Out and about

An enjoyable side-effect of being a beer blogger is the news, information and plain old gossip I receive from other beer fanatics. At the weekend I spent a few hours trawling selected pubs in Dublin following up on some leads I'd received, as well as doing some research for The Session this Friday.

My first port of call was Thomas Read opposite City Hall. Thomas Read is probably the nearest thing Ireland has to a pub chain. We have lots of businesses which own multiple licensed premises, but (apart from the Porterhouse) the Thomas Read group is the only one that will use the same name for new branches, so there's now a Thomas Read in Smithfield and several at Dublin airport. The brand name came from a seventeenth-century cutlery firm which ran a shop on Parliament Street -- the oldest shop in Dublin -- until the 1990s. The pub owners closed it down when they bought the site, opening the first of their pubs next door and leaving the original shop in its current derelict state.

It was very much a café-bar for the beautiful people when it first opened. I've no idea where it stands in the fashion stakes now as I don't keep track of these things. Anyway, a friend (hi Nick) was telling me that they are currently selling a stout under the Murphy name, but which wasn't branded with the normal Murphy's logo and which came in a fancy stemmed pint glass. Murphy's is, of course, Heineken's property, and big transnational brewers aren't known for their variation and localisation of their brands. So on Saturday I called in to find out what was going on.

Sure enough, there was the pump clip, featuring a naked lady where one would expect to see the sober and authoritative Murphy's badge. The accompanying beermat tells us this is Marie Louisa Murphy (1737-1814), whose steadfast work getting her kit off for Parisian artist Francois Boucher provided venture capital for her family which went on to set up the Cork brewery.

The new stemmed pint glass reminds me a lot of the chalice that InBev are currently touting for Stella Artois, claiming its design helps keep the beer cold. My pint of Murphy's was certainly very cold indeed and it took a while before I was able to taste the sweet roasted flavours that confirmed that this is plain old Murphy's stout.

The whole thing intrigues me: it's so out of character for big soulless breweries to stray from their homogenous branding. Whether Marie Louisa's rosy cheeks are displayed here purely for the jaded poseurs of Thomas Read or whether they're part of a wider rebranding remains to be seen.

My journey around the city also brought me to Messrs Maguire, to follow up on a conversation I'd been having with Knut about their Imperial stout. Was it possible there was a new lower-strength version? The answer is no: in fact, the batch of Imperial had just run out which suggests it was the same big 7%er it has always been. I hope we'll be seeing it again before long. I made do with a pint of MM Best: the cask ale made by MM's brewer for the festivals, guest taps in UK pubs, and other such cask outlets. In its home pub it's bunged into a keg and served on nitro to resemble, as Knut accurately observed, nothing so much as Boddington's or similar crashingly dull English keg bitters.

Not all of this excursion was on foot of third-party observations. I had noticed a couple of days previously that Dublin's eastern European late bar, The Czech Inn, had a sign out advertising a new range of draught beers. They'd taken it in by Saturday, the better to advertise the day's big screen football, but the beers were still there. They're from the Konrad range made in northern Bohemia. Konrad Premium is a pale lager and reminds me more of the Munich style than anything Czech. It's a big 5.6% ABV, and quite sweet with it. Thirst-quenchingly good.

Konrad Dark is sweeter still, almost to the point of being slightly saccharine, but just restrained enough to remain drinkable. At the very end there's just a hint of coffee to add a bit of complexity to an otherwise straight-up no-nonsense sweet dark lager, considerably less demanding than The Czech Inn's test-card-tastic wallpaper.

After that, all that remained was for a quick trip to the Bull & Castle for a couple of Hookers and then home. So concludes the third year of this blog and, while I predicted a fairly limited amount of travel a year ago, it has been a busy time with lots of new beers. I'm not intending to let the momentum slow. Sorry, Mr Liver.

The Alan Partridge Project

Last year I reported on a visit to a dire pub in what used to be rural England but is now just off the road to somewhere else. This week I went one further and found myself in a generic low-rent business hotel in the English midlands: exactly the sort of Travel Tavern that Alan Partridge used to live in. It was, of course, a real ale desert (how did he survive so far from his beloved Director's Bitter?), with the bar taps dominated by InBev products, including Boddington's. It's a very sweet, light keg bitter: unchallenging but still quite tough drinking. I stopped at one pint.

My trip was far from a total waste, however. With some careful planning I found myself with a couple of hours to spare in central Manchester. I had picked out a handful of pubs worth visiting, but never got past the first: the gloriously appointed Marble Arch. This quirky boozer is kitted out in steel-and-ceramic Victorian bling and boasts a curiously slanting floor throughout. Out back, the house brewery produces a range of cask and bottled beers, the latter available to take away. Everyone in the house was drinking Manchester Bitter, a shockingly pale yellow lager lookalike. The resemblance ends there, however. This has a strong fresh hoppy aroma and greets the palate with a lemony bitterness which would appeal to any witbier fan. It's a wonderfully refreshing classic bitter and, I can only presume, the sort of beer that Boddington's would like to be.

The house range also includes Stouter Stout, a very sharp, bitter, but creamy stout. The abundance of hops is there right from the nose and is carried through in the strong rich bitter flavours. For a stout this is just too tart to my taste: IPA dressed as stout and off-puttingly weird, despite the care and attention that obviously went into making it. The house also makes Ginger Marble, another very yellow ale. The clue's in the title here, but in case of doubt there's a sweet, candied ginger aroma first off. This is followed by a gorgeous back-of-the-mouth raw ginger burn on the first swallow, with a legacy of ginger nut biscuits on the lips. I think this is the best ginger-flavoured beer I've ever tasted and would make a superb aperitif. And every flavoursome beer the Marble Brewery produces is 100% organic: proof that most everyone else is just doing organic wrong.

Of the guest ales, Spitting Feathers caught my attention first. This is a "smoked autumn ale", thick and creamy with little foretaste and almost reminiscent of a nasty keg ale. The smoke comes through afterwards in a vague sort of way, after some unpleasant dry mustiness. My limited experience of smoked beer has led me to expect the full-on bacon flavour experience and you don't get that with this. Two guest taps were displaying clips from Scottish craft brewing's enfant terrible Brew Dog. When I asked the barman whether I should go for Hype or Buzz, he told me he'd sold more Hype that evening, so that's what I ordered. Again, this is a very pale affair but it more than makes up for it in texture and flavour. It's warm and hits the palate with a hefty bitterness. A heavy and filling beer, all-in-all, despite having a mere 4.1% ABV.

With a heavy heart I left the pub and headed to the airport. A little previous research allowed me to stave off the return to keg ale for a few more precious minutes. The online menu of terrifyingly cheery family restaurant Giraffe included, among the Corona and Tiger, Brooklyn Lager. This is an impressively amber beer with a hoppy aroma, smelling for all the world like the lighter sort of American IPA. On first sip there's a full body and a strong malty flavour, carrying through to a dry bitter bite at the very end. Brooklyn is a thinking man's lager, and not just because the brewmaster is now a published philosopher.

A delay to my flight meant the time eventually came to bite the bullet and approach the main bar, where Worthington's Bitter was the house ale. Unlike the Boddington's, this is properly amber coloured. It has a striking burnt corn flavour, liked singed tortilla chips. Flavoursome, but not really in the right way.

I feel Manchester definitely warrants further barstool-based research. It'd just be a question of tearing myself away from the Marble Arch.