The A game

Back in June, Molson Coors Ireland held another one of their beer events for the trade and meeja at House on Leeson Street. This time, the focus was on Blue Moon and they had brought over Blue Moon's "founder" Keith Villa to introduce himself and a few of his beers. As usual, the House kitchen had done a great job of putting together food combinations to go with the beer. We started on Blue Moon's Summer Honey Wheat which I'd had at the last event and was highly unimpressed by. It was paired with a chicken dish here and that worked surprisingly well in drawing the flavour out of the beer.  Mr Villa described it as a "food friendly" beer. I'd go so far as to say food dependent.

The main act consisted of three beers from the Blue Moon Graffiti Collection: their super-premium, ultra-craft, small-batch beers made to daring recipes and not normally available on this side of the Atlantic. First of the set was Ginger Smack, a powerful 9% ABV honey and ginger wheat ale. It looks heavy and honeyish though is definitely lacking in the flavour department. The ginger is present, but there's no invigorating spiciness, rather it comes through like the ginger in ginger biscuits. All the heat is from the high alcohol quotient. It's a simple, sippable beer, but doesn't compare at all well to beers where the ginger kick is more up-front. The official notes say that there should be clover honey in both the flavour and aroma, but whoever wrote those has either a very acute palate or an overactive imagination.

Ginger Smack was followed by Pine in the Neck, a 7.5% ABV, 70 IBU double IPA made with Citra, Simcoe, Cascade and Taurus hops. And then for some reason they've added juniper berries as well. It's a dark garnet colour and smells wonderfully of fresh American hops and enticing rich toffee. The texture is full, providing an ideal platform for the hops, which start with an acidic smack and then get smoother, oilier and danker later on. The toffee sweetness provides a modest degree of balance while still letting the hops sing, and doesn't cloy or get sticky as often happens in this type of beer. I could swear I get a herbal, gin-like flavour at the very end, from the juniper berries, but this time it's entirely possible that my imagination is the one doing unnecessary overtime. Overall an absolutely cracking beer, up there with some of the best stuff produced by the like of Odell and Sierra Nevada. I'm not sure my journalist table-mates enjoyed it as much as I did, so all the more for me then.

Dessert came with Chimp, an imperial wheat ale of 9% ABV with added cherries. It's the same sort of colour as the IPA, with maybe just a little more of a reddish cast to it. This has a hot and heavy barley wine quality, reminding me a great deal of the Three Floyds/Mikkeller "wheat wine" Hvedegoop. There's lots of crisp husky cereal in the flavour underneath all the alcohol and the cherry comes through as quite a sickly sweet syrupyness that it really could have done without. The whole is a bit of a mess and quite tough to drink, I thought.

It's clear from the IPA that the Blue Moon R&D team in Golden, Colorado do have plenty of brewing ability to go with their vast resources. The other two do seem more like committee efforts, designed to look daring rather than taste good. All are worth trying -- and big thanks to Molson Coors Ireland and their PR agency for providing the opportunity -- but I think the world's independent and innovative breweries have little cause to worry about the Graffiti Collection. If anything, it will bring a broader audience to oddly-constructed beers. It's all good.

Mixing it up

Shane Long talks to the Dublin Ladies Craft Beer Society

A footnote to Monday's post on the Franciscan Well Easter Beer Festival today. Founder Shane was keen to show off the new education centre that they've put into the upstairs bar, the walls decorated with flavour wheels, brewing diagrams and tutored tasting instructions.

Last year the bar was dedicated to some special cask beers from Molson Coors stablemate Sharp's, and it was the same this time, only with a bigger range and shinier handpumps. With all the Irish beer available downstairs I had only one small taste of one of them: Six Hop, a 3.8% ABV bitter which tasted terribly dull and biscuity for something that uses the H-word in its name. How big a batch did they put the six hop cones into?

The 'Well itself had a couple of new releases downstairs. One is called Eggenstien and is a 5.5% ABV pale brown German bock. It tastes quite inoffensive, striking the right balance between rounded grain flavours and the grassy tang of noble hops, but the smell of it really got to me. I struggle with German noble hops at the best of times and this beer just reeked of the green nettle acridity that turns my stomach. I'm sure it will have its fans among the bock-drinking community but it was just too full-on for me.

I try to avoid writing about beers that are simply blends of other beers. Some of the more geek-focused continental breweries are a little too fond of doing this and I don't feel obliged to provide space for their mixes. However, I'm making an exception for Franciscan Well's Spring Fusion, also available at the Easter Festival. This is a straight saison blended with the brewery's longtime flagship Rebel Red. The result is a fascinating combination of crisp tartness next to totally incongruous red ale toffee and caramel. It shouldn't work, but it does: at once palate cleansing, thirst quenching and comfortingly warm.

Of course, The Franciscan Well are not merely confined to Cork these days. The long reach of Molson Coors and their PR team brought beers and brewer to Dublin last month for an evening's ligging in the opulent surrounds of House bar and restaurant on Leeson Street. After a 4km walk in the warm Spring sunshine, the free Blue Moon on arrival was the nicest Blue Moon I've ever tasted. Mind you, sucking the orange slice was even better than the beer. We also got a try of the new seasonal Summer Honey Wheat. It's pretty poor, as it goes, much like the other Blue Moon seasonals: an aroma consisting of no more than a trace of sugar, and a flavour to match. Some minor honey stickiness is just about detectable on the finish but very little else is going on. I'd swap back to regular Blue Moon in an instant.

Also on the preview list for the evening was Chieftain, an IPA which looks to be joining the permanent draught line-up. It's 5.5% ABV and is another one of those dark oily pale ales, like Porterhouse Hop Head or JW Sweetman Pale Ale. This is, of course, a good thing. The hop combination is Tettnanger, Magnum and Citra, though it hides this at first, presenting burnt caramel and toffee in the aroma to begin with. This dark malt theme continues in the first sip, some almost coffeeish notes come into play, quickly followed by a dank green funk of the sort found in many an amber ale, and bringing to mind BrewDog's 5AM Saint in particular. Rather than bitterness, there's a sharp citric piquancy, followed by a long resinous, palate-coating finish. Those who prefer their IPAs to have a bit more fresh zing to them might rather think of this as an amber, but either way it's a good beer and a welcome addition.

On the above evidence, Molson Coors Ireland seems to be strongly outperforming its American and British brethern.