and launch events.

Five Points I had at least heard of, and even tried their flagship Railway Porter some years back. A selection of their core range is now being imported to Ireland via FourCorners, and a launch event was held at UnderDog so punters like me could try them out.

I began with Five Points Pils. They've adopted the old Camden Town system for this, brewing some in-house and contracting out the rest to a brewer in Belgium. Though unlike Camden Town in its indie days, they don't deign to tell us which Belgian it is. (edit: Matt reports in the comments that all Pils production is now in-house.) The beer is 4.8% ABV and a bright gold colour with a handsome dollop of shaving foam on top. I got a fun combination of lemon sherbet and grassy Saaz hops to begin, backed by a classic Czech-style golden syrup malt flavour. It was all going well until the finish which was just a bit too harshly bitter for my liking, turning waxy and vegetal. It's certainly bold and interesting; my taste runs to something smoother, however, even in pilsner.

The evening's special beer, not part of the range being imported on a regular basis, was De-Railed, a barrel-aged version of Railway Porter. I don't think the barrels have improved it any. The result is very woody, all dry and stale-tasting. The sour funky aroma doesn't help ameliorate the sense of a beer gone a bit rancid. Some of the coffee survives from the base beer, and there's a certain pleasing vinousness, but it's all too severe for me. A taster was plenty, thanks.

The ale sequence begins with Five Points Pale Ale, 4.4% ABV and a murky orange colour. I got a whole candystore full of sherbet from the first sip, zipping and popping with oranges and lemons, set against a heavier marmalade background. A bitter jolt of lime is the finishing flourish. This is a tremendously fun beer, absolutely packed with 360° hop flavour and a triumph for that modest strength. The light texture also adds to its drinkability.

XPA was an altogether calmer affair, served on cask for the evening. Despite the name, this is lower-strength than the pale ale, at 4% ABV. It offers a very simple and dignified blend of sharply citric fresh grapefruit segments and wholesome all-grain toast malt. Again it's one that drinks very easily, but offers plenty to keep the palate occupied while it does so. I think I preferred the sparks found in the kegged pale ale, however.

Completing this subset is Five Points IPA, a big-hitter, US style, at 7% ABV. It's a beautiful medium-gold colour and quite dry, surprisingly so, in fact. I guess they're pitching for that Sculpin-like, almost astringent, west coast thing. A little bit of light dankness in the finish helps add a touch more substance to it, but I felt there should be more going on. It's fine, and totally without flaws, but just isn't as interesting as the preceding two pale 'n' hoppy fellas.

I'll admit to not expecting much from Hook Island Red. The 6% ABV was sending me warning signals about cloying toffee and caramel flavours. Thankfully I was completely wrong in my prejudices. While it does have a significant toffee component, it's balanced by and blended with big fresh and resinous hops. The inclusion of rye adds a spicy complexity before a smooth fruity finish packed with ripe strawberries. It can be difficult to impress with a malt-heavy red ale, but this one gets excellent use out of all its ingredients.

And lastly, from the bottle, comes Brick Field Brown Ale, a very welcome addition in these brown-ale-starved parts. I like the masses of chocolate in this but did not appreciate the carbonation. It was far too fizzy and that created a dryness which tragically almost cancels out the sweeter features. Here's one that would definitely benefit from cask dispense. As-is, I don't really feel I got to taste it properly.

A huge thanks to Francesca from Five Points and everyone who put the night together.

A short while later, it was the turn of Gipsy Hill Brewery, newly brought to Dublin under the auspices of the Carlow Brewing Company. They occupied a few of the taps at L. Mulligan Grocer to introduce themselves.

We began with Beatnik, a pale ale at just 3.8% ABV. It doesn't seem like a lightweight, however, beginning with the alluring grapefruit-and-weed aroma. The flavour goes big on hops too, reminding me a little of that other low-octane, high-impact beaut Fyne Ales's Jarl. On draught I found it a bit thin, the hops turning harsh and acidic without enough body to support them. That was less of an issue with a slightly warmer can later on: here there was an almost sticky layer of malt candy and plenty of substance. In both, the finish is quick, setting up the next mouthful. Overall a very decent hoppy banger and well suited to sessioning.

