Drygate gate

I will freely admit that the packaging is what sold me on these two Drygate beers. Specifically, how breathtakingly similar their design is to that of Beavertown. Well, it's nice to have an angle for these posts. Drygate is the joint brewing operation of C&C Scotland (the Tennent's people) and Williams Brothers. You'd think that avoiding the charge of stealing craft beer's clothes would be high on their agenda but there you are. Mind you, events since this post was first drafted mean they're pretty much as independently craft as Beavertown now.

The lesser offender is Chimera, an India pale lager. Williams already has a decent one of these in its portfolio, Caesar Augustus, so they know their way around the style. This one's high ABV of 5.9% is very apparent in the thick texture. It's soupy looking as well as tasting, so a clean hoppy lager is not what's on offer. Instead it's a gritty and pithy affair, full of oily orange and herbal bathsalts. There's nothing lagery at all about the downright greasy texture, but as an IPA it's not bad. I enjoyed the chewiness of it, while the flavour is big and punchy, layering on the fruit then finishing sharp. It took a bit of time to get used to but I was on board by the end.

Disco Fork Lift Truck mango pale ale is the one whose can looks like a direct rip-off of Neck Oil. It's clearer than the lager but still orange, and lighter at 5.1% ABV. There's a syrupy artificiality right from the get-go: a sharp sugary hit of fake fruit. Behind this there's a medium-bodied, low bittered, plain pale ale, almost touching on the cereal blandness of twiggy brown bitter. The mango gunk has very obviously been wheeled out front and centre to be the beer's headline quality, but it's just not good enough. It's trying to be fun and down-with-the-kids, but you need hops for that: syrup doesn't cut it.

Branding aside, these are largely what I expected from the Drygate project: passable supermarket beers, taking cues from smaller independents but not really executing them with the same panache. There's an argument here that such things are gateways (no pun intended) to better beer, but I think they're at least as likely to prevent the curious beer drinker from looking further afield than Sainsbury's.

Tinkering sans frontières

The newest pair of beers from Dublin-based Brown Paper Bag Project arrived a couple of weeks ago, heralded by a barbecue and garden party out the back of L. Mulligan Grocer where projecteers Colin and Brian introduced the débutantes.

Look at that lovely head

Vlad the Baker is a lager, lagered the proper way in Vyškov, in central Moravia. American hops have been used extensively, leading its creators to badge it as an "India Pale Lager", immediately drawing a comparison with Williams Brothers Caesar Augustus. Vlad is the better of the two: the hops don't just provide a whiff of citrus on a clean lager base, they're the main act, as you would expect in an IPA. There's an almost sticky orange pith quality, aided by a generously heavy US-IPA-style toffee malt base. The aroma melds the West Coast grapefruit sharpness with a classic Czech fresh-cut-grass character: there's Columbus, Simcoe, and Summit in here, but not so much that they bury the Saaz. I'm amazed that such a weighty beer is a mere 4.8% ABV, and the bonus good news is that it comes in half litre bottles, the first Brown Paper Bag beer to do so.

The companion piece is a similar strength but couldn't be more different. Shmoake is a grätzer created at regular Brown Paper Bag haunt Hofbrouwerijke. I'd say that this smoky wheat beer is a difficult style to get right: the iodine intensity of the one Jopen brewed a few years back, which I'm sure was totally authentic, was just a bit too much for me, and it's probably very easy to go the other way and lose the whole point of the style: a refreshing summer quencher given an extra dimension by the assertive smoke. This one is lightly textured for easy drinking, and pleasantly dry, with the smoke flavours right at the centre where they should be, striking the palate immediately and lingering all the way through. But... there's something else. Something I've never encountered in my admittedly limited grätzer experience. It's a sweet fruit juiciness, like honeydew melon, utterly out of place but absolutely beautiful. Sadly, it almost disappears when the beer's lees are added to the glass, but on a clean first pour it adds a wonderful refreshing new dimension to the flavour.

An American twist on real světlý ležák and a hop-driven grätzer: that sounds like what the 'Project would be up to all right.

Watchoo talkin' 'bout, Williams?

Reuben has already had a go at this one, and I'm sure it's the first thing that any beer writer notes when sitting down to tackle the Williams Brothers' Caesar Augustus: "Lager/IPA Hybrid". Really, Williams Brothers? Really?

What you get is a highly fizzy golden beer whose flavour is centred on a sweet biscuity graininess: the sort that's common to good-quality lagers. And indeed a lager is what it really is: the brewing process is helpfully described on the label and we're talking about a lager yeast and a month or so of low-temperature maturation. That's lager, that is.

Hop-wise there's a little hint of soft fruit in the aroma and an initial bitter catch in the back of the throat on first gulp. A vague kind of peachiness emerges as it goes but there's nothing I'd consider serious hop impact.

It's a decent enough lager. Clearly the "IPA" tag is little more than an attempt to jump on that particular style bandwagon and shift a few units to beer drinkers who perhaps regard lager as a dirty word, the fools.
To the rest of us it's a short-lived curiosity followed by a nice refreshing beer.

Thanks to Derek for the bottle.