The middle child is Southpaw, an amber ale. There was something slightly off-putting about the aroma here, a certain plasticky quality. That translates to a harsh unsubtle bitterness in the foretaste, one which only gets a little balance from the toffee malt. The underlying issue may be that it's a mere 4.2% ABV, which doesn't provide enough gravity to carry the substantial hop charge. It feels a little watery in the middle, and then the finish is a rough acidic burn. This seems to be an amber ale afraid of its true nature and unwilling to turn up the crystal malt. It would be a better beer if it did.

Last of the core beers on offer was Hepcat session IPA, strongest so far at a whopping 4.6% ABV. No qualms about the body here: it's lovely and big and fluffy, bringing some seriously herbal grassy dankness and savoury caraway seed with it. Just before it goes completely serious there's a delightful burst of fresh mango and pineapple, lightening everything up, before it's back to the grass for the bitter finish. While it has some features in common with Beatnik there's more going on, as I guess befits the higher strength. It's still easy drinking and wonderfully refreshing, fulfilling the session role perfectly.

Two tall-can specials were also on the go, beginning with Simcoe, another low-strength pale ale, this time only 3.6% ABV. It has amazing body for all that, plenty to carry all of the hop. And there's a lot of hop, beginning with a gorgeous stonefruit aroma, all peaches and apricot. My first impression on tasting was of a smooth and dry beer, with a strong mineral component. The hops emerge here first as fruity chew sweets, then gradually turning bitterer, providing a lovely kick for a finish. Simcoe is not usually my favourite hop, but whatever they've done here to tame it really calms down its harsher tendencies.

Doyen is a collaboration with Fuller's. This IPA is another dry one, with a kind of celery cooked-veg flavour at first. The middle brings a bigger hit of marmalade, something I very much associate with Fuller's, particularly in beers like Bengal Lancer and Oliver's Island. It doesn't have a whole lot to say beyond that, which would normally be fine except that it's 6.5% ABV, a point where I think it's fair to expect greater complexity, or at least a bigger flavour. It's quite an anodyne beer, overall, and not as special as I'd hoped for.

The following day I trekked over to Urban Brewing where Gipsy Hill's JT was doing a collaboration brew. On bar was Haymaker, a pilsner. They've used German hops in this, but the more modern fruit-forward ones, and the result is enormously fruity. Juicy peach and summer strawberries are the main act, while there's almost zero bitterness. I felt aggrieved that it didn't taste like a proper pils for almost a minute, before I settled into it and began to really enjoy the pint in front of me. The beautiful soft texture makes it extremely quaffable and I can imagine it as a perfect outdoorsy summer beer.

Thanks this time to the O'Hara's, Gipsy Hill and Mulligan's folks. Plenty of really solid ungimmicky drinking here. I'd love if Dublin's brewers were able to return the favour in London.

Admirable of the fleet

I first encountered Hook Norton's Flagship on keg in Against the Grain and was a little surprised that this oh-so-traditional English brewery would have any truck with such a dispense method. Still, it was highly enjoyable and I was happy when I found a bottle of it in the fridge back home.

Though it's bottle conditioned, pouring carefully gave me a pale orange beer with only a slight haze to it. And that could just as easily be hop-derived. While it looks a bit wan and watery, it has been thoroughly infused with a quite uncompromising bitterness, unfolding into an array of orange and lemon pith, with strong jasmine flower and chamomile. Admiral is the advertised hop variety, but I suspect there's more to this as well.

It's really quite wonderful to encounter an English IPA with all the complex hop wallop of its American counterparts, but without the sticky toffee malt notes and in a neat 5.5% ABV package too. Bengal Lancer has perhaps the edge on it for balance, but if you like that balance tipped in a hoppy direction, this is well worth a look.

The big Bux

Buxton Brewery from Derbyshire were a newcomer to Borefts and I confess I was quite sceptical when I first saw their presence listed. Groundbreaking revolutionaries like Kernel and Thornbridge are one thing, but what is this run-of-t'mill northern micro doing there? How many Dutch beer geeks can you wow with a 1.038 brown bitter? How wrong I was: I don't know if it was their A-game that Buxton brought, but it had the beatings of many others there.

The highlight for me was Tsar Bomba, a 10% ABV imperial stout. Its origins lie in a bottle of 1978 Courage Imperial Russian Stout, sent to the lab for analysis which showed that the only thing still living in it was Courage's hungry and deathless strain of Brettanomyces. Buxton cultured it up and fermented Tsar Bomba with it. My first thought on tasting it was "Oh, Orval has made a stout." The Brett funk is right up at the front but it's not overpowering: there's enough chocolate smoothness to hold it in check, providing a residual dark sweetness that not even this beast of a yeast could chomp through. And just on the end that assertive tang of hops. A strange and challenging beer, but in a quite delicious way.

Beer name of the festival goes to Smokey and the Band-Aid, a dark ale that is apparently quite deliberate in its phenols: the name suggests to me an attempt to deal with customer expectations when something has gone wrong but I'm reliably informed that's it's an adaptation of a homebrew recipe of the head brewer. It's actually quite subtle in its smokiness, though the phenols are clear as a bell: Laphroaig or TCP coming in loud and clear while the underlying sweet 7.5% ABV stout is just about detectable beneath. It's quite a full-on experience, but still balanced and nothing to be afraid of.

Buxton also produce a terribly impressive black IPA in the form of 7.5% ABV Imperial Black.This tastes like it has been hopped every which way, being powerfully greenly bitter and also succulently fruity. Only a tiny, missable hint of roast at the end suggests dark grains, otherwise this just tastes like a really really good IPA. For those who think that the style is simply a kind of hoppy porter, this is the one to change your minds.

Two paler ones to finish off with Buxton: Wild Boar is a hazy gold blonde ale of 5.7% ABV featuring fantastically sharp and zingy hop aromas. It's more rounded on tasting, melding flowery hops with toffee malt to form delicious perfumed caramel. I'd place it broadly in the category of English IPAs which includes White Shield and Bengal Lancer, but it tastes more modern than either. For something a little stronger there's Axe Edge: leaning more heavily on the hop side of the scales, this has a heady spicy funk to it, mixing up the soft fruit and astringent medicinal character of different hop strains but providing enough of a malt base to carry them off without unbalancing the flavour altogether.

Overall a quality performance from Buxton and I'll be looking out for more of theirs.

The last British beer I had was operating covertly at the Emelisse stand. The Dutch brewery was a collaborator on Earl Grey IPA but it was brewed at the Marble Brewery in Manchester. It's a fizzy pale gold beer, just under 7% ABV but quite plain tasting. The added flavourings give it a pleasant summery honey and mandarin nose but on tasting it's more scented soap than posh tea, but barely even that.

While we're at the Emelisse bar we may as well see what else they've got. A Red IPA? How jolly! This is a nicely balanced chap, quite heavily textured but neither cloyingly sweet nor particularly hopped up. Taking a bit of a liberty with the IPA designation there, but they're hardly the first brewery to do so.

And just a quick sideways hop over to Belgium to round off this post, and a visit to the mental experimentalists of Alvinne. Some of this brewery's output can be hard to handle but I struck gold with the three I tried at Borefts, all wine-barrel-aged. Undressed is a dark ruby ale in the Flemish red vernacular and has that wonderful mouthwatering tartness that makes the style an ideal thirst-quencher. The barrel adds an even more quenching tannic quality so, despite the acetic tang on the finish, I could happily neck this in indecent quantities. But we move on to Wild West, a headless orange-amber beer with powerful lactic sourness reminding me of the most assertive lambics. Deep underneath this there's a trace of Lucozade sweetness trying to make itself heard. It has just enough of a sparkle to make it refreshing, though I couldn't say what effect the red wine barrels have had on it.

Lastly, Cuvée d'Erpigny was billed as a barley wine, but was a similar ruby-brown to the Undressed and possessed the same sort of sour Flemish red aroma. It's not sour on tasting, though, due in part I'm sure to the Montbazillac barrel it was aged in. This has imparted a distinct botrytised sweetness which, combined with the smooth and heavy texture and 13% ABV, immediately conjures Tokaji or eiswein. This combines effortlessly with the caramel malt and an unequivocal hop bite to make a beer that should be a complete mess but all works together in a fascinating way.

And just when I thought things couldn't get any more strangely delicious, we come to the last two breweries at the festival...

Indus crispy Dancakes

We're Lancashire-bound today, with two beers from Thwaites.

I started with Indus, an IPA. It looked to be pouring a bit flat and it took a bit of coaxing to get a loose-bubbled head to form on the top. It didn't last long. However the beer really benefits from the low carbonation as it creates a wonderful cask-like effect, with just enough sparkle to push the flavours out. Naturally enough, it's hops out front: good honest English varieties by the taste of them, with lots of floral orange blossom laid on quite intensely, creating almost a resinous burn while staying clean and crisp, avoiding all harshness. At 4.6% ABV it's around a percentage point weaker than the likes of White Shield and Bengal Lancer, but I'd regard it as being very much in the same league. The balance of marmalade and toffee you get in the others isn't present here, but the hop punchiness makes up for it for me. Tangy, sinkable and with a lasting bitterness, I really enjoyed it.

I think I only bought the Indus because it was in a four-for-a-tenner deal in my local branch of The Beer Club and what I was really after was the brewery's old ale Old Dan. Dan had a tough act to follow. I was expecting something much darker than this red-amber beer, which proved quite gold around the edges and topped by a pale beige head. The first sniff gave me boozy sherry or calvados and the taste is pure fruitcake: plums, raisins, cherries and a great big glug of alcohol. More than 33cl would be hard to take, I reckon: the flavours and the thick syrupy texture build up on each other until it starts to get quite cloying. As an after dinner liqueur substitute, shared perhaps, it's wonderful.

Stateside classics

Rounding up the American beer evening that Reuben hosted a while back with three breweries whose stuff really stood out.

I've already covered a few from Great Divide, though I was surprised on checking back that I've never had their Titan IPA before -- I guess Hercules, the double IPA, occupies a similar space in my head. It's been my loss too as this is great stuff: that classic sherbet character of US IPA finishing with an intense oily bitterness that really wakes up the palate. Dialling the hops back but keeping the sherbet there's Samurai, brewed with rice. It's a suitably pale yellow but is no dull watery cheap-tasting guzzler. Lots of zesty lemon flavours leap out of the glass and the body is remarkably full, given the look of the thing. Lots of fizz, on the downside, but still a quality beer.

Somewhere between these two comes Denver Pale Ale. Aroma of biscuits and fresh fruit, with honey added into the mix on tasting. It's a smooth and mellow ale, worth taking time over. As is the Great Divide porter Saint Bridget's (we'll pass discreetly over the trucker's mudflap of a label). It's absolutely packed with rich and warming chocolate flavours, to the point of seeming almost powdery.

Next up a brewery I had never heard of before: Lazy Magnolia of Mississippi: the Magnolia State, dontcherknow. Indian Summer promised more than it gave. Yes it's a wheat beer, but there's more than the average amount of coriander and orange peel in here giving it some lovely light botanicals on the nose. The taste is oddly sour, however: a throwback to when Hoegaarden was spontaneously fermented, perhaps? Anyway, when the label says "Spiced Ale" I expect a bit more welly.

Such shortcomings were more than made up for by the other offer from Lazy Magnolia: Southern Pecan. It's banoffi as beer: heavy, sweet yet deliciously moreish with lots of biscuits and brown sugar, plus the pecans, of course. Easily the best American brown ale I've ever met.

Finally, to a brewery particularly close to our host's heart and one whose beers he particularly wanted to introduce us to: Bell's of Kalamazoo. The sunny orange and turquoise branding of Oberon is entirely appropriate. Another wheat beer, this one shows lots of light and breezy fruit, with candied orange in the driving seat. It's fun and dangerously easy drinking at 5.8% ABV -- that's going to sneak up on you pretty quickly, I reckon.

The brewery's IPA is called Two Hearted making it, as far as I know, the only commercial beer in existence named in tribute to Doctor Who. A whopping 7% ABV would suggest that this is an all-American badboy, but my impressions were more those of the better class of British IPA. It's that balance of bitter marmalade on a big toasted grain body, perhaps finishing a tiny bit soapy or metallic that has me recalling White Shield and Bengal Lancer. It's a comfortable and balanced beer: hopped up and powerfully strong, of course, but gentle and reassuring with it.

Enough beers for one afternoon's drinking? Time to grab the last bus back to the big smoke? Oh just a pint from the kegerator for the road, then...

Thanks to Adam and Richard for bringing along beers and for the company, and a massive thank you to Reuben and Hilary for a great day out and one hell of a virtual tour of American breweries both great and small.

Just another winter's ale

I only barely escaped snowy Dublin last week to spend the holiday in frozen Hertfordshire, so my Christmas drinking was mostly along English lines, with just a couple of exceptions. One sister gifted me a bottle of Saint Landelin Spéciale Noël, a seasonal from Gayant, the Douai brewery perhaps better known for Goudale. It's a yulified Belgian-style blonde -- 6.8% ABV and quite sticky with it, piling in the honey on top of gentle pot pourri spices. While warming, it's light enough to stay drinkable and sharing the 75cl bottle is entirely optional, fully subject to one's personal levels of seasonal goodwill.

The other non-English Christmas ale came from another sister (they know me so well): Merry X-Moose by Porthmadog's avant garde Purple Moose brewery. This poured shockingly flat but redeemed itself with lovely big chocolate flavours, finishing on some intriguing lavender high notes. Similar-but-different was Three Tuns Old Scrooge. A bit more condition to this, though not much. It's a dense black beer with lots of treacle spiced up by cinnamon and liquorice: an excellent warmer.

On to less seasonal fare, and Dorothy Goodbody's Imperial Stout: a boxed-up limited run of 6,000 bottles. Advice was that this is best left a few years to mature, but the air travel liquids ban left me with no choice but to pop the cap almost immediately after taking it out from under the Christmas tree. Immature imperial stout can be an unpleasant experience, often spiked with harsh metal-and-cabbage hop tones. None of that here, though. At 7% ABV it's perhaps on the light side of the genre and the flavours are quite gentle: lots of sweet and slightly sticky dark malts, a touch of roasted grain and a balanced grassiness from the hops. It could well be that it gets more interesting with age, but really there's absolutely nothing wrong with this beer right now.

A bottle of McMullen AK XXX fell across my path at one point during my stay. A fairly plain brown bitter, this. Crisp with a touch of toffee, it immediately called to mind Bailey's observations on the substituting of London Pride for altbier. This hits a lot of the same places as alt, finishing with a dry hop bite and being a little over-fizzy for English bitter. Close your eyes and think of Düsseldorf. (For more on the historical brewers' code "AK", including McMullen's use of it, see Zythophile's analysis here.)

Speaking of over-fizzy bitter, I was unable to resist the opportunity to try Whitbread Bitter when I spotted it on keg at a hotel bar near Luton. You have to try the local specialities when you travel, right? It lends further credibility to my grand theory that Irish red ale and English keg bitter are the same ill-starred creation. Whitbread Bitter is monstrously watery, generally sweet, with just a tiny shade more hopping that you might find in the likes of Smithwicks. My other guilty pleasure came on an excursion to the pub near where I was staying. Ignoring my own rule about going for something good rather than ticking off new beers, I couldn't resist a swift pint of Wells & Young's Eagle IPA. Brewed very much to hit the same market segment as Greene King IPA, this is 3.6% ABV and every bit as light, plain, uncomplicated and inoffensive. After one pint it was over to the far superior St Austell Tribute on the next tap.

I got to do very little by way of beer shopping -- just one trip to Sainsbury's, yielding the new IPA from Fuller's: Bengal Lancer. I was really quite careless in how I poured this 5.3% ABV bottle conditioned beer, but it still came out a perfectly limpid shade of dark copper. Despite the gung-ho branding it's quite understated all-in-all: I needed a few nosefuls of the aroma to pick up anything much, eventually identifying jaffa, or possibly mandarin, oranges. The malt drives the taste, leading the hops behind it, creating a not unpleasant effect of marmalade on thick-cut toast. The tail end veers almost tragically towards the metal and puke of Fuller's execrable IPA but just manages to avoid it by finishing quickly. The texture is perhaps the beer's best feature: big and satisfying. It would be nice if there was just a bit more substance to it, but as a straightforward well-constructed English IPA it can't really be faulted and I would buy it again.

And that's where we leave things for 2010. By the time you read this I should be somewhere in central Europe, gathering material for a post or two in 2011. Happy New Year!

Round the Cape

I've not had the best run of luck with English IPAs of late. I couldn't stomach the Fuller's one at all (though have not yet had the pleasure of their new and very much admired Bengal Lancer). Samuel Smith's was better but I still couldn't shake that harsh, rather metallic, bitter sensation that I get from these styles. Is there anything out there that has the beatings of Proper Job or White Shield?

Ask anyone who knows anything about English beer and they'll probably tell you "Thornbridge Jaipur", most likely followed by some sort of "duh" noise. I've seen this beer on sale once, at the British Pavilion of the European Beer Festival in 2008. I was thoroughly underwhelmed by it: thin, sharp and characterless. I'm perfectly willing, as always, to give it another go but the opportunity never presented itself. Until, out of the goodness of his heart and to shut me up, Mark from Real Ale Reviews sent a bottle to me in the post.

Immediately, I knew this was going to be a different experience. The aroma from Jaipur is fantastic: lots of those peachy, sherbety hop flavours that I enjoy in American IPAs, but this isn't a simple clone of a west coast hop bomb. On tasting, the citric punch is missing. Instead there are nice soft melons and peaches, plus lively orange flavours which are zesty though not any way sharp or aggressive. Indeed, it's one of the least assertive IPAs I've met. There's a bit of a bum note on the end however, where a soapy off-flavour creeps in and spoils things. I think I've got a better sense of the beer now, but also that it has to be tried on cask to get a proper feel for it. I'm still reluctant to put it in my tiny pantheon of good English IPAs. Sorry Mark.

I didn't think I'd be putting St Peter's India Pale Ale in the pantheon either. Ken in DrinkStore told me the bottle was something of an antique, having been taken in by him as a refugee from another off licence, one with a less-discerning clientele. The best-before date had rubbed off some time previously and the hard-wearing label had a definite frayed look to it. This, along with the green glass of the bottle, meant I was not expecting the fresh hops of a mint condition IPA.

But it was wonderful. Fantastically full-bodied for 5.5% ABV with a base of delicious toffee malt. It's not fresh and fruity, but spicy and complex, giving out exotic undertones of sandalwood and incense. And yet, like all the St Peter's beers, it remains incredibly drinkable throughout: all gone in under ten minutes. If this is what St Peter's IPA is like after months of ill-treatment and harsh lighting I can only imagine how good it must be fresh.

I'd also forgotten how great the St Peter's beers are generally. Whatever happened to them? They used to be everywhere.